BETWEEN STORIES AND THEIR TELLINGS: THE LEGEND OF WENJI'S CAPTIVITY AND THEIR HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE

IRENE S. LEUNG

"Wenji's Return to China" (Wenji gui Han) is a legend that has been celebrated in ancient classical poetry, paintings, drama, in a Beijing opera by Guo Moruo in 1959 China, and in Maxine Hong Kingston's novel The Woman Warrior. The legend's popularity is a testimony to the ability of the tale to evoke powerful emotions that resonate with universal human feelings-love, sense of belonging, self-identity, and family.

The story's main protagonist is Cai Yan (c.178-?), courtesy name Wenji. She was the daughter of a prominent statesman from the Eastern Han dynasty (25 CE-220 CE). Around 194 CE, a civil rebellion brought Xiongnu (a nomadic tribe which lived north of China) mercenaries into the Chinese capital and Wenji was taken, along with other hostages, into the frontier. During her captivity, as the story goes, she became the wife of the heir apparent, the zuoxianwang (Wise King of the Left), and bore him two children. It was not until twelve years later that Cao Cao (155 CE-220 CE), a powerful minister, ransomed her in the name of her father, who had already died before her capture. When Wenji returned to China, she left her children behind in the frontier.

Despite the lack of concrete details surrounding Lady Wenji's captivity and even her captors, her twelve-year ordeal became a legend. What also made Wenji's story remarkable is the survival of two powerful and heartbreaking poems that were attributed to her. These poems were written in the first-person narrative. In them, the protagonist voiced her grievance against fate as she endured captivity on the frontier and separation from her own flesh and blood. She returned to China only to discover that her entire family had already passed away and her home was abandoned and left in ruins. One of these poems goes on to say that she kept on living only for the sake of the people around her. According to historical records, Cao Cao arranged to have her marry a new husband, Dong Si-her third, as she had already been married and widowed before her capture. Other than a few other biographical anecdotes, historical records do not tell us much more about the rest of her days. Nonetheless, the lack of records has not lessened the fascination of Wenji's legend throughout the centuries. In fact, the story has been infused with life and dramatizations through different re-telling of her journeys.

About six centuries after the death of Cai Wenji, during the end of the Tang dynasty in the 780s, a scholar and poet named Liu Shang transformed the story of her captivity and return into an eighteen-stanza narrative poem. This poem, entitled "Eighteen Songs of a Nomad Flute," was said to be so popular that women and children memorized it and sang it. Liu Shang created a much more elaborate backdrop for the narrative by enriching it with popular frontier poetic motifs. The nomad prince, the zuoxianwang, appears for the first time as a character in the legend. It was also during this time in the 8th century that we find anecdotes of his attentive adoration and affection for Wenji. These characteristics humanize him as Wenji's husband rather than a ruthless captor. While the earlier poems from the 3rd century were written in the genre of protest poetry, wailing against war and destruction and the injustice of Heaven, Liu Shang's poem depicted Wenji for the first time as a passive helpless pining beauty, often gazing upward toward the sky in symbolic hope and expectation. Even more remarkable is that it is in this 8th century poem that the sad ending was changed into a happy and inspirational one. Images of renewal and regeneration accompany Wenji's homecoming; her relatives gave her a warm welcome. Once again, Wenji puts on her Chinese dress and plays her qin (a string-instrument associated with scholars). In Liu Shang's conclusion, she overcame the ties of maternal love and successfully reintegrated into Chinese society despite her twelve-year ordeal.

The historical moment of this transformation of Wenji's legend underscores the cultural and ethnic identities Wenji came to symbolize. At the height of the Tang dynasty in the 7th and 8th centuries, it was an empire that had expanded its territory westward and northward into Central Asia. The capital Chang'an was a cosmopolitan city where Central Asian merchants and foreign monks lived. It was a place where foreign fashion, foreign food, foreign music and dance were in vogue. By the late 8th century, a major internal rebellion has weakened empire and its territories and influence curtailed. In light of this historical context, Liu Shang's poetic imagery of a cohesive Chinese state unmarred by destruction and rebellions and a Chinese culture that has the power to restore the anguish soul therefore seem ironic if not utopian.

Later imaginings of Wenji's legend continue to explore themes that have been set forth in the Tang dynasty. The legend was transformed into a moral tale of Chinese civilization's triumph over "barbarism." The pain of separation from her children was regarded as the greatest sacrifice a mother could make for the sake of her paternal family and her country. Despite these general trends, individual interpretations and domestic politics continue to play important parts in the artistic rendering of the story.

In the long history of the development of the Wenji legend, one of the most significant re-interpretations took place in the 1100s during the Northern Song dynasty (960-1127) when Liu Shang's eighteen-stanza poem was depicted as eighteen scenes on a long handscroll painting. Not content with passively "illustrating" the 8th century poem, the Northern Song painter created a new story in which the nomads appear not as Xiongnu of the Han times, but as the contemporary foe in the north-the Qidan people from the Liao dynasty (916-1125). This way, the painter has in fact created a direct comparison with current events and politics of the Northern Song. For over a century, the Song dynasty saw its territorial ambitions impeded by the existence of powerful empires and kingdoms in East Asia. Treaties and regular diplomatic and tribute missions to the Liao dynasty in the north have kept the peace in the region. In the 1100s, however, the Song court was seeking new military and diplomatic alliances in order to tip the balance of power in the region. Debates amongst the emperor's advisors and scholar-officials were heated. Some saw new opportunities for the empire to expand its territories and sphere of influence while others urged peace, stating that that "barbarians" have been a part of China's history for centuries and proper governing of the Chinese people within the empire-rather than increasing the size of the military-would ensure peaceful relations with the foreign neighbors.

It is within this dynamic that the handscroll painting, now known as Eighteen Songs of a Nomad Flute, was created. Through dramatizing the legend in pictures, the painter persuades his audience against ethnic chauvinism by portraying Wenji's captors as part her family rather than primitive and uncouth barbarians. In scene after scene, the nomads are shown living in sophistication and refinement appropriate for Liao royalty. The emotions and attachments the nomads felt about Wenji are also prominently featured in the painting. In the scene of the final farewell, Wenji, her husband, children, and other attendants are shown openly weeping. Relegated to the far corner and obscured by a hill, the presence of the Chinese envoys is kept to a minimum. The painting appears to be a remarkably bold statement that advocated peace with the Liao empire. Unfortunately, the message of the painting was obscured and forgotten after the advocates of war prevailed in the 1120s. By 1127, the capital was invaded and sacked by a new enemy, the Nüzhen of the Jin dynasty, and the Northern Song dynasty finally fell.

It is precisely because Wenji's story brings together themes that resonate with the human experience-themes about war and destruction, home and displacement, encounter with the foreign, sense of belonging, and the meaning of family-that the legend is layered with meanings that are at once personal, and at the same time communal, cultural, ethnic, and nationalistic. In 1959, the scholar and writer Guo Moruo (1892-1978) wrote the opera Cai Wenji. An avowed Marxist, and Vice Premier of the State Council and Chairman of the Cultural and Educational Commission, Guo's operas celebrate the strength of womanhood in all its revolutionary romanticism. In this work, Wenji's personal choices are intimately bound with the fate of Chinese culture and the nation. The opera begins at the moment when Wenji was torn between the obligation to return home to assemble her father's writings and staying in the frontier to care for her children. Written in the spirit of national ethnic unity, the opera portrays Han envoys and the Xiongnu conversing in friendship and harmony. In Guo's opera, after zuoxianwang died, Cao Cao arranged to have Wenji's children brought to China. Wenji's conflicted role as a preserver of Chinese culture and as a loving mother is therefore resolved in a happy ending.

The major historical revivals of the Wenji story in the Tang and Song dynasties, and in the 20th century occurred during times when the cohesion of the Chinese state, and by extension, Chinese cultural and ethnic identities, were in flux. Through the re-dramatization of Wenji's legendary encounter with "barbarians" and her painful separation from her "barbarian" children, the storytellers explored and pushed those blurry boundaries that have been otherwise taken for granted. While some prefer to see her representing the integrity of the Chinese state, culture, and ethnic loyalty, others choose to explore different dimensions of the story through personal feelings and individualized voices. For them, it is through humanizing the legend that love, affection, and self-hood come to resonate with the humanity that we all share. In fact, Maxine Hong Kingston adopted this aspect of individualized voices in her 1975 novel The Woman Warrior. Growing up in Stockton, California as a child of immigrant parents from China, Kingston's search for a clear and high note that matches the sound of a "barbarian reed pipe" is a metaphor for finding her own voice; struggling between silence, language, memories, and talk-stories as a Chinese-American woman. The twelve-year wandering amongst the "barbarians" is a journey in search of a personal identity negotiated through her mother's expectations and the outside world of "ghosts." As our globalized world becomes even more interconnected, one wonders how many other Cai Wenji's are amongst us, wandering far from home, fine-tuning their voices to retell the story of the nomad flute.