Bannermen Tales (Zidishu): Manchu Storytelling and Cultural Hybridity in the Qing Dynasty by Elena Suet-Ying Chiu

Abstract

Reviewed by: Bannermen Tales (Zidishu): Manchu Storytelling and Cultural Hybridity in the Qing Dynasty by Elena Suet-Ying Chiu Stephen Wadley Bannermen Tales (Zidishu): Manchu Storytelling and Cultural Hybridity in the Qing Dynasty by Elena Suet-Ying Chiu. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2018. Pp. xiv + 366. $49.95 cloth. After years of travel to libraries and archives and extensive and painstaking research, Professor Chiu has produced her long-awaited book: Bannerman Tales (Zidishu [子弟書]): Manchu Storytelling and Cultural Hybridity in the Qing Dynasty. And a very welcome book it is. Scarcely anything has been done in researching this genre of amateur performance in the United States, even though in China, as Chiu notes in her introduction, there are literally dozens of books, articles, research papers, and MA and PhD theses that come out on this topic every year. Zidishu seems to be a favorite of graduate students as a thesis topic. This attention may be because, though always included in the histories, lists, and anthologies of Chinese genres of oral performance, this particular folksong genre is actually exclusive to the Manchus. And though interest in Manchus and Manchu language is on the rise in China, interest—or at least institutional support—has declined considerably in the United States. Manchu language offerings in US colleges have dwindled down to essentially a single location: Harvard [End Page 222] University. Manchu language instruction in the US continues to disappear despite the fact that scholars of late imperial China have in recent years convincingly shown that researching the vast Manchu-language archives in China and elsewhere produces new insights into the history of the Qing dynasty that could not be obtained by Chinese-language sources alone. Chiu translates the genre as "bannermen tales," though she continues to use the Chinese term, zidishu, throughout her book. The term is difficult to translate. Zidi 子弟 literally means "sons and younger brothers," but sources make it clear that the term refers to the baqi zidi 八旗子弟, the "sons and younger brothers of the Eight Banners," the sociomilitary organization of the Manchu conquest army. In that organization, all males are potentially assigned as fighters in the army. Once the Manchus entered China and established garrisons in the major cities throughout China, however, there was no longer a need to have all males in the garrisons be active military. Those male members of the banner who were not assigned active duty were called zidi—that is to say, "young guys." So zidishu is variously translated as "youth songs," "songs of the boys," and the like. Chiu's translation takes less account of the "youth" or "unemployed" aspects of the term and focuses rather on the "banner" (baqi) part. Though baqi zidi does not technically include all male members of the Manchu banners, her translation comes as close as any could to conveying the idea of who were the creators and performers of these works. It is also understandable why she chooses to employ the Chinese word throughout her text rather than her translation for the genre. The book contains an introduction, five chapters dealing with various aspects of the zidishu genre, an epilogue, an appendix listing all the zidishu she consulted in writing the book, a bibliography, and an index. Since this is essentially the first book written in English exclusively about zidishu, one would have expected it to be simply an introduction to the genre. While the book does serve that purpose for English-language readers, Chiu has a more ambitious aim for her work. As the subtitle, Manchu Storytelling and Cultural Hybridity in the Qing Dynasty, indicates, this book uses zidishu to show how Manchu and Chinese culture and society interacted to produce a hybrid society. In this way, Chiu makes her own foray into what has, surprisingly, become a heated topic of late. As mentioned above, Qing scholars in the US [End Page 223] and elsewhere have begun to mine the Manchu-language archives for insights into what the Manchus and their society and political structures were like and how they governed China. Their research has led in some cases to a reassessment of the interaction between the Manchus and the Chinese and, to some extent, a...