In her preface, Anne E. McLaren tells us that she had long been interested in “the storytelling and folkloric culture of the lower Yangzi delta” (p. vii) when she learned from Shanghai folklore specialists that substantial records existed of bridal and funeral laments performed by women in nearby Nanhui County. From 1994 through 2004, McLaren conducted fieldwork in Nanhui and studied tapes and transcriptions of the bridal laments with the aid of local scholars. The main source for Performing Grief is a complete cycle of bridal laments recorded in 1982 and 1984, preserving the improvisations of the septuagenarian Pan Cailian, who had learned the repertoire for her own wedding during the 1920s.

What may one learn from the elicited performances, tapes, and transcriptions of these laments, rehearsed by the young brides of Nanhui during the Republican era and remembered by elderly women on the outskirts of Shanghai during the economic reforms of Deng Xiaoping? McLaren regards the laments as “an ancient folk art now in decline … that was once a signal mark of female status, talent, and virtue across broad areas of China” (p. 1), and as part of an oral tradition that ensured “the transmission of knowledge systems, beliefs, and mythologies of the participants” (p. 3). The lines transcribed from the withered lips of Pan Cailian therefore evince “how illiterate Chinese women in the premodern period constructed the operations of kinship hierarchies, the marriage market that determined their destiny, and the shadow cast by the Chinese state even in remote rural communities” (p. 4). In addition, the bridal laments were “a form of verbal sorcery,” whose ability to dispel the noxious vapors of wedding pollution affords “a rare example of the visible exercise of ritual power by women in a male-dominated society” (p. 13).

The first three chapters lay out the geographies and economies that inform the bridal laments, extending from the saline soil and the brackish canals into the verses, and from the shapeless, illiterate past into the present transcriptions: the dichotomous worlds of the poor bride and her wealthy mother-in-law, and the vague contours of the realm beyond the nearest market town (chapter 1); the cotton production on the reclaimed land, and the economics of sex ratios, infanticide, and marriage (chapter 2); and the value of women as skilled laborers in the local cotton industry (chapter 3). Chapter 4 demonstrates how the local landscape and notions of value are put to use in the rhetoric of Pan Cailian's lament cycle, in the service of a distinctly feminine commentary on the Nanhui marriage system. The final two chapters of the book argue the magical potency of the bridal laments, tracing the history of bridal laments within a longer history of ritual wailing (chapter 5), and presenting varied evidence for the exorcist function of the bridal laments (chapter 6). An appendix contains a partial translation of Pan Cailian's lament cycle.

The main contribution of McLaren's study is her argument for the exorcist power of the bridal laments. This interpretation yields new insights into historical practices of wailing, a convincing reading of the Ming dynasty story “The Record of the Loquacious Li Cuilian” (Kuai zui Li Cuilian ji), and an integrated approach to the bridal laments as a close parallel to funeral laments. The shared modes of address, the shared imagery, and the shared verses and ceremonies of the bridal and funeral laments show “the intrinsic commensurability of the two rites of transition: marriage and death” (p. 114).

It should be noted, however, that while the details of the local landscape and the marriage economy, discussed in the early chapters of the book, help the reader understand individual images and arguments in the bridal laments, they do not allow a comprehensive interpretation of the cycle. To the contrary, they invite selective readings that destroy the ritual coherence of the laments and create apparent contradictions—contradictions that are in fact the result of unreconciled methodological differences between the first and second halves of the book. To this reviewer, Performing Grief would have been more convincing, and more coherent, if its two halves were reversed, with the local background contributing to a more precise understanding of the rhetorical detail of the exorcist laments.

Furthermore, McLaren could have provided a more rigorous treatment of the fate of bridal laments during the Mao era. The mention of an earlier transcription of the laments in the early 1960s (the period of the Four Histories movement), the almost stereotypical biography of Pan Cailian (married to an opium addict, etc.), and the consistent construction, by local informants, of the recent past in accordance with the binary imagination of Communist historiography suggest that Pan Cailian's recording of the bridal laments in the 1980s may have recaptured, not so much (or not only) “the emotion she had felt as a young bride” (p. 14), but the emotion of land reform, “speaking bitterness,” and other political performances of a more recent period.