Mistaken Identities: Negotiating Passing and Replacement in Chinese Records of the Strange

Abstract

The large corpus of early medieval Chinese narratives now classified as records of the strange includes an abundance of stories of mistaken identity. This essay focuses on stories in which an animal successfully impersonates a human but is eventually found out. The questions I ask of these materials touch on issues of identity, privilege, and narrative: What does it take to pass as and replace a human, and possibly even a particular human? How are personal identity and privilege conceptualized, also across species and gender? How do narratives of initially mistaken and finally revealed “true” identity operate and what literary means do they employ? I propose that the political and social changes that shook early medieval China moved questions about ethnic, social, and personal identity to the center of thought, and that the literary conventions of records of the strange made the genre particularly suited to deliberating and negotiating these matters, especially in terms of access to privileged social spheres. Considering the literary sophistication with which records of the strange were usually composed, I also propose to include them more seriously in discussions of literary practice in early medieval China.