Record of the Listener: Selected Stories from Hong Mai's Yijian Zhi by Cong Ellen Zhang (review)

Cong Ellen Zhang's Record of the Listener: Selected Stories from Hong Mai's Yijian Zhi is the third selected English translation of Hong Mai's (1123–1202) Yijian zhi after the Chinese-English bilingual version of Selections from Record of the Listener (2009) and Alister Inglis' Selection from Record of the Listener (Yijian zhi) (2010). Zhang's translated collection contains one hundred stories that focus on five major thematic subjects, including (1) natural, political, social and economic conditions; (2) beliefs and practices; (3) people of all walks of life; (4) marriage and sexuality; and (5) family relationships and family matters. The one hundred translated stories included in this 2018 publication contain a small portion of Yijian zhi.

Yijian zhi is one of the largest story collections published in the Song Dynasty (960–1279), second only to Taiping guangji (Records of the Taiping Era). Hong Mai's original work had 420 juan or volumes (totaling over 4,000 entries), but only 207 juan survived. A representative work of the zhiguai genre (records of anomaly), Yijian zhi is famous for its extensive and inclusive content that reflects all aspects of contemporary social life and cultural phenomena of the Song Dynasty. This famous twelfth-century text was continuously written by Hong Mai during a period of nearly four decades,¹ mainly based on the stories that he had heard or had been told by his informants. It serves as an important and meaningful resource for historians, as it focuses on the lives of ordinary people and includes what is ignored in official history. It is also credited with becoming the thematic source of more than thirty vernacular stories of the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties.

Although only sampling a small part of Hong's magnum opus, Cong Ellen Zhang's translation attempts to reflect the general features of Hong's original. In the Introduction, Cong Ellen Zhang indicates that "[t]he one hundred stories included in this translation volume aim to provide students and the general English-language reader with a representative sample of Hong's work" (p. xiii). Such a representativeness can be observed from the broad scope of the stories' themes included in Zhang's selection. Zhang's inclusive intention in subject matter is also highlighted by the "Thematic Guide to the 100 Stories" appearing at the end of the book, which, in addition to the five major thematic categories aforementioned, includes numerous subsubjects. For example, under the rubric of "People of All Walks of Life," Zhang indicates that the personalities peopled in her collection include Buddhist monks, butchers, Daoist masters, ritualists, exorcists, diviners, fortune-tellers, geomancers, doctors, maids and wet nurses, merchants, runners and clerks, scholar-officials, servants, students and examination candidates, thieves, robbers, and bandits.

Zhang's selection reflects that, in paying close attention to the lives of ordinary people, Hong Mai gave more weight to their beliefs and practices, as indicated by Zhang that "[f]irst and foremost, the Record² stories are unique and valuable sources for the understanding of the religious ideas and experiences of both the educated elite and their illiterate and semi-literate counterparts. They demonstrate, among other things, a profound belief in the existence of gods, ghosts, and animistic spirits and the rise of local cults and local deities" (p. xxxi). In the first available English monograph on Hong Mai, Alister Inglis lists three major themes of Yijian zhi: retribution, destiny, and anti-Jurchen theme. Retribution and destiny—belief in divine power to punish or reward people's immoral or moral behavior and one's predetermined lot due to his/her debt or credit of previous life—are really the "religious ideas and experiences" that Zhang refers to above. Therefore, evidently, both Inglis and Zhang believe that a major contribution of Yijian zhi is to reflect people's religious and popular...