Four Miao Ballads from Hainan

CHINOPERL Papers No. 29 (2010)©2010 by the Conference on Chinese Oral and Performing Literature FOUR MIAO BALLADS FROM HAINAN WILT L. IDEMA Harvard University In recent decades a large number of popular songs and ballads have been published in China, testifying to the richness and variety of these traditions throughout the country. One of the most important publication projects in this regard is the ongoing compilation and publication of the Compendium of Chinese Folksong (Zhongguo geyao jicheng 中國歌謠集成) and the local collections on which each of the provincial volumes in that series were based. While the overwhelming majority of the materials in the individual volumes consists of short lyrical songs, each volume also contains a section of narrative songs, which make many otherwise previously unavailable ballads easily accessible, and greatly facilitates our work of studying and introducing popular narrative verse from all over China in all its diversity in terms of topic and form. While English translations of popular songs and ballads have increased in recent years (and more are on their way), the available translations only cover a very minor fraction of these rich materials. At this stage each selection of ballads for translation still has to be arbitrary to a large extent. I came across the four texts translated here more or less by accident when I was leafing through the various volumes of the Compendium of Chinese Folksong looking for versions of the ―Four Great Folktales.‖ I was struck by the subject-matter and style of these four ballads, and believe they well merited translation, not only as representative examples of one highly specific local tradition (the Miao of Hainan), but also as literary works of considerable power. While the Miao are often listed as one of Hainan‘s major ethnic groups alongside the Han and the Li, they are actually very small in number, making up less than one percent of the total population. The majority of the Miao live in small dispersed settlements in the interior of the island. While in the past their main livelihood was swidden agriculture, which CHINOPERL Papers No. 29 144 involved the frequent movement of the Miao villages as old land was left fallow and new land cultivated, the government policy since the inception of the People‘s Republic has been to concentrate them in permanent settlements. The existing ethnographic scholarship on the Miao is primarily focused on the Miao of mainland China and Southeast Asia. This scholarship points out that the Chinese ethnic classification ―Miao‖ subsumes a number of quite different groups, and that these groups vary greatly in terms of language, culture, folklore, and degree of acculturation to Han culture—Miao communities are often bilingual, speaking both their own language and the local variety of Chinese.1 In view of the bilingual nature of many Miao communities it should not come as a surprise that ballads in Chinese also circulated in some of these communities. A short article on the Miao of eastern Hainan published in 1921 already notes that ―The Miao have no written language of their own, but pick up Chinese characters with amazing rapidity.‖2 The first detailed ethnographic description of the Hainan Miao was provided by the German ethnographer H. Stübel in his Die Li-Stämme der Insel Hainan: Ein Beitrag zur Volkskunde Südchinas (The Li Tribes of Hainan: A Contribution to the Ethnology of Southern China) of 1937.3 In the appendix devoted to the Miao, Stübel notes that only a few Miao knew Chinese characters. But he also says, The only exception was the old village headman of Nam-pu, who in his youth had traveled throughout Hainan ….With great care he had compiled a Miao song book, from which he sang something for us, and from which we were allowed after long negotiations to copy a poem about the activities during the twelve months of the year that must have been of Chinese origin. (p. 239) 1 The Miao live widely dispersed throughout China‘s southern provinces and South-East Asia. The complexity of the ethnic category of ―Miao‖ is extensively discussed by Nicholass Tapp, The Hmong of China: Context, Agency, and the Imaginary (Leiden: E.J...