https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6832-2909
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ABSTRACT
Perhaps the most familiar “Chinese” narrative in Indonesia involves the Tang general Xue Rengui. This article examines the process of transformation that turned Xue into first a hero of fiction and drama in late imperial China, then of a major narrative in late colonial Dutch East Indies culture, and recently – in the more permissive atmosphere of post-Suharto Indonesia – of a commercial theatre series. That last work, a tetralogy by Teater Koma, draws from archipelagic traditions, local vernaculars and Sino–Indonesian stereotypes, mediating Chinese sources to create a raucous and macaronic theatre work. This article argues that the Xue narrative in its various iterations shows how Chinese narrative makes a profound and enduring contribution to Indonesian culture, integrated early and through popular media, including human and puppet theatres, popular fiction and comic books.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank the members of Teater Koma, especially Rangga Bhuana, for their assistance and openness. He would also like to thank the editors and anonymous readers for their suggestions, as well as Wayan Jarrah Sastrawan for his comments, and Miguel Escobar Varela for the conversations that provided the impetus for this research project.
Notes
1 For a longer English summary and a Freudian analysis, see Yen (Citation1970). For a full translation of the Yuan zaju play on Xue Rengui, which presents a wholly different homecoming, see Idema (Citation2015). The son Xue Dingshan, it should be noted, will in fact be revived by supernatural beings, meaning there is no contradiction between The Bend story and the later military exploits of Xue Dingshan and his barbarian wife, Fan Lihua.
2 The first play of dramatist Chen Baichen, written in 1931, used the Jingju version as its foundation, though Chen also declared that it was written “in protest” at the content of the Jingju play (Chan, Citation1991, pp. 84–93). Chen’s leftist text naturally shows “strong resentment of the ruling class” (Chan, Citation1991, p. 86).
3 The various spellings of Xue’s name are troublesome for the researcher, but illustrate the transformation of 薛仁貴 from China to Indonesia. Orthography may seem a negligible feature, but the sketch of how one gets from one to the other can serve as some small metaphor for the transit the character and the narrative, too, have gone through. The rich, varied and convoluted Xue Rengui narrative came to Southeast Asia through the largescale Hokkien migrations, whose pronunciation of the characters might be represented as something like Sih Jin Kui (as, for instance, according to the leading Taiwanese Hokkien dictionary). This spelling was analysed according to the Dutch-modelled Malay orthography of the colonial period (the Van Ophuijzen spelling system), largely producing “Sih” or “Sie Djin Koei” (the title under which, for instance, comic books disseminated the narrative). The Indonesian spelling reforms of 1947 and 1972 replaced the Dutch-based “Dj” and “oe,” with more international (read: English) “J” and “u/w,” producing the contemporary “Sie Jin Kwie”, although alternate (in Indonesian terminology, fully “perfected”) analyses such as “Si Jin Kui” also have a certain persistence. Meanwhile, the successful standardisation and domination of the PRC’s system of Romanisation, Hanyu pinyin, has ensured that Western-language sources now use “Xue Rengui”, with older Western or Taiwanese accounts using the Wade-Giles spelling of “Hsüeh Jen-Kuei”.
4 Sampek Engtay (Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai, sometimes known as the “Butterfly Lovers” in English) is the other great Chinese narrative to achieve widespread familiarity in the Malay–Indonesian world. In noticeable contrast to Sie Jin Kwie stories, Sampek Engtay remains a universally known narrative throughout the Sinophone world as well. For various versions of the Chinese narrative, see Idema (Citation2010). For the story in colonial Indies and Indonesia, see Stenberg (Citation2019, ch. 4).
5 Wilt Idema, reviewing Claudine Salmon’s Literary Migrations, first published in 1987, remarked that “Occasionally, a story of Chinese provenance achieved much greater popularity outside China than it ever appears to have possessed inside China” (1989, p. 584). While that remark would be an exaggeration in the present case, it is worth stressing the asymmetry of the canons produced by the migration of stories. The story of Tang Minghuang and Yang Guifei, which at present is a basic, universally familiar, narrative in China, seems to have played little or no role in the narrative worlds of Indies and Indonesian Chinese.
6 White snake is a narrative that remains broadly popular in Sinophone print, stage and screen. It concerns the transformation of a snake by means of Buddhist self-cultivation into a beautiful young woman, and her doomed love story with a young scholar. Since Lady White Snake will, through no fault of her own, never be accepted by humans as a member of their race, the Teater Koma script and production can also be read as a metaphorical representation of the Sino–Indonesian Other’s struggle for acceptance.
7 Népote and Khing (Citation2013) write lkhon pāsāk’, but I find lakhon bassac the more common rendering. Since I do not speak Khmer and have not seen this theatre, I cannot comment on the extent of Chinese influence, except to note that it is considered substantial and perhaps dominant, and may have come by way of Vietnam (Billeri, Citation2017; Blumenthal, Citation2007, p. 76; Miller, Citation2010, p. 135).
8 In a different article (2013b, pp. 241–242) on the same work, Salmon gives 1858 as the date. However, her source is apparently Pigeaud (1968, p. 74), who gives 1859, as does an earlier Dutch source (Schlegel, Citation1891, p. 151). Pigeaud notes that it was written by order “Tig Og” of Kediri, in a “big clumsy cursive script, probably a Chinese hand”, as was an 1869 version (1968, p. 76).
9 Salmon’s (Citation1981, p. 501) catalogue for Indonesia lists a number of versions of Xue Rengui zhengdong (Xue Rengui Conquers the East) and Xue Rengui zhengxi (Xue Rengui Conquers the West). For the latter tally, we can add a version published by Tjiong Hok Long (鐘福龍). For his other works, including a version of zhengdong, see Salmon (Citation1981, pp. 354–355; Citation2013c, p. 255). Copyright on this version was declared in the Dutch government gazette (Nederlandsche staatscourant, 1901.05.10). The declaration is for a second edition; the full title of which is Boekoe tjerita doeloe kala di benoewa negri Tjina, di tjeritaïn Sih Djin Koei, Tjeng-see, toeroenan sama anaknja Sih Teng San, tatkala tempo Hongte Lie Sie Bin, merk Tong Tiauw (Book set long ago in the great land of China, telling the story of Xue Rengui conquering the west, his descendant and child Xue Dingshan in the time of the Emperor Li Shimin, temple name Taizong). As to Malaya, Salmon (Citation2013d) lists a Singapore-printed 1922 Xue Rengui zhengdong, but both zhengdong and zhengxi were in 1897 already being counted there as “some of the best Chinese romances” of this “new literature in Romanized Malay” in order to be made “accessible to the Baba community” of the Straits Settlement (Tan, Citation1897, p. 63). For a chronological table showing the early position of translations of Xue Rengui (1884) among Chinese historical narratives (the first of which was in 1883) into Malay, see Song (Citation2018, p. 248).
10 In 1908, Dutch colonial authorities created an institution, the Balai Poestaka, dedicated to producing low-priced reading materials in archipelagic audiences for a wide reading public. The impact of the institution on the development of an independent and modern Indonesian literature were formidable, although inevitably the press was also complicit in the system of colonial control (Jedamski, Citation1992; Teeuw, Citation1972).
11 Teater Koma, following Marcus A. S., credited the script to “Tio Keng Jian” and “Lo Koan Chung”. The identity of Tio (typically the Indonesian–Hokkien analysis of the surname which in pinyin is Zhang 張) remains something of a mystery, but “Lo Koan Chung” evidently refers to Luo Guanzhong, the 14th-century man supposed to be the author of Sanguo yanyi (Romance of the Three Kingdoms). Luo’s connection to the Xue narrative would seem to be through Chu Renhuo, the author of 17th-century Sui Tang yanyi 隋唐演義 (1675; Romance of the Sui and Tang), who claimed that his own work was derived from Sui Tang Liangchao zhizhuan 隋唐兩朝志傳 (Record of the Sui and Tang Dynasties), a work dubiously attributed to Luo (Hegel, Citation2004, p. 164). In any event, it can only be in a very remote way that the Sui Tiang liangchao, which “reads like a chronicle, with many figures and dates piled up in a dreary procession” (p. 164) is the source of the Teater Koma’s wild humour. It seems appropriate to consider attributed authorship a matter of homage while considering which other Chinese and Sino–Indonesian sources more proximately produced the work.
12 As for Teater Koma’s pure delight in anachronism, eclecticism and tomfoolery, the Mainland Chinese stage has nothing very much resembling it. Its closest kindred spirit in the Chinese-speaking world is perhaps the 1990s classical China costume comedies of Stephen Chow, such as Flirting Scholar or the two A Chinese Odyssey movies (1995). Nano Riantiarno apparently instructed Singaporean actors for a production of Sampek Engtay to bear Chow’s films in mind.
13 Indonesia has very limited xiqu practice today, and the Riantiarnos have only travelled briefly to China; nor does Teater Koma have any history of collaboration with xiqu performers.
14 As Elizabeth Wichmann noted about Jingju, percussion in xiqu “punctuates the speech of stage performers, punctuates their movements, provides sound effects, and provides structural punctuation for each play as a whole” (1991, p. 256). In Sie Jin Kwie, likewise, percussive speech punctuation is used to “stress and highlight words, phrases and pauses of special dramatic importance” (p. 257).
15 Though there is little likelihood of direct influence, it is perhaps worth noting that one of the Hokkien genres, gaojiaxi, is especially noted for its marionette-aping clowns. It should also be noted that the Teater Koma production has itself spawned further transmissions into a new genre. Muhammad Tavip has pursued his technique of coloured wayang made from waste, and in 2014, premiered a “wayang tavip” version of the narrative – elaborated from the sequence he prepared for Teater Koma.