Eighteen Songs of a Nomad Flute (Hujia Shiba Pa)
The daughter of a second-century scholar, the Lady Wen-Chi was kidnapped by the Huns and forced to marry one of their chiefs.
A rescue party from her home in Ch’en-liu took twelve years to track her down in the Mongolian steppes. What happens in between is the richly detailed and bittersweet romance of the Eighteen Songs of a Nomad Flute.
Wen-Chi’s story has inspired several poems, including her own. This edition from the Metropolitan Museum of Art includes an eighth-century poem cycle by Liu Shang and paintings by an unknown artist from a 14th-century handscroll.
The paintings capture the strangeness of this new world for a Chinese gentlewoman. From her hometown in modern-day Honan, with its peaked roofs and columned porches, Wen-Chi travels on horseback across a sweep of bare hills.
Here nomads boil mutton, play painted horns, and bear the chieftain’s falcon on their wrists. We see the wild geese they shoot on horseback and the felt walls they put up to shelter the blue-green yurts. In scenes such as “Longing for Home,” the yurts take up a small corner of the painting. The rest is sand.
Wen-chi loathes these featureless sands and the sameness of her days. She wrinkles her nose at the fox and badger-fur she has to wear and the gestures she uses in place of words. Worst of all is her barbarian husband. “They can eat my flesh, and they can drink my blood,” the poet has her say. “But to make me his wife is worse than killing me.” She sits on the ground beside him, pale and facing forward, while he, a trim, mustachioed man in long robes, turns anxiously toward her. The painter has him point out the constellations to the lady and see their newborn son in her arms for the first time.
Giving birth seems to transform Wen-Chi. When an envoy comes to bring her home, the woman who hated the barbarians cannot decide whether to leave or stay.
I keep asking myself this: Unless it was fate that preordained such a marriage,
How could I have become bound to my enemy in love and trust?
It’s perhaps overly modern to say that love conquers the barriers of language and custom in the Songs. The translators point out that, for many readers, Wen-Chi’s return to China reflects the superiority of civilization and the Confucian ideal of loyalty to one’s country and family.
Still, the scene that lingers in the mind – and, incidentally, the one most painted – is her parting from her sons as they cling to her robes. The nomad chief covers his face with his sleeves and weeps with the rest of his tribesmen. Returning home without his wife, he rides on the same snow-leopard saddle she had used at the beginning.
As for Wen-Chi, she delights in using towels and combs again and in playing the chi’in at home. Her last words are melancholy yet matter-of-fact:
From going out through the pass to my return was twelve years;
Now all my sorrows are told in this Song of the Nomad Flute.
Translation
Robert A. Rorex and Wen Fong The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1974
One of the chief pleasures of the Songs is getting lost in the wealth of detail that is emphasized by the blown-up images. The translators call the reader’s attention to these details and provide concise and helpful background on the cultural context. We see the nomads kneading bread and hitching up their robes to walk more easily. The horses appear in battle mode for the kidnapping, with studded armor and knotted tails, and break the frozen ground with their hooves to reach the grass.
