The original text of “The Tale of the Tiger Grandmother” (“虎媪传”) is a short narrative piece written in classical literary Chinese (as opposed to modern vernacular Chinese) by the early Qing dynasty writer, scholar, and official Huang Zhijuan (黄之隽，1668-1748), a relatively unknown and more or less minor author from late imperial China who was unfortunately not canonized within the classical Chinese literary tradition (a tradition which itself came to an end shortly after Huang’s death, roughly 171 years later, when a couple of Chinese writers in 1919 decided to break off with it). The story itself is unclear in its origins, since it seems to have first appeared in written form in Huang’s version of it, though it is highly possible that it might have been a popular folktale circulating within an oral storytelling space before being taken up, edited, refined by Huang into the current version, but we do not know for sure, given the dearth of information concerning Huang’s process of composition for this particular story (which is little to none). However, we do know that this story has been in wide circulation in certain oral forms since Huang’s times, as evident from the existence of stories about “Tiger Grandmothers” in both the Mainland China and Taiwan (there is the “虎姑婆” story in Taiwan) to this day. The current text, the one on which I have based my translation, can be found in both Huang Zhijuan’s personal collection of works (𢈪堂集五十卷补遗二卷续八卷附冬录一卷)and in an early 19th century anthology of stories called Yuchu Xinzhi (广虞初心志 by 黄承增), the latter of which is mentioned more at length in the preface.
In translating the text, I have taken a rather radical decision to preserve as far as possible its original style of diction and syntax at the expense of English linguistic and stylistic conventions. This is difficult, and can and does often result in sentences that do not seem to fully make sense in English. However, I believe doing so is important in preserving a sense of distance and strangeness within the text to better highlight the non-European culture from which it emerged and also prevent it from being read by an English-speaking reader in a way that, whether consciously or unconsciously, might assume a Western if not European cultural logic to it. As mentioned, the original text, in linguistic and stylistic terms, is written in classical Chinese, which itself is a highly complicated form of expression observing extremely vague linguistic rules and is very different from contemporary vernacular Chinese, which has a relatively more standard and somewhat westernized grammar. The sentences of the original text, in accordance with the usual style of classical Chinese, are frequently neat four-character phrases (“双双而往，日暮迷道”), or certain variations of the four-character form (“而公方鸠工择木，别构为堂”). In translating these sentence structures, I have tried my best to preserve the parallelism (such as trying to convey the repetition in “双双而往” by translating it as “and the two together went”) and the position and layered meaning of words (thus “日暮迷道” is “At sunset [they] confused the way” instead of “At sunset [they] lost the way”), though I have more often in other cases altered the position of words to reconcile certain un-reconcilable differences between Chinese and English grammar (thus, while “鸠工择木” is almost parallelly translated as “gathering workmen and handpicking timber”, “别构为堂” is slightly altered as “construct a house elsewhere” instead of “elsewhere construct a house” which does not make sense in English). On the level of the paragraph, I have decided to keep to convention of presenting the entire text within one paragraph, which seems to be the contemporary Chinese publishing convention in presenting classical texts that, originally, were written and printed from right to left, from top downwards, and lacked punctuation in the modern sense.
In terms of genre, Huang’s tale clearly belongs to a long tradition of “zhiguai xiaoshuo” (“志怪小说”, literally “recording strangeness stories”) or “strangeness-recording stories”. Stories of this genre were usually written in literary rather than vernacular Chinese (which is an anomaly, given that most sorts of narrative fiction from the late imperial age, whether long or short, were usually written in the vernacular, which was more accessible to the emerging urban mercantile and artisan class at the time, who were the primary consumers of narrative fiction in late imperial China), the primary and most artistically excellent example of which is the early Qing dynasty writer Pu Songling (蒲松龄，1640-1715)’s much-canonized Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio (聊斋志异，literally Records of Strangeness from the Liao Studio), a collection of stories, sketches, and other texts concerning foxes, fairies, ghosts, and foxes that are actually fairies/ghosts (“fairy” here should be understood in a loose sense of the word), that together had a huge impact on the popular imagination of China at the time and up until now. As mentioned, Huang Zhijuan’s short piece accorded with the general stylistic features of the “strangeness” genre, such as predatory animals with sinister intentions magically disguised as humans to prey upon humans, or a general horror-story-like atmosphere conveyed via deceptively simple and concise sentences (“The woman gave the girl a date, and it turned out to be an icy human finger” or “Beneath the moon, the girl beheld the rope, and saw entrails”). Huang Zhijuan, a minor writer, and certainly no Pu Songling, nevertheless succeeded in composing (or editing, since we do not know for sure) a story that smoothly fits within Pu’s genre and, stylistically, can be said to be delicately written.
The original text also has what could be called an epimythium to it. In parody of Confucius, and in imitation of Pu (who himself in his Strange Tales imitated the great historian Sima Qian (司马迁，145-86BC) in adding a personal commentary to each and every one of his recorded tales), Huang Zhijuan added a short commentary to the end of his story that purports to expound its message. He parodies Confucius by starting his epimythium with “I master Huang say” (“黄子曰”), echoing the famous phrase “the master says” (“子曰”) that could be found all over Confucius’ Analects (论语). However, whether he intentionally meant this as a parody or not is not absolutely known, since it is common, especially in the late imperial age, for intellectuals and literati to refer to each other and more rarely to oneself in compliment by adding “master” (“子”) to one’s surname. Whether Huang meant this as a creative move of parody or simply an act in accordance with the conventions of the “strange-story” genre which Pu established, we cannot know for sure, though we could reason that a not-so-creative writer might not have embarked upon the composition of such a strange tale in the first place.
Citations:
Source of the original text of the story:
四库全书存目丛书.集部.第二七一册.别集类.𢈪堂集五十卷补遗二卷续八卷附冬录一卷.陕西省图书馆藏清乾隆刻本
Source of information regarding the author:
晚晴簃诗汇.卷六十一.黄之隽.中国哲学书电子化计划
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