Legends and Politics of China

What the Rams Brought

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Oh, of course, I had to realize; how true and universal. The story of the Five Rams was explaining, in its own way, what the Book of Genesis did for the West. In the Chinese story, lack of faith condemns mankind to suffer in the fields. In the Bible, because Adam eats the forbidden apple, he is expelled from the land of plenty and told that that he will have to water the crop 'with the sweat of his brow.' Before the Industrial Revolution most of mankind lived within six weeks of starvation, and this was the central fact of all human life. Unfortunately, the benefits of technology have yet to reach a large part of mankind. In the north I had traveled through villages where people lived in raw earth holes and dreamed of eating meat every day. They were still living in the world from which the rice had escaped.

Scott had transformed "The Five Rams" for me. Originally I was puzzled by the contradictory details; now I was astonished by the way the story had been cut, removing the original moral, as if Adam and Eve had eaten the apple and then went on living in the Garden of Eden anyway. How did this happen? On the one hand, I knew that many Chinese are afraid of having foreigners judge their culture. Out of national pride, many Chinese will hide the most basic facts about their world from any outsider who cannot prove that he alreadly knows them. In other words, my students might have been whitewashing the story for me.

On the other hand, the Chinese Communist Party has always had a very dim view of traditional culture. During the sixties millions of teenage 'Red Guards' had poured through China. In a fever to erase the 'currupt and fuedal' past, they had torn down temples, burned books, and beaten scholars to death in the largest plazas they could find; and what literature they had left emphasized 'class struggle', with heroic rebels and brutal aristocrats. Since then the regime had mellowed, but hardly become sentimental; instead, the present government emphasizes practical matters, as well as the ideal future which science should bring. Therefore, it was possible that the story had been edited, and that my students had actually never heard the older, complete version. China is a poor place to begin the study of China.

It is, however, the best place to conclude it; and over the next few months I talked to many Chinese about this. Most were surprised to learn that the story of The Five Rams had many versions, let alone that the moral had been forgotten. Upon discovery, a few claimed that all myths should change as society changes, and the point seemed hard to argue; after all, the American media has long done the same thing.

Any person who opens the Brothers Grimm will read about 'thieving' Jews, and Gypsies who 'steal babies', as well as the horrible executions which are meted out to 'witches'. Now you can see these same stories adapted to the screen, where the villains are helpfully deracine and merely skedaddle at the end. Cultures do change, and sometimes the changes are positive.

Perhaps this point should give us a necessary humility; however, I think we can easily exaggerate the similarities. The remaking of Chinese culture was not achieved by celluloid, but by fire and knives, when the Red Guards threw 'reactionary' scholars into heaps of burning books. Does anyone have the right to alter a culture by force? If so, what truth does the new version represent? Perhaps the upbeat edition of the Five Rams represents the same ideal future of which nineteenth century reformers dreamed; but it also obscures the present regime's failure to achieve this future.

At the same time, it might be honest to say the 'Disney Versions' have not simply overwhelmed our culture, popular as they are, but also diversified it. After all, the older views are still in print, and sometimes published; so I can go to the library and find each Western myth interpreted a hundred different ways, from Fundamentalist to 'Marxist Feminist Deconstructionist'. This permits me to make my own choices, while Chinese have their choices made for them.

Indeed, images of the Five Rams stand above a dozen intersections, and at the center of Canton's biggest park; but I could have stayed in the Middle Kingdom for ten years before I learned why the myth had been created, and what it was meant to explain.

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