I have made it through this book and it killed me

[flemmings]

Well, not quite. Several Badnasties bit the dust (or rather, expired in bloody vomit) in the last few chapters, and I thought I could say Oh good that's it for Yuan Shao *and* his unlikable family let's rest here and read something else before Cao Cao (being his generous Dr Jekyll self at the taking of Jizhou) and Sun Quan and Liu Biao and Liu Bei go at it again. But no.

Last page of vol 1 has impetuous Cow Pee bursting armed into Yuan Shao's house (in defiance of his father's orders) and finding two women weeping together. He decides to kill them, because that's what one does with unarmed women your father has given securities of safety to. So I had to start vol 2 to see what happens. Yes, and it all ends well, but Cow Pee does not impress. I wish him a short unhappy life.

The worst part of 3K is how it makes reading most kinds of fantasy novel impossible. I'd thought of getting The Fall of the Kings, since I can't read it fast in enough in library copy, or The Years of Rice and Salt because it sounds marvellous. But imagined worlds pale beside the doings of these dismissable confusable unlikable and real-life 3rd century thugs and ruffians. Which is so not fair. Were they Roman thugs and ruffians I wouldn't look at them twice. Why must they inhabit a work that's central to Chinese culture?

I'm increasingly struck by something I first noticed in Woxin, and thereafter in just about any Chinese work I come across. It's the way people naturally turn to historical parallels whenever debating a course of action. Yes, the present viewed in light of the past, makes perfect sense, nado nado. But I'm trying to think if we ever do it here and I can't think of any parallel examples. Never mind now-- did we ever say 'Henry II thought Thomas a Beckett was his right hand, but that hand turned on him and betrayed hm to Rome. Your Majesty should not trust Thomas Wolseley so far'? 'Edward II's favouring of Piers Gaveston caused his death. Elizabeth's love for Essex nearly ended the same way. Your Majesty should beware of showing favour to the Duke of Buckingham'? Not that I recall.

But any Chinese courtier has history, ancient and modern, at his fingertips (or hers, if you're Ya Yu.) And I wonder how come? Quotations from the Confucian classics one expects, and doesn't find nearly as often as you'd think. Were all the complicated doings of the end of Zhou and the start of Qin and (in 3K) the early Han commonplace knowledge, passed on in stories or something? Where did people learn all this?

Equally, as the Gou Jian book demonstrated, the cultural use of historical personages to, umm, point the moral and adorn the tale. That I can recall, just, from earlier days when American schoolchildren were told to emulate the infant George Washington's truthfulness and British ones to emulate Robert the Bruce's patient spider. But movies and TV have replaced what few popular-cultural historical figures we may have had, and we never had that many to start with. Are we a culture that refuses to remember the past? (Pace Santayana, the Chinese remembrance of the past doesn't seem to have deterred anyone in 3K from repeating it in bloody and horrific detail.)

The only other time I've some across such an automatic referencing of the past is in Yoshitoshi's 100 Aspects of the Moon (a useful site that annoyingly requires something above 1028 x 764 to navigate comfortably.) And there half the prints can be traced to either Heike or Chuushingura. Though the common Edokko for whom the prints were designed seem unlikely to have read Heike or to know about Nara period Japanese envoys to China...

Comments

full of spoils

[mauvecloud.livejournal.com]

Pee was only a hot-blooded 18-year old at the time. He had no idea of the headache taking to wife an older woman whose husband was clearly alive at the time - e.g., paternity and successiissues on which would haunt and caused him to discard her 16 years later.

Re: full of spoils

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Being a woman is tough in ancient China. This may be why the women one reads about are frequently such cows. But then it would seem that being anybody in ancient China is no picnic, and Confucius stressed benevolence in rulers so strongly precisely because benevolent rulers didn't exist (except Cao Cao in his Dr. Jekyll moments. Mr Hyde C-C strangles pregnant women.)

Re: full of spoils

[mauvecloud.livejournal.com]

meh, either they were cows, or real slick manipulators (er manipulatresses?), so slick that no historians who ever found out survived to record this.

or, it's that brainwasher Confucius again.

the only Real Woman (TM) in 3K is fictional (http://dynastywarriors.wikia.com/wiki/Zhu_Rong), and a barbarian at that.

Oh, there's another Real Auntie, who ranted and cursed at her son, before hanging herself, Xu Shu's Mom. Wait, she's fictional too :P

Re: full of spoils

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Dunno what 3K you're reading but vol 1 of Robert's translation has a lot to say about someone called Diaochan who strikes me as Real Woman enough. The commentator Mao keeps asking after her in his footnotes.

I've met the Real Auntie; I rather like her.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

One's taught it at school, and through the longwinded lectures of older relatives. XD You're right - that's just how Chinese people talk and think, so the stories get passed down like George Washington and the cherry tree. Probably disappearing to some degree, too (I barely know any of this stuff).

[mvrdrk.livejournal.com]

I believe in my parents generation, the historical stuff is all covered in common conversation and schools. I don't think that's true anymore, but it still forms a kind of common literature in the culture. Probably by way of movies these days ...

[paleaswater.livejournal.com]

There was a star trek new generation episode where Picard was stranded on a strange planet with an alien, and the universal translator just could not make any sense of what the alien was saying. As it turns out all the words the alien used were actually allusions to historical events, and the universal translator just had no context. I thought it was an amazingly clever idea for a few days, until it dawned on me that they probably modeled it on China. >_<

While it true that people had a common literature and the scholars in particular would have a sound grasp of history from which they could draw their references, the reason that people keeps on referring to historical parallels is because they're built into the language. These historical examples appear in form of pith four or five character words known as 成语， of which you know one of the most famous -- 卧薪尝胆. And 成语 constitutes a large portion of the vocabulary of any educated person, even today.