Freshman class II

Scary tales

Sing-Chen Lydia Chiang, assistant professor of Slavic and eastern languages

Ph.D. Stanford University

Specialization: Medieval and late imperial folklore of China

Representative publication:Collecting the Self: Body and Identity in Strange Tale Collections of Late Imperial China (Brill, 2005)

My research focuses on collections of "strange tales" in medieval and late imperial China. These are short stories about ghosts and animal spirits, supra-human heroes and freaks, exotic lands and haunted homes, earthquake and floods, and other perceived anomalies in accepted cosmic and social norms. This body of literature is a rich repository of Chinese myths, folklore, and unofficial "histories."

Traditional and contemporary scholars tend to take these stories on face value, treating them as no more than anthropological and historical data, religious and moral propaganda, or simple inferior compositions. In contrast, I regard them as reflections of Chinese attitudes towards normalcy and strangeness, perceptions of civilization and barbarism, and fantasies about self and other. Inspired by contemporary theories of myth, literary fantasies, psychoanalysis, museum studies, and utopian studies, I explore the complex emotive subtexts of Chinese strange tales to consider what these stories tell us about suppressed cultural anxieties, communal and individual self-images, and the construction of gender and other social norms.