Chinese Ethnic Minority Oral Traditions: A Recovered Text of Bai Folk Songs in a Sinoxenic Script ed. by Fu Jingqi, et al (review)

by Xiaomei Chen, do include some texts from Taiwan. This volume also was released around the same time as several translations of plays from mainland China, such as Yu Rongjun’s The Crowd (East Slope Publishing, dist. Hong Kong University Press, 2015), translated by Gigi Chang, and Meng Jinghui’s I Love XXX and Other Plays (Seagull Books, dist. University of Chicago Press, 2016), edited by Claire Conceison. One hopes that this promising cluster of publications is indicative of increased attention to the need for thematic drama anthologies and single-artist collections from both Taiwan and mainland China. Voices of Taiwanese Women both stands on its own as a collection of compelling texts and offers a timely contribution to the growing field of translated drama from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China. In highlighting the Taiwanese theater’s pervasive concern with history, memory, and local culture and its commitment to giving voice to marginalized populations, the volume challenges readers and audiences to engage deeply with what may be an unfamiliar context. Its commitment to performability paradoxically calls attention to gaps in understanding between the plays and the average English-speaking theater-goer, but with these superbly translated texts and on-point explanatory material, any director or dramaturg will be well equipped to begin bridging the divide. This reviewer, for one, certainly hopes that some will try to do so. TARRYN LI-MIN CHUN University of Notre Dame tchun@nd.edu© 2018 Tarryn Li-Min Chun DOI 10.1080/01937774.2018.1524413 Chinese Ethnic Minority Oral Traditions: A Recovered Text of Bai Folk Songs in a Sinoxenic Script. Edited by Fu Jingqi, et al. Amherst, New York: Cambria Press, 2015. 426 pp. $124.99 (Cloth). The Bai 白 (formerly known as the Minjia 民家 people) are recognized as one of China’s fifty-five minority nationalities and live in the western region of Yunnan in southwest China. The volume entitled Chinese Ethnic Minority Oral Traditions: A Recovered Text of Bai Folk Songs in a Sinoxenic Script contains an introduction chapter and texts for 208 folk songs of the Bai nationality. The volume represents the fruits of efforts put in by four scholars (from two generations) over a ten-year period. Their primary purpose in publishing this volume was the reproduction and annotation of a source booklet of hand-written song lyrics in Bai script dating around the 1930s. A majority of the song texts contained in the original booklet were previously undocumented and lost to living Bai communities, making this volume an invaluable source for scholars working on Bai culture, linguistics, and performing arts. The text begins with a fourteen-page introduction in English that familiarizes the reader with Bai history, geography, and writing system, identifies the value of the original source booklet, and relays the challenges that the four scholars faced in Book Reviews 87 deciphering the booklet. The chapter describes how Xu Lin (1921–2005), a Bai scholar, linguistics fieldworker, and member of the Bai-language survey team in Yunnan, acquired the booklet during the height of the Mao era in 1958. Professor Xu realized the value of the booklet as a rare source of early-twentieth-century Bai script, a writing system which had yet to be fully deciphered by contemporary scholars. She hid the text away for several decades and waited to begin work on the project until the end of the Mao era, when references to courtship and romance, abundant in Bai song lyrics, were no longer forbidden. Professor Xu’s daughter, Jingqi Fu, picked up the project when Xu Lin died at the age of eightythree in 2005. Additional work on the project was provided by Duan Ling (1939–2012), a Bai linguist and folklorist, and Zhao Min, a Bai historian from the city Baofeng where the source text originated. The scholars determined that the source booklet, one of the oldest available sources for the Bai script, was valuable enough to warrant a full-scale, page-by-page transcription and translation effort. The resulting volume contains careful transcription of the original booklet’s Bai script (a “Sinoxenic script” with adopted Chinese characters), translation of each song text into Chinese and English, and transliteration into the International Phonetic Alphabet...