Taste Cheese With Chopsticks

The theatre department production this year is called Undressing Cinderella, which will take place in Wright Theater in April. Two weeks ago, the theater department, collaborating with the comparative literature program, presented Cinderella Symposium. At the symposium, Professor of Chinese Carrie Reed and Visiting Assistant Professor of German Roger Russi introduced the crowd to several unconventional versions of a familiar fairytale, Cinderella.

Reed started the symposium with an ancient Chinese story, Ye Xian. The story was recorded in the ninth-century compilation Miscellaneous Morsels from Youyang about a millennium before the European Cinderella story. Children were not the readers of Ye Xian story, instead, only educated people who can understand ancient written Chinese were able to read the story.

I’ve never heard of Ye Xian before, but I read Cinderella when I was four. Translated storybooks from the West were an important component of my early reading. Back in early 90s, instead of watching TV, I preferred listening to story-telling tapes, because my parents were too busy to read any story. I repeatedly listened to The Little Mermaid, The Princess and the Pea, Snow White, The Frog Prince and a lot of other stories from Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, and was able to recall any subtle details of those fairytales.

Fairytales, however, are only one kind of children’s book. Besides textbooks, in college I probably spent most of my money on children’s books: Robert Sabuda’s and David Carter’s pop-up books, as well as Roald Dahl’s and Dr. Seuss’s classic collections. I could not stop myself from clicking the “Buy now with 1-Click” button on Amazon when I see those vibrant and catchy covers of the books.

There is inevitably some educational purpose embedded in children’s books, but it is more interesting to understand those moral rules and restrictions from reading imaginative stories than reciting behavioral criteria.

What was the reading life of children in ancient China like before the translated versions of western storybooks came out? They were probably reciting Confucian classics. They needed to recite those classics in order to stand out for the imperial examination. My 90-year-old great grandpa once told me that childhood is the best time of our life to recite those classics because then we will remember every single line of them forever afterwards. He iterated a long Tang dynasty poem to convince me, and I was amazed at his memorization.

But there must be something other than reciting classics to compose the childhood of ancient Chinese people. Diving deep into my childhood story list, I noticed some Chinese folktales and legends. Although it is hard to find any copy of those traditional stories in bookstore nowadays, they exist in oral tradition. I like listening to story-telling tapes, but I enjoy lying down and listening to my grandma’s stories even better. I asked ridiculous questions and she made up the answers. Comparing to the love of a prince and a princess, the love being portrayed in Chinese legends is less predictable, such as the love between an ordinary man and a white snake spirit who transformed into human beings in Legend of the White Snake.

Love between different classes and different creatures is acceptable and even admirable. In that sense, ancient China is more modern and unorthodox than Europe at the same era.