What If Your Fairy Godmother Were an Ox?: The Many Cinderellas of Southeast Asia

From the late 1960s well into the 1980s, the primary images that most Americans had of Southeast Asia, garnered from Life magazine, the evening news, films like Apocalypse Now, or their own war-time experiences in Vietnam, were of death and destruction. Later, due to the Vietnam War memorial, films like Born on the Fourth of July, or in some cases personal experience, we became familiar with images of America's often damaged Vietnam War veterans. These images haunt us to this day, and rightly so. Nor are they uncommon in contemporary American children's literature. Whether we're talking about picture books or Young Adult novels, fiction or nonfiction, such works as Minfong Ho's The Clay Marble (1991), Sherry Garland's The Lotus Seed (1993), and Dia Cha's Dia's Story Cloth (1996) have become increasingly well known over the past decade as writers have attempted to interpret the Vietnam War and related conflicts for a new generation of young readers. Needless to say, however, death and destruction do not sum up Southeast Asia. The region has a complex history and a multiplicity of cultures. In particular, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and the other countries of the region share a rich storytelling tradition that long predates the wars of the past half-century, a folklore tradition every bit as magical and enchanting as that of Western Europe.

Many of the better known European folk- and fairytales have analogs among the traditional stories of Southeast Asia, and perhaps the best known of these is "Cinderella." Variants of this tale have been collected from virtually every country in the region. In fact, each ethnic group within a given country will frequently have its own version, or perhaps more than one. A number of studies have been done on the subject, most notably R. D. Jameson's classic essay "Cinderella in China" (1932) and, later, Nai-Tung Ting's full-length work The Cinderella Cycle in China and Indo-China (1974); however, virtually all of the extant scholarship has centered on the examination of these tales as folklore rather than as children's literature. My main purpose in this paper is to look not at the original Southeast-Asian versions of the Cinderella story, but rather to examine how those tales have been rendered into English for publication in the United States. To some extent these stories have been published with an eye toward various increasingly prominent (and increasingly English-speaking) Southeast-Asian communities within the United States. To some extent they have been aimed at the traditional American children's book market, dominated, of course, by white middle-class kids and their parents. This has, at least in the view of various publishers, editors, translators, and "re-tellers," necessitated the introduction of a wide range of changes in the stories. It is these changes and the possible reasons behind them that I will be examining most carefully in this essay.

Although collections of Southeast-Asian folk- and fairytales have been available in English for many years, the sheer number of such volumes has increased considerably over the past decade. Among the best of these collections are Folk Stories of the Hmong (1991), compiled by Norma J. Livo and Dia Cha; The Brocaded Slipper and Other Vietnamese Tales (1992), edited by Lynette Dyer Vuong; and Thai Tales (1994), retold by Supaporn Vathanaprida. The current interest in the many variants of "Cinderella" has also led to the recent publication of a number of such Southeast-Asian tales in picture-book form. It is these picture-book versions of the story, beginning with Darrell Lum's retelling of The Golden Slipper, that I want to examine in detail.

The Golden Slipper is a Vietnamese Cinderella and, like most of the other Southeast Asian variants that will be discussed here, is clearly descended from what Marina...