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SALMAN RUSHDIE CALLS MYTHOLOGY "the family album or storehouse of a culture's childhood, containing [its] ... future, codified as tales that are both poems and oracles" (1999, 83). Myths are, in his words, "the waking dreams our societies permit" that celebrate "the non-belongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks" (73). Of course, all societies have such waking dreams, but women as mythic figures loom rather larger in some cultures than in others. Chinese poets, painters, sculptors, librettists, essayists, commentators, philosophers, storytellers, puppeteers, illustrators, and historians made a veritable industry of myths of womanhood-an industry that, I shall argue today, far outstrips any of its counterparts elsewhere in Asia.
Scholars who study myth will doubtless find my use of the term here overly broad. The myths I discuss are stories that many scholars of comparative mythology would not consider myths at all, but rather "histories" or, perhaps, legends, that conceal, distort, obscure, or otherwise overwrite the remnants of archaic plots and characters that form the stuff of true myth.' Embedded as they are in historical and cultural context, though, Chinese myths of womanhood yield unexpected insights into historical consciousness about women, and among women, in Chinese history. So whereas the subject of this address has an intellectual debt to a past president, Wendy Doniger, its slant is peculiar to historians.2 And it plays (not without irony) on the widespread myths that surround "Asian" women in the media and in popular consciousness in the United States (Manderson and Jolly 1997). I can hardly touch on most of the myths of Asian womanhood this afternoon. Rather, I focus on Chinese myths, with passing (though I hope not frivolous) allusions to myths in other parts of what is called Asia. Among those Chinese myths, I single out two-not necessarily the ones most familiar even to this erudite audience (although yes, Mulan is one of them). Conspicuous by its absence will be one of the great Euro-North American myths about Chinese women, the myth of submission, oppression, and the bound foot, a subject that will make a very belated appearance in the coda, where-as Professor Doniger would note-it will become clear that "often when we think we are studying an other we are really studying ourselves through the narrative...