INTRODUCTION

Robert E. Hegel

Slapping the Table in Amazement: A Ming Dynasty Story Collection (Pai’an jingqi 拍案驚奇) is a collection of forty stories in vernacular-style Chinese written by Ling Mengchu 凌濛初 (1580–1644) and published in 1628. Ling’s second collection, Slapping the Table in Amazement, Second Collection (Erke Pai’an jingqi 二刻拍案驚奇), containing thirty-eight more stories, appeared in 1632.

The stories here were meant to be entertainment—but entertainment that makes the reader think. Fate is an underlying theme, and sometimes the central topic. To what degree are human lives controlled by outside forces, either the unseen powers of the universe or simply other people whose decisions deliberately or unwittingly affect our very existence? Are there “marriages made in heaven” that are bound to occur, no matter how great the obstacles? Can one ever relax and simply enjoy good fortune or be justifiably pessimistic about one’s prospects while in straitened circumstances? As one might expect, some of the answers embodied in these stories reflect values specific to their time. The Buddhist concept of karma is regularly invoked, and marriage is accepted as the normal state after one reaches the proper age. The civil service examinations were considered the only reliable ladder to success and security—except when the candidate failed, as happened in reality for most aspiring bureaucrats. Yet despite their clearly fanciful plot lines and characters, other stories speak to issues common enough in our own day: How can a woman assert herself among males without being misunderstood? How can one tell a sham opportunity from the real thing? When is an offer too good to be true? And has common human kindness really become as rare as it seems?

Certain stories in Slapping the Table in Amazement are deeply satisfying: divine justice does prevail in several, with rewards eventually coming to the deserving and punishments visited abundantly on those who have earned them. Some characters are precisely as they seem: honesty and goodwill do exist in their fictional world. Other stories are more admonitory: as we have heard so many times, beware of keeping bad company. Likewise, sentiments such as “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall” (Proverbs 16:18) are as well illustrated here as in any other great literary tradition. It is the deep humanity of these tales, rather than grandiose themes or clever plots, that draws the reader now as it did four centuries ago. We readers can easily sympathize with situations in their world.1 When these characters hurt, they cry, profusely and openly. They weep at the deaths of loved ones and over separation from friends; they wail loudly in outrage over being abused; tears of relief flow when fears turn out to be groundless. The appeal of these stories, compared to other Chinese stories from the same period, stems from their strong emotions, both those expressed in the fiction and those that they elicit from their readers.

This collection of stories appeared just as the genre of vernacular short stories known as huaben was coming of age. In the 1620s, Feng Menglong 馮夢龍 (1574–1646) published three collections of forty stories each, in order to revive and develop short fiction in the vernacular (in contrast to more formal writing in the “ancient” literary language) that had appeared sporadically since 1550 without becoming widely popular.2 Feng’s stories, handsomely printed with fine illustrations, circulated among the better educated in China’s cultural centers, where they garnered considerable approval.3 At first glance, Ling Mengchu’s stories might seem derivative. Like Feng, Ling selected earlier narratives in the classical language for expansion and adaptation into polished vernacular stories. Ling, too, seemingly took on the guise of the professional storyteller as narrator, which allowed him to intrude into his tales; through pretend dialogues with a skeptical audience, he drew attention to aspects of fiction and also took up issues of the day. But in contrast to Feng Menglong’s stories, Ling’s are more uniform in style and structure. Feng was an innovator; he utilized a number of editorial schemes in his expansion of earlier narratives and of the work of his several collaborators.4 Ling enjoyed the benefits of having models to follow—and to improve upon. But compared to Feng’s adaptations of older stories, Ling used such tales as sources of inspiration for his own highly creative stories. Seldom was he constrained by the details of earlier texts or even the limitations of historical events.5 Moreover, he amplified the moral messages of his sources and made them more clearly relevant to his readers. Ling’s method was imaginative satire, his active narrative voice keeping his readers at sufficient distance from his characters to allow reflection on their all-too-common foibles and flaws. Ling developed the specificity of his narrator’s perspective from the non-personalized storyteller model present in Feng Menglong’s stories; this new voice in turn developed into the very outspoken and individualistic narrators in later huaben stories of the early Qing period, the 1650s and 1660s.6

Ling Mengchu was from Wuxing (Huzhou) in Zhejiang, a city known for its publishing houses and sophisticated literary culture. His father, Ling Dizhi 凌迪知 (d. 1600), earned the highest civil service degree, that of jinshi (presented [to the emperor] scholar), and served in both central government and local posts. After he retired, the elder Ling joined his brother in working with the family printing business, perhaps in collaboration with the Min family to whom the Lings were related by marriage. Careful editing, strong critical commentaries, and fine-quality printing were hallmarks of their publications. Both Ling and Min editions frequently were printed in two or more colors, which made them noteworthy for their clarity in distinguishing commentaries by different authors and for their attractive appearance. These multicolor editions, most of which were produced by Ling Mengchu and Min Qiji 閔齊伋, were also quite expensive. Their generation of Lings and the Mins published collections of poetry, histories, and outstanding plays including The Western Wing (Xixiang ji 西厢記), a sequence of five zaju plays, and The Story of the Lute (Pipa ji 琵琶記), a lengthy chuanqi play.7

Although a highly learned and skilled writer, Ling Mengchu failed to earn more than the initial xiucai (also known as the shengyuan) degree. Consequently, his official career was limited to small posts in Shanghai and Xuzhou as a tribute student; he received his first position only in 1634 at the age of fifty-four. Like Feng Menglong, he was fiercely loyal to the Ming dynasty and died fighting the rebel forces led by Li Zicheng (ca. 1605–1645).8 Before taking office, Ling had been known as a compiler, a dramatist, and a drama critic. His plays in both short and long forms were playful rewritings of classical-language tales; three were based on the Tang chuanqi story “The Curly-Bearded Knight” (Qiuranke zhuan 虬髯客傳), and others were unmistakably comical. He also published collections of his verse and essays in addition to his vernacular fiction.

Ling Mengchu was well placed in cultural circles. His friends included a number of well-known and influential scholars of the older generation, among them Feng Mengzhen 馮夢禎 (1546–1605), Wang Zhideng 王穉登(1535–1613), Yuan Zhongdao 袁中道 (1570–1624), the great playwright Tang Xianzu 湯顯祖 (1550–1617), and the editor and man-about-town Chen Jiru 陳繼儒 (1558–1639).9 Undoubtedly he was fully conversant with the trends and tastes of his day, which became fodder for his fiction.

Ling wrote a total of seventy-eight vernacular-language stories. In 1628, the forty collected here appeared in Suzhou under the title Slapping the Table in Amazement, and thirty-eight more were published four years later in Slapping the Table in Amazement, Second Collection.10 As he later admitted, Ling Mengchu began writing his vernacular stories in frustration in Nanjing after failing the provincial-level civil service examinations. Before long, his fellow examinees got word of them and asked him for more, which he supplied. Small wonder, given his circumstances and the immediate concerns of his original reading audience, that so many of his tales concern scholars and the examinations. Indeed, the collection concludes with a number of anecdotes and a story about how fate, not ability, dictates who passes and who is doomed to failure in their attempts to qualify for office and recognition.

But this account might suggest a lesser degree of serious intent in writing than seems to have been the case. In the preface to the first collection (translated in this volume), Ling comments disparagingly on most contemporary editors of popular fiction, saving praise for Feng Menglong alone. This may well be a response to the sixteenth-century fashion for erotic fiction in the classical language that, perhaps coincidentally, had fallen out of popularity by the time Feng’s vernacular stories came to be widely read.11 This preface also reveals that he, like Feng, rewrote earlier tales rather than originating new material. But Feng had used up the best of the older fiction, Ling declares, leaving him to adapt the remaining narratives from the past, a broader range of fictional, historical, and theatrical materials than Feng had used.12 In so doing, Ling created a narrator who clarifies the moral messages to be drawn from each tale. In tone, this voice shows varying levels of seriousness but inevitably castigates the moral lapses of his day. In many stories, the narrator takes aim at senseless greed and cupidity. His messages are expressed with some urgency because many of Ling’s main tales are set in his own time, the Ming, in situations that may well have seemed familiar to his readers.

Perhaps even more than Feng Menglong, Ling Mengchu was highly self-conscious as a writer. This tendency seemingly developed from his refined dramatic theories and aesthetic tastes. He criticized plays written by his contemporaries and predecessors for their lack of authenticity in responding to the needs of dramatic style and for excessive lyricism that could obscure the truthfulness of character and action. Ling’s own fiction is frequently humorous, but one cannot escape its relevance to understanding human shortcomings.

Some of the special characteristics of Ling Mengchu’s stories, including their differences from those written by Feng Menglong, can be seen in story 17, “Prayer Services Are Held at West Hill Temple for a Departed Soul; A Coffin Is Prepared in the Kaifeng Yamen for a Living Criminal.” Unlike the stories in Feng’s Sanyan set (Stories Old and New, Stories to Caution the World, and Stories to Awaken the World), each entry here has a title in couplet form. Its first line identifies the catalyst for the action to be narrated, the beginning of the story, and the second line predicts the outcome of those events, the conclusion of the tale. Scholars have identified earlier versions of parts of the story in classical-language collections, as they have for Feng’s Sanyan stories. But unlike the best of the Sanyan tales, Ling’s central characters here are nearly caricatures, making it hard to sympathize with them regardless of how easy it may be to understand their motivations.

After a lengthy prologue that includes short anecdotes and a moralistic warning from the narrator to set the stage, the main story begins with a young woman who has just been widowed, leaving her with a young son. She is beautiful, but because she has no older relatives to help her, she must make all the funeral arrangements herself. When she visits the local Daoist temple to arrange for a prayer service, the temple’s young master espies her and is at once deeply infatuated. For her part, it is only when the Daoist priest draws attention to himself that the young widow notices him and begins to reciprocate his feelings. Thereafter, throughout the weeks of funeral services, they meet each night for passionate lovemaking facilitated by the master’s pubescent acolytes. After formal mourning is complete, the priest continues to visit the widow’s house, where they regularly satisfy their passions. The situation continues as her son grows into a teenager, and the acolytes become as interested in sex as their master. When the son realizes what his mother is up to, he tries to thwart the relationship by various schemes in order to protect her reputation. His successes cause the lovers such frustration that his mother decides to kill him so that she might continue her sexual relationship with the Daoist master—and now with one of his mature acolytes as well. Failing in that (and because the priest continuously argues against murder), she charges her son with unfilial behavior, a crime punishable by execution according to Ming law. The perspicacious local official sees through the half-truths of the testimony given by the two and discerns an illicit relationship, even though the son refuses to accuse his mother of any wrongdoing. The magistrate has the priest arrested and beaten to death. The sinful acolyte dies of longing, and after the filial son cares for his repentant mother for the rest of her short life, he matures and becomes a successful husband and official.

The characters in this story all seem wooden compared with, for example, the vividly portrayed protagonists of story 9 (the remorseful mother) and story 27 (the faithful young wife). The lovers in story 17 are too single-mindedly obsessed with sexual gratification. The mother hesitates at nothing to satisfy her desire—although she was a sincerely grieving widow before she met the priest—and the son is nearly prescient in finding ways of preventing the priest from seeing his mother. The characters seem to be simply going through the motions needed to justify an extended narrative about an illicit relationship and to comment on the emotional satisfaction of stolen sex—and rationalize its tragic outcome.

The primary prologue tale in story 17 is a lightly rewritten version of an entry in the encyclopedic twelfth-century, classical-language story collection Records of the Listener (Yijian zhi 夷堅志). The entry tells of a Daoist priest who makes suggestive comments to a pair of young women only to suffer fatal punishment from the gods for profaning his ritual duties.13 The portion of the main tale devoted to the courtroom scenes was presumably adapted from a late Tang period collection, Anecdotes from Court and Provinces (Chao ye qianzai 朝野僉載), although nearly identical versions of Prefect Li’s investigation appear in other collections of historical and legal narratives from the Tang through the Ming, including in one of Feng Menglong’s classical tale collections.14 The court case was in turn adapted into another classical tale that refers in slightly greater detail to Ms. Wu’s amorous adventures as the reason for her indictment of her son; in both anecdotes, the priest readily admits to the adulterous affair, and the fornicators are executed as a result.15

The brief classical version (approximately 250 characters long) appears in New Tales from the Green Window (Lüchuang xinhua 綠窗新話), from which Ling Mengchu regularly drew inspiration for his stories. But at around 17,000 characters for his main tale, this is one of the longest in Ling’s vernacular story collection. A master storyteller, he elaborated on every element in the earlier tale in order to draw out the affair to its inevitable conclusion. But along the way, he constantly piques his reader’s curiosity about just how much detail the author will provide and what outrageous acts the lovers will commit when consumed by lust. The magnitude of the lovers’ passion is similarly hard to ignore: here, as in other stories, emotional outbursts are narrated and described in considerable detail, some redundantly in both prose and verse. In their intensity, Ling’s stories surpass many of Feng’s, and despite the simple characterizations in story 17, readers must confront their own prurient excitement while reading; given its devotion to descriptions of sex, there would be scant other reason for continuing to read through to the predictable conclusion. In this story, as in so many others in the collection, the prologue seems to have taken place in the undefined but distant past. The main tale of story 17 is unusual for not being set in the Ming. Ling thus means to bring his stories home, to the time—and the circumstances—that his readers might most easily identify as their own. This makes his stories, with their messages and satiric barbs, even more effective than those of Feng Menglong, which might be set at any time in the past. Raw desire might function similarly in challenging the reader to apply their message to his own day.

Story 17 has been discussed in some detail here because it is unusual for this collection. Although illicit behavior is regularly condemned, sex is generally treated somewhat unconventionally. Ling’s standards are “reasonable” rather than absolute,16 that is, lovers’ fidelity to each other is represented as far more important than chastity, and it is accepted that sex with one’s husband is not necessarily satisfying for a woman.

Homosexual activity is considered a matter of course for many men, although the perspective of both narrator and characters is clearly one-sided, concentrating on the desiring older male rather than the desired boy or young man. Even so, story 26 explores the multifaceted nature of uncontrolled sexual desire—and does not avoid comment on the pain involved in anal intercourse. The disastrous consequences for the obsessed in story 17 and other stories in the collection are clear—but they are punished for their extreme selfishness and its outcomes, not for merely having desires. In story 2, for example, a young man has only momentary qualms about having sex with a prostitute who looks so much like his sister that he initially mistakes her for his sister, a situation that might well have made incest-averse Chinese readers uncomfortable. But the two are devoted to each other and end up living happily ever after.

Through this magnificent translation project, Shuhui Yang and Yunqin Yang have succeeded in bringing these centuries-old tales back to life for modern readers. Their chosen style of English is easy to read; one can only marvel at their ability to find just the right aphorism for rendering the witty phrasing in Ling’s original language. Their notes, too, fill in just what we need to know to appreciate his innumerable references to popular historical and literary lore. Here, as with their previous story collections, the Yangs’ translations are unsurpassed in their vitality. Once again they have done a remarkable service for world literature and comparative studies of the arts of narration. Earlier translators selected individual stories on the basis of theme or content, and none has attempted anything like translating the complete collection.17 Unquestionably, no other version can surpass what the Yangs offer us here, their truly amazing tales from the Ming dynasty.