Asian Origins of Cinderella: The Zhuang Storyteller of Guangxi

Abstract

Asian Origins of Cinderella:The Zhuang Storyteller of Guangxi Fay Beauchamp (bio) Introduction and Overview While a very early version of "Cinderella," printed in China in the ninth century, has been known to the world since the translations and commentary by R. D. Jameson (1932) and Arthur Waley (1947 and 1963), there has been no extended analysis of this Tang Dynasty text in the light of its Asian religious, historical, and literary contexts. The story of a young girl, Yexian, appeared in the miscellany of the Tang Dynasty Duan Chengshi (c. 800-63) (Reed 2003:3-5). Upon examination, the Yexian narrative is remarkably close to the story made most famous by the Frenchman Charles Perrault (1697) and the 1950 Walt Disney cartoon. A mistreated stepdaughter is kind to an animal; at the moment she is bereft of hope, an otherworldly person appears out of the blue; a marvelous dress for a festival and a shining lost shoe lead to identification through the fit of the shoe and marriage to a king (see Appendix A for a translation of the Yexian story).1 Despite the fact that the Cinderella and Yexian stories are parallel in spirit and series of motifs, recent scholars interested in the story's diffusion, such as Graham Anderson, disregard the Asian roots of the story, and instead trace a few motifs back to other stories told by Greeks about Egyptians (Anderson 2000 and 2003). While the Tang Dynasty text adds a highly unusual fish with red fins and golden eyes to the story famous in the West, Yexian herself demonstrates familiar character traits: she is hardworking, virginal, kind, lonely, wishful, and willful. It is time for this heroine's Asian identity to be recognized and the evocative story motifs understood in their Asian contexts. Focusing on Duan Chengshi's c. 850 CE text, this paper starts with the hypothesis that Yexian's story reflects the time and place of the informant, Li Shiyuan, cited by Duan. I concentrate on Li Shiyuan's possible identity as a member of the Zhuang ethnic group in Nanning, Guangxi Province, now within the People's Republic of China near the Vietnamese border. Victor Mair's 2005 translation and footnotes stimulated my interest in Guangxi, and Katherine Kaup, who studies contemporary Zhuang politics, enabled me to interview Zhuang folklore scholars in Nanning. With some observations in Guangxi Province, but more importantly analysis of literary texts and previous scholarship, I place the Yexian story in the context of Zhuang beliefs, creativity, and history. Even in a preliminary study into Yexian's Asian origins, however, it is not sufficient to explore one subgroup; the Zhuang lived at a crossroads in the ninth century, absorbing and resisting Hindu and Buddhist influences from South and Southeast Asia, and Han Chinese political and cultural dominance from the north and east. Particularly in the Tang Dynasty, well established trade routes connected India, Southeast Asia, and East Asia, and ideas were exchanged along with silk and other material goods. The resonances in this c. 850 story of Hindu, Buddhist, and Han Chinese narratives, as well as local concerns, help to explain the story's symbolic power and ability to adapt to different world areas. The Yexian story is a composite of at least two narrative lines: one emphasizes the fish rescued by Yexian, and the other focuses on an untidy being who rescues the girl at a time of anguish. Both narrative strands have Hindu and Buddhist analogues. The question then arises whether the Yexian story could have been completely composed almost anywhere with access to Hindu and Buddhist beliefs. Could it, for example, have arisen in India, Vietnam, Java, Tibet? Could Li Shiyuan simply be a conduit to Duan Chengshi? Since the Zhuang have crossed many borders, formation of the story in Vietnam is quite possible. There are also smaller distinctive ethnic groups within Guangxi such as the Dong, Yao, and Miao. My focus, however, is to understand the complexity of Zhuang ethnicity in the Tang Dynasty. The evidence I present does not support the conclusion that the story arrived on the shores of China complete as a ship in a bottle. The red color of Yexian...