Feature Articles
Author: Howard Giskin
Keywords: China, China and Inner Asia, Literature, World History
How to Cite: Giskin, H. (2002) “Using Chinese Folktales in the Classroom”, Education About Asia. 7(2). doi: https://doi.org/10.65959/eaa.486
Teaching Chinese folktales is a challenging but ultimately rewarding activity that can be a way to teach students core cultural beliefs and practices of the Chinese people. Teaching folk literature, however, presents some special challenges to the instructor, since folk literature differs in some crucial ways from more familiar forms of literature such as poetry, fiction and non-fiction narrative, novels and drama. Perhaps one of the key areas of difficulty when using folktales is that they are sometimes constructed in a way that makes them seem transparent. Often students will say that they enjoy a story, but just can’t seem to find much to say about it, and on other occasions students have been less generous upon their initial contact with Chinese folk-tales. My evolving response is one of patience in the knowledge that if given the opportunity students will warm up to Chinese folk literature, and not merely enjoy it but have something to say about it as well. The following, then, is a brief attempt to retrace some of my steps in learning how to better meet students’ needs when discussing Chinese folktales, followed by a folktale I have used in several classes, along with the type of analysis that might be used to shed light on the tale. An experience all teachers have had is introducing literature one loves only to have students greet it with dampened enthusiasm. In my case, since I had collected, edited, and adapted the folktales I wanted to teach (stories I collected when I was in the People’s Republic on an academic exchange in 1993–4 at Northeast University in Shenyang), I felt the temptation to be annoyed at students’ apparent lack of appreciation. Instead, however, I took the most obvious next step: I asked my students to comment, in an open-ended way, about the folktales they had read. The responses surprised me somewhat, though perhaps shouldn’t have. Among students’ reactions/complaints were (1) the stories all seemed simple, almost as if they were for children; (2) there were too many stock characters, such as cruel mothers-in-law, poor, kind orphans, and evil landlords; (3) the stories were hard to relate to, since they didn’t know enough about Chinese culture and history; (4) the stories were nearly all very brief, some only a page long; (5) some of the stories didn’t seem to pull together at the end, leaving the reader with an “unsatisfied” feeling after finishing the tale; (6) the stories seemed to be patterned, and somewhat predictable; (7) the stories were moralistic; and finally (8) some of them were just plain hard to make sense of. The students’ accounts of the stories we had read reflected their genuine frustration with an unfamiliar genre; the students’ reactions were, however, a valuable point of departure for an in-depth discussion of folk literature, and furthermore, a key to presenting Chinese folktales in a way that led to an enjoyable and profitable learning experience. A natural starting point is that folktales are very different from other forms of literature. An ancient genre dating from before the dawn of recorded history and the written word, folktales do nearly everything modern short stories are not supposed to do; so while it is tempting to read folk literature as simply communally created stories, this won’t work if we continue to use the written short story as a model. Most short stories, good ones at least, do not pretend to put forward anything resembling a moral—their purpose is not to inculcate a particular belief or encourage a particular kind of behavior, but rather to raise complex issues in an aesthetically pleasing way. Folktales, on the other hand, are meant to teach us something, and to encourage particular kinds of behavior, though this in no way makes them simple. So folktales are doing something very different from short stories. They are not short stories, though they are short and are stories; and I would argue that most (perhaps all) of the aspects of folktales that trouble students can be explained by the tales’ radically different function than short stories. The stories appear simple, though they are in fact not simple, since much social, psychological, ethical, mythical, religious, and historical information is encoded into the text in the form of symbols and other literary and structural devices. There are many stock characters in folk literature, but these are meant to be there, and function as cultural templates in which readers/listeners may see repeated in tale after tale the central character motifs of a society. The stories are indeed sometimes difficult to relate to, since, by their very nature they are tales or stories created by, and most often about, the common folk and incorporate a large amount of culturally specific information. The stories are frequently brief, though length varies considerably, and seems as much to be a function of the particular version of the story one happens to hear or record, and the personal style of the storyteller. Some folktales don’t end in ways one would expect a story, at least a traditional story, to end—and here I would suggest that in folktales aesthetic concerns are generally subordinated to the didactic. Since the primary aim of a folktale is to teach a lesson (often admittedly a rather complex and sometimes ambiguous one), aesthetically pleasing endings, while not specifically excluded, do not form part of a story unless the didactic aspect of the tale can remain intact; the stories are predictable, in some sense, because they are meant to be, because lessons, especially important ones, bear repeating often; and finally, folktales are sometimes difficult to make sense of (but not inherently more so than other forms of literature), since we must move beyond a literal level of interpretation in order to appreciate the deeper levels of meaning embedded in the text, seeing such tales as complex repositories of symbolic, metaphoric, allusive, imagistic, mythic, archetypal, cultural, moral, and humanistic material.1 The following story is one I have taught a number of times in various undergraduate literature classes, and takes place in a remote part of China. It seems to stress the idea that no matter where you are, or who you are, when good fortune comes, it is our responsibility to share our luck with others. While most find this story entertaining, there is, as I will later argue, much in the way of concealed meaning in the text.