How are we to live under conditions of economic precarity and extreme social inequality? When all aspects of our lives are characterized by brutal competition and when genuine human connection, free of instrumental rationality, seems impossible? When our media are choked with fake news and our expressions of dissent are surveilled and censored by a state helmed by corrupt and incompetent bureaucrats? In such a world, does literature have anything to offer beyond providing a binge-worthy distraction?

So ask three recently translated texts written not in our own uncertain time but in another. Though produced on either side of the Ming–Qing transition, in a variety of genres, styles, and linguistic registers, by authors who range from the obscure to the ubiquitous, these story collections all limn the nightmares and fantasies of a world unglued from its past and heading toward a future that is hard to fathom. This is a view of historical disjuncture that takes as its subject not the elite but what we might consider the 99 percent; though the occasional well-fed scholar-official makes an appearance, these stories are really the domain of the shopkeeper and the student, the traveling merchant and the itinerant monk. As these common people in uncommon times move about a changing landscape, they illuminate the possibilities for literary production in an age of anxiety.

The Book of Swindles (Dupian Xinshu), first printed in or around the year 1617 and attributed to the otherwise unknown Zhang Yingyu, consists of a little over eighty classical-language tales that seem to be drawn from a variety of sources, from rumor and personal experience to previously published accounts. Together these stories catalog an exhaustive assortment of swindles: bait-and-switch operations, honey traps, impersonation scams, money-changing cons, and the odd eunuch-cannibalizing-young-boys-to-regain-virility scheme. The comments that follow each story frame the collection as a guide for navigating the perils of late Ming commercial life. Indeed, in these stories, the flourishing silver economy promises not unlimited bounty for all but a brutal zero-sum game: swindle or be swindled.

Most of the stories are centered around the places where people and things can circulate freely as strangers and commodities without histories. In city streets, busy waterways, and roadside inns, no one is who they seem—not the friendly Daoist or the helpless sisters or the interested customer. Even people you think you know turn out to be strangers: a son tricks his mother into remarrying in order to settle his debts; a Huizhou merchant runs off with the profits of his compatriot. Everyone is trying to separate everyone else from their hard-earned silver—presumably Zhang Yingyu included.

In their brief but wide-ranging introduction, with concise sections on topics like the civil service examination and the silver economy, translators Christopher Rea and Bruce Rusk provide enough information to situate the reader in the late Ming world of the text while gesturing to the transcultural connections such a text invites. This translation includes just over half the stories and the commentaries that accompany them, and the stories represented here capture the wide range of the collection, from sleight-of-hand tricks to appetite-suppressing pills made from fetuses. Rea and Rusk translate the text with clarity and verve, employing a breezy, idiomatic vernacular: a crook pulls a “switcheroo” (Zhang, p. 15); “some take-out dishes” are ordered (Zhang, p. 112); a fellow is “tall and gutsy to boot” (Zhang, p. 42). This makes the translation a pleasure to read—perhaps even more pleasurable than reading the often workman-like classical prose of the original. The translation also includes an array of helpful reference materials, though there are a few minor editing problems (a couple of errant endnotes, an oddly cropped map).

This is a versatile text available in an affordable paperback that could easily be incorporated into a range of undergraduate history and literature classes, though the translators are possibly engaging in some light swindling of their own when they refer to this decidedly minor text as a “landmark work in Chinese literary history” (Zhang, p. xv). The Book of Swindles appears to have been of limited impact and disappeared quickly from the late imperial marketplace. It also does not seem to mark any sort of innovation in either form or content. Though this collection is the first of its kind to focus on swindles, classical-tale collections on an unorthodox theme arranged in a kind of comprehensive typology were not rare in the late Ming, nor were stories about swindles and swindlers uncommon. Moreover, the text is hardly a hidden gem of literary genius—the stories are not particularly well written, and the commentary does not reveal an especially idiosyncratic thinker.

Yet the fact of its minor status does not make the text any less compelling an artifact of the late Ming imaginary. The Book of Swindles takes as its subject an amorphous rot at the heart of human relations, “an empire of endemic criminality,” as the translators say, in which everyone is implicated. Through the appropriation of existing forms and tropes, “the swindle” is conceptually delimited, collected, and categorized, then turned into an object of knowledge and pleasure. The Book of Swindles thus captures not only the anxieties surrounding the erosion of interpersonal norms and obligations under intensifying commercial exchange but also the ways in which literary form was employed to organize this newly fluid social landscape.

Like Zhang Yingyu, the late Ming writer, editor, and publisher Ling Mengchu understood the value of looking to the social and literary margins. In the preface to his 1628 vernacular story collection Slapping the Table in Amazement (Pai'an Jingqi), Ling argues that the minor tradition (xiaodao) in which his stories follow could be a vital source of both entertainment and edification. Of course, the position this work now occupies in the modern canon of vernacular literature is anything but minor; this collection and its 1632 sequel are often grouped together with Feng Menglong's three earlier collections as the Three Words and Two Slaps (Sanyan Erpai), a common shorthand for the highest achievement of late Ming vernacular short fiction. As such, its translation is long overdue.

Drawing on a wide array of materials ranging from classical-language anecdotes to popular plays, Ling crafts stories that map the social whole of late imperial China, tracing the intersecting paths of down-on-their-luck merchants and scammer alchemists, corrupt officials and clever prostitutes, depressed exam failures and famous poets, lovelorn ghosts and lecherous nuns, avenging daughters and prodigal sons. As in The Book of Swindles, this is a society in constant motion as people move from one place to another and from one identity to another. In all this flux, things have a tendency to become untethered, lost, confused—it is no surprise that scams, counterfeits, and imposters figure heavily in these stories. But while Zhang Yingyu's collection of swindles evokes a Hobbesian world governed by brutal competition, Ling's stories exist within a moral universe in which people and things are ultimately returned to where they ought to be.

As Ling tell us in his preface, he was inspired not just by Feng Menglong's formal innovations in vernacular short fiction but also by the way Feng invests his stories with a sense of meaning. No matter how astonishing or extraordinary the story that Ling tells—a giant turtle shell contains impossibly valuable dragon pearls! a ghost borrows her sister's body to sleep with her fiancé!—these are not “tall tales” that are “fabricated out of thin air” (Ling, pp. 3–4). While Ling's stories may not be factual, they are nevertheless true: true in their rootedness in a lived, everyday experience; true in their trenchant commentary on social ills; true in their revelation of the workings of fate.

While indebted to Feng's work, Ling was not a derivative imitator. Rather, as Robert Hegel points out in his helpful introduction, Ling's vernacular stories reflect a distinctive and highly self-conscious literary voice. In the specificity of the storyteller's persona, in his use of lacerating satire and contemporaneous settings, and in his grounding of the marvelous in the ordinary, the sensible, and the plausible, Ling anticipates the experimental turns of writers like Li Yu in the early Qing.

Despite this considerable legacy, only a handful of Ling's stories have been translated into English. Most of these earlier translations hail from an era when not only were commentaries deemed extraneous but occasionally entire sections of the story—poems, philosophical disquisitions, introductory stories—were cut as well. In contrast, this translation by Shuhui Yang and Yunqin Yang, much like their previous treatment of Feng Menglong's Three Words collections, is complete in every sense. All forty stories are translated in full along with a complement of paratextual materials: the 1628 preface and list of editorial principles, a selection of ten woodblock illustrations, and both marginal and interlineal comments.

The Yangs’ translation is highly accessible, masterfully balancing fidelity and readability. Their inclusion of both kinds of commentaries is particularly welcome, as it restores some of the noisiness of the late imperial page, in which texts were always already subject to conversation and critique. Representing these comments on the page presents a unique set of problems, as it requires translation not just across languages but also across book histories and typographic systems. The Yangs elect to turn both marginal and interlineal comments into italicized parenthetical comments marked by either MC or IC. Making all comments into in-line ones transforms the topography of the page, changing the way the eye makes its way across the text; it also requires the translators to decide where exactly to insert the marginal comments into the text and flattens distinctions between the two types of commentaries. The Yangs have come up with as elegant a solution as is possible given the constraints of Western publishing conventions; here perhaps is a place where the tools of digital humanities could make a helpful intervention into the conventional modes of translation, with resources for hyperlinking original texts like Yale University's Ten Thousand Rooms Project, offering new possibilities to communicate to non-specialist readers the experience of interacting with a page of late imperial fiction.

Nowhere is the value of translating an entire short story collection more apparent than in the case of Idle Talk under the Bean Arbor (Doupeng Xianhua). Written by the pseudonymous Aina Jushi (The Cassock-Wearing Layman) in the early Qing, Idle Talk employs a frame narrative—the first of its kind in Chinese vernacular fiction—that unfolds over the course of the twelve sessions.Footnote ¹ A bean arbor, we are told, has been built to provide a respite from the summer heat; as the seeds take root and the tendrils unfurl, local people gather and tell stories. This frame is not merely a device for the telling of twelve discrete stories but, like the bean plant, a generative, living structure that intertwines author and audience, past and present, story world and real life. A listener in one session becomes a storyteller in the next; the traumas of the old invade the dreams of the young. The stories told are constantly interrupted, revised, referenced, and countered—they echo and bleed across the collection and only make sense in their totality.

In many ways, this is another book of swindles—and not just because session ten reads as an updating of Zhang Yingyu's catalog of scams, enumerating all the hustles awaiting unsuspecting visitors to postwar Suzhou. Each of the stories told under the bean arbor exposes some kind of fraud: unmasking cultural heroes as villains, overturning conventional wisdom or literati authority, revealing historical records to be so much fake news. The way these reversals destabilize what we know about the world and how we know it captures something of the experience of living through the cataclysm of dynastic transition—a period that readers, much like the young men listening to these stories, may not have lived through themselves. But even the post-transition world of “peace and contentment” (Aina, p. 171) is shown to be a chimera, the many stories featuring gruesome, casual, and often intimate violence recalling the horrors of war at the same time that they unsettle any sense of a seamless return to order.

In the final session, the anxieties of this period of supposed harmony bubble to the surface, as the early Qing regime of suspicion, surveillance, and censorship encroaches on the world of the bean arbor. After a pedantic Confucian scholar, misinformed about the nature of these gatherings, comes to give a lecture on the nature of the cosmos, the denizens of the bean arbor reflect on the troubles that might arise from coming to the attention of local authorities. As one of them leans on the arbor, the entire structure collapses. If the collection opens with a spring-like hope in the regenerative power of the natural world, this ending in the brittle winds of fall intimates a more unsettling future, as the members of this erstwhile community laugh darkly to themselves and go their separate ways.

This first complete English-language translation, edited by Hegel, gives Idle Talk the treatment it deserves. Hegel's excellent introduction provides a textual history of the collection, situates its formal innovations in the history of Chinese vernacular fiction, and contextualizes its fractured cynicism in the world of early Qing Jiangnan. The ten translators involved with this project have done an admirable job translating the two prefaces and the twelve often-idiosyncratic stories. The translators have not only included the end-of-session comments from the pseudonymous Ziran Kuangke (Purple Beard the Eccentric Wanderer), but also added their own: in the spirit of vernacular fiction commentary, the translators include an “Afterthoughts on Stories” appendix in which they share their own reflections.

However, not all of the reference material is quite so successful. The glossary of historical terms was particularly cumbersome to use. Many endnotes consist entirely of an instruction for the reader to see an entry in the glossary of historical terms, but because page numbers for the glossary entries are not given, the reader would need to flip through the glossary to locate the term. As a number of the terms included in the glossary are referenced only once in the collection and many entries are no longer than the typical endnote, it is unclear why some concepts or historical figures are given an explanation in an endnote while others appear in the glossary.

As is to be expected with different translators working on different stories, there are some minor inconsistences across the collection. For example, the title of the famous first poem in the Shijing (Classic of Poetry) is translated as “Fair, Fair Cry the Ospreys” (Aina, p. 22) in session one but as “Ospreys Cry” (Aina, p. 27) a few pages later in session two. The treatment of the frame narrator could have been better coordinated, as the translators take different approaches toward the way in which they move from the third-person omniscience of the background narration to the first-person voice of the host of the bean arbor. In a few cases, very similar sorts of lines in the frame narration—which do not include any pronouns in the original—are treated as first-person statements by some translators and third-person by others.

The collection's structure, in which stories are told within stories, presents a unique set of translation challenges. The translators treat this structure with a superabundance of caution—often a shift in narration is signaled by a paragraph break, a fleuron, a title assigned by the translator, a paragraph indentation, a change in font style, and a change in font size. To bring a text published in the early Qing into modern punctuation certainly requires acts of interpretation and (re)creation. However, all of the typographic signaling here seems rather excessive and is frequently distracting. Moreover, in this impulse to stamp out any ambiguity, what was surely a part of the pleasure of reading this text—the reader's unraveling of the levels of narration—is lost.

Occasionally the very complexity of the signaling employed in this translation creates confusion instead of clarity, as when the text appears to ignore the rules that it sets for itself. For example, in session one, three different font systems are used to signal three different levels of narration. Font one is used for the frame narrative of people gathering to listen to a story under the bean arbor. The various characters are discussed in the third-person and their direct discourse is marked by quotes. Font two is used for the story that one of these characters, an old man, tells the group. The old man's story is told in the first person and no quotation marks are used to mark his speech. Font three is used for a story that a carriage driver tells the old man within the old man's story; the driver's first-person narration is presented without quotation marks. At the end of the driver's tale, we return to the voice of the old man concluding his story. Since the old man's lines are presented in first-person narration without quotation marks, font two should be used. Instead, font one is used.

This decision (both here and later in session four) to use the typographical markers of the frame narration for a portion of the second level of narration has the potential to be even more confusing, as throughout the collection the unnamed background narrator/arbor host is represented as also speaking in the first person in the frame font. The unwieldiness of the system employed here seems particularly unnecessary, as English punctuation allows quite easily for the use of nested quotations—indeed, Yenna Wu uses this more intuitive approach in her previously published translation of session one.Footnote ²

These reservations aside, Idle Talk under the Bean Arbor, like The Book of Swindles and Slapping the Table in Amazement, is a vital addition to English-language translations of late imperial literature. I experienced first-hand the potential for these translations to transform how we teach late imperial literature, as last year I had the opportunity to teach all three of these translations to undergraduate students. Certainly one need not invoke contemporary resonances in order to appreciate these complicated, bizarre, fascinating collections. However, it is no coincidence that the texts so captured my students’ imaginations in our present moment, which shares with the mid-seventeenth century a sense of unsettling uncertainty and interpretive instability. While not abandoning a sense of the historical specificity of these texts, class discussion frequently returned to the question of how one writes in a time when long-standing patterns of social and political life are disrupted, when conventional narratives no longer appear adequate or tenable, and when doubt is cast on all forms of authority. By making these collections available in their full richness, these fourteen translators have opened up worlds both old and new to students and non-specialists alike, and for that we should all be tremendously grateful.