South of the Clouds: Tales from Yunnan ed. by Lucien Miller (review)

ClUNOPBRL Papen No. 18 Reference Cited Samuel H.N. Cheung 1982 A study of xiehouyu expressions in Cantonese. Qinghua Xuebao n.s. 14, #1/2 pp.51-103. (Reviewer's note: Cheung's "post-pause expressions" is a more exact rendering than Rohsenow's "enigmatic folk similes.) Fan Pen Chen SUNY Albany South of the Clouds: Tales from Yunnan. Edited by Lucien Miller. Translated by Guo Xu, Lucien Miller, and Xu Kun. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994. xiii, 328 pp. $40.00 (cloth); $19.95 (paper). This is an important collection of translated narratives from the oral traditions of Yunnanese ethnic groups that will become a centerpiece of many reading lists for some time to come. I have already added it to my syllabus for Linguistic Survey of Minority Languages in Mainland China and will also include it in another course entitled Chinese Literature in Translation and Literary Translation in Chinese. But the possibilities do not end with language and literature: this is a teaching volume with interdisciplinary appeal and applications. Wherever Chinese folklore is a focus of interest, South of the Clouds will be likely to appear. The double introduction, comprised of complementary essays authored independently by two of the background project's participants (Professor Miller and Yunnan folklorist Xu Kun), provides the reader with a dual perspective on the subject matter of the volume while opening space for fruitful speculation in regard to certain questions the collection itself inevitably raises. Both essays have been aptly partitioned by subheadings that together communicate a strategic approach to the narratives. For example, Miller -- Folk Literature, Children's Literature, and Chinese Intellectuals; Textual Issues; Oral Art and Folk Literature; 136 Book Reviews Xu - Myth, Legend, and Tale; On Collecting, Recording, Translating, and Redacting. And they are in sum well aimed to usher readers into the study of ethnic folklore and its literary expression in China in a manner that is thought-provoking while preserving a tactful humor in their treatment of the complexities involved. Another feature setting this volume apart from ancestors and various cousins is the scholarly apparatus at the back. This includes up-todate and information-filled -- though, as some readers may feel, underdocumented -- sociohistorical profiles of the traditional yet multifarious ethnic and linguistic communities that have made Yunnan one of the most diversely populated provinces of China. From a list of 51 _recognized minority nationalities reflected in recently published (1992) Yunnan census statistics, 24 are represented here, as well as one nationality, the Kucong people 1!iJl~, that still awaited official recognition (wei shibie *_EU) at census time. Interestingly, the tale from , Kucong appearing here is among the more unsanitized narratives of the collection, still clearly reflecting its origins in picaresque and "uncooked" oral source material. A young woman, having retired with her new husband (who is coincidentally a boa constrictor), utters successive formulaic complaints to her mother lying in the next room: "...it's up to my thighs!"; "...it's up to my waist!"; "Mama, it's up to my neck now!" before being entirely swallowed up. A comprehensive glossary of Chinese characters, a forward-looking bibliography amplifying the volume editor's approach to literary folktales, and an index complete the backmatter. One thematic conceit known to recur among different ethnopoetic traditions of China's southwest concerns a post-creation deluge that destroys all but a single pair of human beings who happen to be a brother and sister. The details of their survival and eventual incestuous union provide the stuff of multiple epics that have been transmitted orally in a variety of different languages. Thus it seems appropriate on all counts that the sequence of rubrics under which narrative texts are organized here should begin with one entitled Stories About Creation. In this section are included narratives from Dulong (here spelled Drung), Jinuo (here Jino), Lisu, Miao, and Bulang (here spelled Blang). Two of these, both from Tibeto-Burman languages, indeed relate variants of the flood and incest topos. Surprisingly, however, we rmd the same complex of motifs also reflected in a narrative from Zhuang -- not a Tibeto-Burman language-137 ClUNOPERL Papen No. 18 appearing elsewhere under a different thematic rubric: Heroes and Heroines of...