Introduction

In Chinese literary studies, the second half of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) is customarily regarded as the golden age of vernacular fiction, an age that witnessed the emergence of the well-known “four masterworks of the Chinese novel”: The Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguo zhi yanyi), Outlaws of the Marsh (Shuihu zhuan), Journey to the West (Xiyou ji), and The Plum in the Golden Vase (Jin ping mei). Toward the end of this period, there appeared three collections of short stories that represent the most important milestone in the development of the Chinese vernacular story.

Stories Old and New (Gujin xiaoshuo) was the first of these three collections, published in Suzhou (Soochow) in 1620. Perhaps as a result of its instant success, the other two soon followed as its sequels: Comprehensive Words to Warn the World (Jingshi tongyan) in 1624 and Constant Words to Awaken the World (Xingshi hengyan) in 1627. Each collection contains forty stories, and since Stories Old and New is also known as Illustrious Words to Instruct the World (Yushi mingyan), they are most often referred to collectively as the Sanyan (lit., Three Words), from the common Chinese character with which each title ends.

The Sanyan collections were edited by Feng Menglong (1574–1646), the most knowledgeable connoisseur of popular literature of his time. He came from a well-to-do, educated family in the exceptionally prosperous Suzhou Prefecture, one of the great cultural centers of Ming China. His father was closely associated with a few distinguished scholar-official families in the area, including that of Wang Jingchen (1513–1595), a renowned orthodox Confucian scholar. Feng Menglong was the second of three talented brothers known as the Three Fengs of the Wu Area. His older brother Menggui was an accomplished artist and his younger brother Mengxiong a highly regarded poet. Feng Menglong himself acquired the preliminary academic degree of shengyuan around the age of twenty and was greatly admired by his friends and schoolmates as a brilliant and widely read scholar.¹

But this talented young man also had a propensity for things unconventional and “heterodox.” Not only did he avidly study and openly advocate the unorthodox theories of Li Zhi (1527–1602), but he also frequented gambling houses and courtesans’ quarters. Of the gambling guides he compiled, two are still extant: Classic of Cards (Pai jing ), in thirteen juan (sections), and Rules of the Madiao Games (Madiao jiaoli), in ten juan, madiao being a card game Feng is said to have invented.² The latter work was long held as a classic among card players in the Qing dynasty (1644–1911).³ Feng’s popularity with the Suzhou courtesans was also something he was proud of. In a note to a popular song in Guazhir, a book of songs to the tune “Guazhir,” he says he was often showered with gifts from courtesans.⁴ He was deeply involved in romantic a airs with at least two of them (including Hou Huiqing, who finally, much to Feng’s grief, married someone else) and helped compile The Hundred Beauties of Nanjing (Jinling baimei), a book that ranks and evaluates the hundred most beautiful and accomplished courtesans in Nanjing.⁵ He also wrote individual courtesans’ biographies, at least three of which are extant.⁶ We get a glimpse of the kind of romance he had with courtesans in story 12, “The Courtesans Mourn Liu the Seventh in the Spring Breeze,” in this volume if we read the main character Liu Yong (d. ca. 1053), a famous Song dynasty ci (lyric) poet, as Feng Menglong’s self projection. Feng’s philogynous reputation was so widespread that other writers’ books about women were sometimes attributed to him in order to promote sales.⁷

Feng’s involvement with courtesans indeed helped his writing career. He published a collection of his own art songs, Songs of Charm and Harmony (Wanzhuan ge), and reprinted sixteen sets in an art-song anthology, Celestial Songs Played Anew (Taixia xin zou) many years later. Although Songs of Charm and Harmony is lost, we can see clearly that all of the extant sixteen sets are about his relationships with courtesans, with as many as six relating to his loss of Hong Huiqing.⁸ And it is reasonable to assume that some of the songs in Celestial Songs Played Anew were performed in pleasure houses before Feng collected and published them,⁹ as is the case with many folk songs Feng published in his Guazhir and Hill Songs (Shange).¹⁰ Feng mentions that one song in Guazhir was “provided by Feng Xisheng, a famous courtesan.”¹¹

As can be expected, Feng’s bohemian way of life invited criticism from conservative moralists. Feng responded by defending Liu Yong’s liaisons with courtesans (and indirectly, his own) in a note in story 12 in Stories Old and New: “Lord Guo [Ziyi] and Prime Minister Wen [Tianxiang] were also self-indulgent men who frequented courtesan quarters, but, once charged with important missions, they dedicated themselves to the nation to the neglect of their self interests. What does a pedantic Confucian moralist know!” This note, however, reveals another side of Feng’s personality—a strong sense of social responsibility along with ambition to hold office himself. He spent more than twenty years, as his younger brother tells us, studying The Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu), which he chose as his civil service examination specialty.¹² He made two long trips to the Macheng area in Hubei Province, the center of scholarship on the Annals, in order to study the classic in a special study group, the first time between 1612 and 1617 and the second in 1620.¹³

As a result, three of his examination handbooks on the Annals were published within a few years: Guide to the Spring and Autumn Annals (Linjing zhiyue), 1620; New Light on the Central Ideas of the Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu dingzhi canxin), ca. 1623; and A Spring and Autumn Annals Thesaurus (Chunqiu hengku), 1625, also known as An Alternative Edition of the Complete Guide to the Spring and Autumn Annals (Beiben Chunqiu daquan).¹⁴ In 1630 he published another examination handbook, Guide to the Four Books (Sishu zhi yue). These handbooks seem to have sold fast; the gazetteer of Feng’s hometown, Suzhou fu zhi, even mentioned Guide to the Spring and Autumn Annals and A Spring and Autumn Annals Thesaurus as the two most important guidebooks for civil service examination candidates specializing in the Annals.¹⁵ The Thesaurus became a standard work for much of the Qing dynasty.¹⁶

Ironically, Feng himself never passed the provincial-level civil service examinations, in spite of his sustained e ort, his erudition, and the market success of his examination handbooks, which must have benefited other candidates. His continuous bad luck in the examinations, however, turned out to be bliss for the reading public. Unencumbered by official duties, Feng was able to devote more time to his publishing career. During the ten years between 1620 and 1630, he produced so much at his desk that he “must surely have been making his living by writing.”¹⁷ Apart from the four handbooks on Confucian classics mentioned above, he published at least another nine titles during the decade, including the three famous Sanyan collections; The Quelling of the Demons (Ping yao zhuan), 1920, Feng’s first vernacular novel; Talks Old and New (Gujin tangai), 1920, an anthology of classical-language anecdotes and tales; Selections from the Grand Gleanings of the Taiping Period (Taiping guangji chao), 1926, a drastic revision of the Song dynasty encyclopedic anthology of anecdotes and tales Taiping guang ji; Sack of Wisdom (Zhi nang), 1626, a joke book with comments; History of Love (Qing shi), after 1628, a classical-language anthology of more than 850 tales and anecdotes on love and compassion, also called A Classified Outline of the History of Love (Qingshi leilüe); and Celestial Songs Played Anew (1628). A New History of the States (Xin leiguo zhi), Feng’s first attempt at fictionalized history, may have been published in 1628 or after.

In 1630, at the age of fifty-six, Feng Menglong seems to have lost hope in passing the examinations and decided, instead, to take the alternative route to office by accepting the status of tribute student. He then served one term as assistant instructor in Dantu County (about ninety miles northwest of Suzhou), probably from 1631 to 1634,¹⁸ before he was promoted to a minor official position as magistrate of Shouning County, Fujian. He held this office for four years and proved himself to be an honest, caring, and efficient administrator, as is registered in County History of Shouning (Shouning xian zhi), compiled in the early Qing period, which also tells us that Feng “venerated literary studies more than anything else” (shou shang wenxue) during his service.¹⁹ This means Feng kept on writing when he was o duty, although he published far less than before. He finished compiling Supplement to “Sack of Wisdom” (Zhi nang bu) in 1634 and most probably completed his play Perfect Satisfaction (Wanshi zu), one of the sixteen extant plays he wrote, adapted, or edited, in 1635.²⁰ As county magistrate, he published in 1637 a local history with the unusual title A Provisional History of Shouning (Shouning dai zhi), which suggests, according to Patrick Hanan, Feng’s “personal approach to the impersonal face of local history.”²¹

Feng’s last political involvement, toward the end of his life, was his association with the Southern Ming government in its desperate resistance against the crushing forces of the Manchus. Shortly after the fall of Beijing and the suicide of the emperor in 1644, he compiled Veritable Records of the National Resurgence (Zhongxing shilu), in which he both records the disastrous events and makes plans of action to handle the crisis. A few months later this book was incorporated into his larger compilation Records of the Year Jiashen, 1644 (Jiashen jishi). In the middle of 1645, Veritable Records was reissued as Grand Designs of the National Resurgence (Zhongxing weilüe), with some revision and a new preface by Feng. He died soon afterward in 1646 at the age of seventy-two, without finishing his Ink Crazy Studio’s New Song Manual (Mohan zhai xinding cipu).

Feng Menglong was one of the most prolific writers of his time. The books he published could literally be “piled up to reach his own height” (zhuzuo dengshen, a phrase traditionally used by critics to praise exceptionally productive writers),²² and they covered such a wide range of interests and literary genres that Feng has been described as “presenting himself in two distinct personae, or . . . in a range of personae between two extremes.”²³ At one extreme, he appears in some of his works as the wit, the ribald humorist, the bohemian, the drinker, the romantic lover. This is the Feng Menglong who compiled Treasury of Jokes (Xiaofu; date unknown), who published two volumes of folk songs (Guazhir and Hill Songs), mostly on erotic or ribald themes, and whose passionate love a air with the famous Suzhou courtesan Hou Huiqing is revealed in some of his poems. At the other extreme is Feng Menglong the patriot, the orthodox scholar, and the ardent examination candidate, who authored at least three handbooks on the Confucian classic The Spring and Autumn Annals, who wrote a similar handbook on the Four Books, and who published many patriotic tracts as a consequence of his participation in Southern Ming resistance activities. These two personae may seem to be mutually exclusive, yet in his fiction as well as his plays, Feng Menglong often reveals elements of both in a single text.²⁴

Modern scholars generally agree, however, that Feng Menglong’s greatest contribution to literature was in the field of vernacular fiction, particularly his collecting and editing of the three Sanyan collections of 120 vernacular short stories. This genre, known as huaben, is believed to have developed, along with the vernacular novel, during the Song and Yuan dynasties and reached maturity in the late Ming. Two social factors are considered to have played a crucial role in the rise of this literary genre: the success of the publishing industry as a result of economic progress and educational expansion, and the increasingly difficult competition for examination degrees. The former o ered job opportunities and the chance to pursue private interests to examination candidates before they were granted official positions, if ever; the latter guaranteed a sufficient supply of highly qualified writers and editors, as well as readers.

The Publishing Industry and the Civil Service Examinations

The Song and Yuan dynasties (960–1279, 1260–1368) witnessed the first rapid growth of the publishing industry in the Jianyang area of Fujian Province, on the southeast coast of China. But the economic boom of the sixteenth century as a result of monetization of silver²⁵ moved the center of the book publishing trade to the lower Yangzi region, the most developed and urbanized area in late Ming China. Suzhou, Feng Menglong’s hometown, was the site of most printing houses for which location can be ascertained, followed by Hangzhou and Nanjing.²⁶

Recent scholarship has shown that publishing houses during the late Ming were of several types: official (supported by branches of the central government in Beijing and Nanjing), commercial (book dealers), private (collectors and scholars), and academic (private academies). Although book dealers were most prolific in number of titles and volume of production, “the finest books were produced by scholarly collector-printers who catered to the refined tastes of others of their class.”²⁷

Ironically, the economic boom that contributed to the development of the publishing industry also stimulated expansion of the school system and thus increased the number of examination candidates competing for degrees.²⁸ The civil service examination system, the best-known political institution of imperial China, consisted of examinations at three levels: district (prefectural), provincial, and national (metropolitan). Successful candidates on the first level received a shengyuan degree, on the second a juren degree, and on the third, the highest degree of jinshi. Normally shengyuan degree holders were not appointed to official positions. From the late fourteenth century to 1600 (when Feng Menglong was a young man of twenty-six), the number of recipients of this lowest degree increased by twentyfold, but the bureaucracy did not grow accordingly.²⁹ Consequently, the highest barrier was in the provincial examination; only one out of one hundred candidates could pass.³⁰ The competition in the lower Yangzi region was even more intense, for the quotas the government imposed on the numbers of successful candidates favored culturally less-developed areas. What is worse, the officials who administered the examinations under such circumstances “had to think more about how to eliminate candidates than about how to select the best scholars, and they devised various complicated formal requirements that in the end destroyed the true purpose of the whole system.”³¹ Not surprisingly, as Robert E. Hegel points out, it was in that area at that time that Chinese vernacular fiction reached maturity, for many writers were from precisely this large and disgruntled group of shengyuan holders in the lower Yangzi region.³² Feng Menglong was a case in point. All of his vernacular fiction—two novels and three collections of short stories—was published in his most productive (and perhaps most frustrated) ten years before he was appointed assistant instructor in Dantu at the age of fifty-six or fifty-seven. It is therefore not surprising that he expressed time and again in the Sanyan collections his anxiety over the examination system. For example, story 31, “Sima Mao Disrupts Order in the Underworld and Sits in Judgment,” is about a talented and erudite examination candidate who continues to fail the examinations even after the age of fifty. When he finds himself led to the underworld, he confronts and criticizes King Yama vehemently for such unjust treatment to the talented and virtuous in the human world. To this Feng Menglong added a marginal note: “He says everything I wanted to say to unburden myself of all my complaints.”

The Sanyan and the Vernacular Story

Feng Menglong can be considered the most important figure in the development of the vernacular story; he almost single-handedly established this genre with Stories Old and New and his other two collections of stories. As a passionate champion of popular literature, he managed to rescue from oblivion a significant proportion of the early huaben stories by making them available to the public again. But preservation of existing stories was by no means Feng Menglong’s only concern—he probably was more interested in giving prestige to this new literary genre and establishing it socially. In the Preface to Stories Old and New, he places vernacular fiction on a par with the highly esteemed classical tales of the Tang Dynasty:

In order to elevate the status of the vernacular story, Feng Menglong also claims, in the same Preface, that the origin of all fiction is the grand tradition of historiography, and he ascribes to the huaben story more educational and moral power than to The Analects of Confucius (Lunyu).³³ To substantiate such claims, not surprisingly, Feng is believed to have extensively modified some of the stories he had collected and to have incorporated many of his own stories and some of his friends’ into the Sanyan collections, although he makes no acknowledgment of authorship whatsoever in the Preface.³⁴ According to Patrick Hanan, who applied rigorous stylistic criteria in his studies of the dating and authorship of Chinese vernacular stories, Feng Menglong is the probable author of nineteen stories in Stories Old and New, sixteen in the second collection, and one or two in the third.³⁵

PAIRED STORIES

A less drastic but more obvious aspect of Feng’s “editing” is his rearrangement of the stories in the three collections into pairs. The thematically and grammatically parallel pairs of titles may be an attempt to parody the parallelism of classical poetry and belles lettres prose (the two most honored literary genres of Feng’s time),³⁶ or may simply represent his e ort to elevate the vernacular short story. However, on the textual level, it is clear that stories were composed with their pairs in mind.³⁷ The paired stories often share common features in subject matter or plot line, and occasionally they contrast or comment on each other.

Stories 7–8 and 15–16 in Stories Old and New can serve as examples of Feng’s pairing practice. Story 7, “Yang Jiao’ai Lays Down His Life for the Sake of Friendship,” and story 8, “Wu Bao’an Abandons His Family to Ransom His Friend,” share the theme of friendship, one of Feng’s most highly regarded virtues. But the relationship between paired stories may involve more than a shared theme or subject matter. Margaret L. John has demonstrated that the self-sacrifice described in the second story is “unequivocally superior to those of either of the friends in the first story”: Wu Bao’an of the second story is willing to undergo tremendous hardship for the sake of a friend he has never even met, and the events in “Yang Jiao’ai” take place in less than a week, whereas Wu and Guo show their loyalty to each other over years. What is more impressive for the family-centered Chinese reader is Wu Bao’an’s abandoning his family for ten years in an e ort to ransom his friend Guo. By comparison it seems “easy enough” for Yang Jiao’ai and his friend Zuo Botao to die for each other, because “they had no families for whom they were responsible.”³⁸

This argument can be pursued further if we look into the unique publication history involving the pairing of two other stories. “Yang Jiao’ai” was taken from Sixty Stories (Liushijia xiaoshuo), the earliest surviving anthology of vernacular short stories, published in 1550, where it was originally paired with “The Chicken-and-Millet Dinner of Fan and Zhang in Life and Death” (which appears as story 16 in Stories Old and New). This original pairing reflects the “almost perfect identity of structure and theme. Both present high-minded individuals entering . . . into a bond of friendship for which each eventually o ers up his life.”³⁹ If similarity in subject or structure was Feng Menglong’s main concern in pairing stories, one would expect these stories to remain paired in the Sanyan. That each is paired with a di erent story in Stories Old and New suggests that Feng may have had other concerns in mind.

Although he has made stylistic improvements in “Yang Jiao’ai,” by retaining its original title in a note, Feng makes it clear that the story appears as a reprint from an earlier anthology. Feng has also left an anachronism unchanged in the text—a glaring mistake that Feng could have easily corrected, had he wished to: the famous assassin Jing Ke (who was already dead in the story) actually was born toward the end of Warring States period (475–221 B.C.E.), a few hundred years after the death of the two friends. Instead, Feng added an explanatory note. To pair such a story with one written by himself may suggest that not only is the friendship represented in “Wu Bao’an” unequivocally superior to that of the two friends in “Yang Jiao’ai,” but in artistic quality the second story is itself far superior to the first. Feng may have deliberately crafted “Wu Bao’an” in the pair to not merely echo or resonate with “Yang Jiao’ai,” but to overshadow or outshine it.

On the other hand, “The Chicken-and-Millet Dinner of Fan and Zhang,” the original companion story to “Yang Jiao’ai” in Sixty Stories, is included without any indication of its origin in Stories Old and New, where it appears as the companion story to story 15, “The Dragon-and-Tiger Reunion of Shi Hongzhao the Minister and His Friend the King.” The two seem to share almost nothing in common. One describes a future emperor and a general at the beginning of their careers as ruffians and thieves; the other is about two scholar friends who kill themselves for each other. There is conceivably irony in the first story (but none in the second): on the one hand the narrator constantly speaks of his protagonists as “destined to rise to the highest dignities,” but on the other hand portrays them simply as “loafers and social outcasts.”⁴⁰ Therefore it seems likely that the second story, with its lofty theme of self-sacrifice and noble friendship, is set purposefully to contrast the future rulers’ abject behavior in stark relief—an indirect criticism of the ruling class or of a specific Ming ruler and his ministers.⁴¹

THE STORYTELLER’S RHETORIC

One of the most interesting and controversial characteristics of Chinese vernacular fiction is its “storyteller’s rhetoric.” This is part of what Patrick Hanan refers to as the “simulated context,” or “the context of situation in which a piece of fiction claims to be transmitted.”⁴² In the Sanyan stories (and in other Chinese vernacular fiction as well), this simulacrum almost always takes the form of a professional oral storyteller addressing his audience. The storyteller-narrator asks questions of his simulated audience, converses with them, makes explicit reference to his own stories, and intersperses his narrative with verses and poems. Usually the narrator begins his talk with one or more prologue stories or poems, which supposedly allows his audience time to gather before the main piece in his performance is presented.

Hanan explains these peculiar formal features of Chinese vernacular fiction as parts of a “three mode schema”: commentary (including the introductory remarks or prologue, explanations, comments, and summaries by the narrator); description (stoptime description of characters or settings, usually in parallel prose or poetry); and presentation (dialogue and narrated action).⁴³ The story is told through the use of all three modes, but commentary and description are separated from presentation. One of the main functions of the storyteller-narrator is to “guide the reader through the transitions from one mode to the next”⁴⁴ by using “storyteller phrases,” such as yuanlai (“It so happened that . . .” or “As a matter of fact . . .”) to turn to the mode of commentary; danjian and zhijian (“Behold!” or “There, for all to see, was . . .”) to description; and huashuo (“The story goes that . . .” or “The story is about . . .”), or qieshuo or queshuo (“To get on with our story . . .” or “Let me now turn to . . .”) to presentation.

Of course, in written literature, this storyteller’s pose is only a pretense in which “the author and reader happily acquiesce in order that the fiction can be communicated.”⁴⁵ It was a way to “naturalize, by reference to the familiar situation of hearing stories told in the vernacular by professional storytellers, the unfamiliar process of writing and reading fiction in vernacular Chinese.”⁴⁶ But this formal feature, plus a misunderstanding of the term huaben, led many scholars of Chinese literature to subscribe, until a couple of decades ago, to the “prompt-book” theory, which held that the Chinese vernacular story developed directly from the prompt-books of marketplace storytellers in the Song dynasty, and that the pre-Sanyan texts were no less than genuine prompt-books written for performance in the Song and Yuan or early Ming periods.⁴⁷ W. L. Idema, however, argues that the storyteller’s manner was deliberately developed in literati imitations by Feng Menglong and others. According to Idema, the conspicuous use of this rhetorical stance in the Sanyan collections was “a consequence mainly of Feng Menglong’s reinterpretation of the genre and due to his overall rewritings.”⁴⁸ In other words, Feng’s editing of his collections included a systematic elaboration of this storyteller rhetoric, which became a hallmark of the huaben story he envisioned.

But this is not to deny the presence of elements of oral folk literature in the Sanyan stories. Most contain anecdotes or episodes known even to the illiterate, which suggests that the editor looked to storytelling for raw materials as well as for rhetorical formulas. And we may assume that traces of the marketplace storyteller and the values he represented would unavoidably have remained in these huaben stories in spite of Feng Menglong’s often meticulous editing. Idema argues that professional storytelling was but one of the many factors that helped to shape traditional Chinese fiction.⁴⁹ Sources for these vernacular stories can be traced to many other forms of narrative, such as drama, historiography (both official and unofficial), and classical tales. The fact that the publication dates of Talks Old and New, Sack of Wisdom, Selections from the Grand Gleanings of the Taiping Period, History of Love, and Supplement to “Sack of Wisdom” coincide roughly with the Sanyan suggests that they could have been compiled as aids for the preparation of the Sanyan.⁵⁰ Small wonder that the Sanyan collections provide for us such a vivid panoramic view of the bustling world of imperial China before the end of Ming: not only do we see scholars, emperors, ministers, and generals, but also a gallery of ordinary men and women in their everyday surroundings—merchants and artisans, prostitutes and courtesans, matchmakers and fortune-tellers, monks and nuns, servants and maids, thieves and impostors. We learn about their joys and sorrows, likes and dislikes, their views of life and death, and even their visions of the underworld and the supernatural. We see the noble friendship of ancient scholars in the Spring and Autumn period (770–476 B.C.E.) in story 7, a late Ming triangular love relationship of merchants and their wives in story 1; instances of Buddhist reincarnation in stories 29 and 30, Taoist magic and long-term “hibernation” in stories 13 and 14; the fall of a tragic hero in story 39, the rise of rude men of violence in story 15; fidelity in love during the Jurchen invasion of the Song in story 17, family reunion after the Japanese pirate raids in the Ming in story 18; frustrated scholars touring the underworld in stories 31 and 32, men and women predestined to live in heaven as immortals in story 33; a naive man who almost dies from excessive sex with a prostitute in story 3, and women who are superior to men in both talent and integrity in story 28.

Thus the Sanyan stories are necessarily overdetermined texts, historically, ideologically, and formally. They can be justifiably taken as an intersection of complex cultural determinations, with generic mixture and multiple voices making di erent and sometimes conflicting claims. This complexity of multiple voices in Stories Old and New has never been fully presented to the English reader before. Of the forty stories in this collection, until now only seventeen have been published in English translation, and they appeared separately in journals and anthologies of Chinese literature, never arranged in pairs and in the original sequence. Even when stories have been presented individually, the storyteller’s rhetoric, the verses, and the prologue stories often have been deleted.⁵¹ The interlinear and marginal comments, generally believed to have been made by Feng Menglong himself,⁵² are omitted even in modern Chinese editions of the collection. This volume represents the first e ort to translate this seventeenth-century collection in its entirety, an e ort not only to provide for the English reader a fuller picture of the bustling world of imperial China, but, more importantly, also to show the intricate interactions among di erent voices in the texts, especially between the voice of the conventional storyteller narrator and that of the literati editor Feng Menglong.

THE EFFECT OF THE SANYAN ON LATER FICTION WRITERS

The two most important vernacular story writers after Feng Menglong were Ling Mengchu (1580–1644), who published two collections, Slapping the Table in Amazement (Pai’an jingqi; 1628) and Slapping the Table in Amazement, Second Collection (Erke Pai’an jingqi; 1632); and Li Yu (1611–80), who published three, Silent Operas (Wusheng xi; 1655/56), Silent Operas, Second Collection (Wusheng xi erji; ca. 1656), and Twelve Towers (Shi’er lou; 1658). Unlike Feng, Ling wrote all of the nearly eighty stories himself and made no attempt to hide his authorship. This can been seen as a sign that by Ling’s time, the vernacular story as a genre was firmly established due to Feng’s success. In his preface to his first collection of stories, Ling states that since Feng Menglong had already exhausted all the old texts, he could only take “those miscellaneous and scattered pieces of the past and present that could refresh one’s views and understanding . . . and expand and elaborate them into a number of stories.”⁵³ The narrator in Ling’s stories appears to have a single, fairly consistent personality, and is often found “equating himself with the author, in the sort of comment we might expect to find in a preface or in the author’s own editorial notes.”⁵⁴

If Ling Mengchu was still dependent on preexisting anecdotes for his stories, Li Yu insisted on the value of originality in literature. Of the stories in the three collections he published, none is clearly based on any previous source material,⁵⁵ and all distinctly bear his own individual stamp. One of the most striking features of his stories is that the traditional storyteller is replaced by a literati persona, who often sounds “like a vernacular version of Li Yu the essayist . . . sly, mocking, ingenious, self-congratulatory—and even self-contradictory.”⁵⁶

After reaching maturity in the late Ming, the simulated context of the oral storyteller developed, as David Rolston observes, along two lines. One was “for the marks of the presence of the narrator as storyteller to drop away to a minimum,” and the other was “to bring the storyteller persona even more into the foreground, dramatizing the storytelling process . . . or personalizing the narrator.”⁵⁷ Both Ling Mengchu and Li Yu seem to have taken the second course, with Li Yu even further personalized. Neither Ling nor Li was much interested in Feng’s arrangement of paired stories; instead, each chose to write a parallel couplet as the title for each story.⁵⁸

These short-story writers’ reasons for not following Feng’s literary techniques were necessarily complex. On the social level, the changed cultural environment with an ever-increasing literati concern for declining morals may have compelled Ling to speak more directly, and the fall of the Ming and the vicissitudes of his own life may have made Li Yu more cynical about human follies. On the personal level, however, it is possible that in the face of Feng’s great literary achievement, these latecomers in the field of vernacular short-story writing also su ered from “the anxiety of precedents.”⁵⁹ Refusing to directly imitate Feng’s specific techniques may have been their strategy for claiming “new territory” for themselves. Perhaps, in their eyes, the once frustrated Feng Menglong was not a victim of the civil service examination system anymore, but had become a formidable literary giant in their field, due to the success of his Sanyan collections.

Shuhui Yang