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Butterfly Mother: Miao (Hmong) Creation Epics from Guizhou, China. Translated by Mark Bender. Based on a version by Jin Dan and Ma Xueliang. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006. Pp. viii + 188, pronunciation key, map, notes, bibliography.)
The Miao or Hmong people of southeast Guizhou are one of the fifty-six minorities that live in China, preserving their ethnic identities in varying degrees, separate from the dominant Han Chinese who form 90 percent of the population of the People's Republic of China. In the south and southwest of China, long narrative myths of plant and animal creation, ancestral heroes, and legendary migrations are still a part of the oral repertoire. One of the Miao traditions includes the antiphonal singing of long poems or songs for courtship, marriage, festivals, house raising, village cleansing, sacrifice rituals, funerals, and pure pleasure.
The poetic title and embroidery motif of Butterfly Mother is fitting for a book of creation poems from the Miao people, for it is from the legendary eggs of the Butterfly Mother that the Miao are descended. These epic poems were first collected in the early 1950s when folk traditions were promoted by the Chinese Communist Party. Jin Dan, editor at Nationalities Publishing House in Guiyang, collected and published some of these songs in Minjian Wenxue (Folklore) in 1955-56. He was raised in the Miao country of southeast Guizhou, a "sea of song and dance," where his father was a well-known singer of these songs. Professor Ma Xueliang of Xongyang Minzu Daxue (Central Nationalities University) in Beijing saved the collection from being destroyed during the Cultural Revolution's persecution of the "Four Olds." In the late 1970s Jin was able to continue his collecting, and together, Jin and Ma published Hxak Hmub (Miao Epic Poems) in 1983. Until 1956 the Miao did not have a standardized writing system allowing scholars to record the dwindling oral repertoire. The spoken language of the Miao is of the complex Sino-Tibetan group and has eight tones. Butterfly Mother includes a tonal chart and pronunciation guide for Miao romanization in the preface. Jin Dan collected the epics from over fifty singers, recorded them in the newly romanized Miao script,...