Nezha in the Qing FSYY Guci
..."FSYY Nezha is sooooo violent and nasty!" is rapidly becoming my new pet peeve in online discussions, not least because Novel! Nezha has nothing on Guci! Nezha when it comes to violence and belligerence.
"What's a Guci?"
Literally "Drum Lyrics", it's a type of folk storytelling performance that originated in the Ming dynasty and was quite popular in the Qing dynasty. Essentially, one or two people sing and recite the story in public, accompanied by either drum beats and clappers or string instruments.
[A modern example: Fengshen Bang, Wenzhou Guci performance]
And there's a lengthy (1.3 million characters!!) Guci adaptation of FSYY in the Chewangfu manuscripts. It was composed during the reign of Emperor Tongzhi (1862-1874), and likely performed in Beijing due to in-story references by the storyteller.
It is also fucking feral.
Like, FSYY novel and the Qing royal opera adaptation are written by literati and palace playwrights respectively, and thus are more tame and Confucianized in tone, while many later folk operas and plays have that "I won't hesitate, BITCH" vibe to characters and scenes.
It is a natural consequence of adapting the story for a folk medium, because:
Most of your audiences were likely illiterate and would neither get the poetry nor the literary references,
You needed to capture their attention quickly through melodrama, violence, and crass humor,
The scripts were often even more repetitive and formulaic, because the storyteller needs that as a mnemonic device, and the audiences should be able to jump into the story without having listened to previous sessions.
Which is why everyone in the Guci seems so eager to throw hands, some of the violence can get more graphic than the novel, and even kings and ministers swear like your average urban dweller.
…In a sense, the adaptation of Nezha's story is pretty representative of the Guci's tone as a whole.
(Disclaimer: everything below the cut is a general summary and definitely not a literal translation.)
Guci Nezha: Chapter 84-101
-The Guci actually shows Taiyi wrapping the Armillary Sash around Lingzhu Zi's soul and putting the Qiankun Ring on his shoulder, which is a neat detail.
-Though Lady Yin doesn't take Taiyi's presence in her bedchamber well in the novel either, here, she's like "The fuck are you doing in my bedroom? You must be a bad guy!" before calling out for her servants to grab weapons and ropes and block the door so the creep won't get away.
-In response, Taiyi strikes her bed with his palm, resulting in a resounding crack and Lady Yin calling out for her husband in fright, which wakes Li Jing up.
-After Lady Yin tells him about the strange encounter (he interpreted it as an auspicious sign), she immediately goes into labor, and Li Jing goes into the courtyard to burn incense and pray for her and her kid's safety.
-It's actually a pretty nice explanation for his absence when the baby turns out to be an orb of flesh that immediately starts rolling around the room and scaring the servants.
-Upon being informed of the bad news, Li Jing cut open the orb, revealing the baby inside. And he nearly strikes the baby too, before going "This is clearly a baby and my kid, how could I just stab him?"
-Then Lady Yin wakes up, they have a pretty sweet familial moment, and just when one of the elderly female servants is about to carry the baby away, he jumps right out of her grasp and begins to run around the room naked.
-Li Jing finds this pretty funny, picks up the baby, hands him over to the elderly servant, and makes her his nanny.
-Yep, Nezha has a nanny in the Guci, and she and her husband kinda function as surrogate parents while his real parents are busy training soldiers to deal with Jiang Wenhuan's rebellion.
-Also, I love that Taiyi's reaction to Nezha's hour of birth isn't "Damn, he's destined to break 1700 prohibitions against killing" but "Great! 1000+ violations of prohibitions against killing! Does he have a name yet?"
-After a 7 years timeskip, Nezha decides to take a walk in the city, accompanied by his nanny's husband, Li Zhong. Because it's summer, they are soon covered in sweat, and Nezha suggests that they go out of the city proper.
-Li Zhong advises him against it because Lady Yin tells them to go early and return early, and Li Jing won't be happy about this, they could always tour the surrounding countryside tomorrow.
-Nezha is like "C'mon, I won't get another chance tomorrow, if you won't go, I'll just go myself." before marching out of the east gate.
-Having no choice, Li Zhong scrambles after him, and Nezha actually feels kinda bad watching the old man huff and puff while trying to catch up with him, so he sits down, tells Li Zhong to take a break, they'll go together.
-Nezha sees a distant water body, and asks Li Zhong what it is. He answers that it's a segment of the Jiuwan River connected to the ocean, and because dragons often appear when people pray there during droughts, it's also called the Hidden Dragon Lake.
-Nezha, finding the heat even more unbearable after more walking, is committed to taking a bath there, despite objections from Li Zhong that swimming in such a deep pool of water is a safety hazard.
-Then he uses his sash as a bath towel and shakes the palace of Ao Guang——but not the palace in the East Sea, just a separate summer palace he and his family reside in. It's kinda the equivalent of a vacation cabin for dragons.
-Li Gen the Yaksha doesn't attack because he gets sassed, but outright jumps to lethal force the moment he sees Nezha, and in return, Nezha snaps his trident in half with a strike from the Qiankun Ring, before chasing the guy all the way to the dragon palace's front door and bashing his brains out.
-Terrified, an Old Turtle of the palace orders the soldiers to shut the palace door and cover the compound in "iron webs", before informing the Dragon King about the matter. Ao Guang wants to check out the brat himself, Ao Bing volunteers to go in his stead, yadda yadda.
(Ao Bing is also described as a golden dragon in this version.)
-Meanwhile, on the shore, Li Zhong just sees him being attacked by the Yaksha before disappearing into the water and is freaking out, thinking the kid has died and his parents have only the babysitter to blame, before deciding to inform them anyways so the kid's body can be recovered.
-Obviously, Lady Yin doesn't take it well, and tries to tell Li Jing the bad news immediately, before Li Zhong persuades her into ordering some of the sailors at the pass to fish up the body first.
-Back under water, Nezha points at the iron web and is like "Fight me you asshole eels!" before Ao Bing and the Old Turtle come out.
(Ao Bing's human form is described as having "blue face + red hair" and pretty monstrous looking, which is kinda close to the Shangmei and most Lianhuanhua designs.)
-The moment Nezha sees them, he's like "This daddy doesn't kill nameless opponents, tell me who you are so I can start decimating you!"
"I'm Ao Bing, courtesy name Jingwen, Third Prince of the East Sea! Our palace just gets shaken, my Yaksha is killed, and if you are behind it, kid, you are DEAD." "Bitch, this lake is in Chentang Pass territory, I have the right to take a bath here without getting attacked by some monster! Now that y'all pissed me off, I'm wrecking your place!" "How dare you! I'm a formal god and it's MY subordinate you just killed! After avenging him, I'm gonna go to Chentang Pass and sort it out with your stupid old man!" "Oh, that settles it! This daddy ain't afraid of you, I'll kill y'all before you can do anything to me!"
-After a few rounds, Nezha is concerned that Ao Bing will try to run back into the palace if he's losing too badly, and decides to feign a retreat to lure him to the water surface.
-The trick works: just when Ao Bing is about to run back, Nezha breaks the hindlegs of his steed and knocks his swords out of his hands with his Qiankun Ring.
-Ao Bing shifts to his true dragon form, first to fight and then to flee back to the palace. It doesn't work, because the Armillary Sash of the Guci can apparently set people on fire, as Ao Bing found out the hard way.
(In the novel, it just looks like balls of flames when unleashed and doesn't do fire damage.)
-After bashing his brains out with the Qiankun Ring and pulling out his tendons, Nezha returns to the palace gate to give a message to the Old Turtle that's basically "I'm Nezha, I killed that little bitch, and you better move your palace in three days before I wreck it!"
-The Old Turtle, who's this comical cowardly figure, is so scared that he retreats into his shell and rolls all the way back to Ao Guang to inform him of the bad news.
-Ao Guang doesn't like the Old Turtle either, which is kinda baffling when he still puts the turtle in charge of organizing Ao Bing's funeral before marching out to find Li Jing, and the Old Turtle's reaction is "Great! I can embezzle a lot of money out of this!"
-As much as it may seem like a subtle indication of Ao Bing's overall level of popularity among the dragon palace staff, it is not and also pretty random.
-Anyways, the sailors are finally led towards the shore by Li Zhong, just as Nezha emerges from the water and starts to make his way back. They initially mistake him for a ghost, before finding out he's very much alive.
-Nezha tells them about the whole story, and Li Zhong is like "Yeah, definitely don't tell your parents *that*, just say you are saved by miraculous divine intervention or something", and Nezha is like "Of course!"
-Lady Yin is rejoiced about his survival, and tells her servants not to say a single word to Li Jing about this incident, before preparing a meal for him. She does tell him to never go out of the house again and only play in the back garden from now onwards.
-Nezha also takes the tendons back to the family mansion to, uh, remove all the blood and soft tissue clinging to it. Can't have a proper belt otherwise, ey?
-Unfortunately, after Li Jing is accused by a furious Ao Guang and goes to get Nezha so he can explain himself, that is exactly what he sees.
-Also, when Ao Guang is getting even more angry after Nezha's "apology" where he basically goes "I'm just taking a bath when your employee and kid try to kill me, NGL, they kinda have it coming", Nezha gets mad too in return and retorts "Yeah, so what? You wanna have a Round 2, motherfucker?" and Ao Guang is terrified.
-The subsequent sequences are generally the same as the novel, plus a few details: Taiyi actually tells Nezha to be less belligerent when he went to him for help…before immediately giving him an invisibility talisman, a "Taishan Stone", and three "Heavenly Scrolls" and telling him to ambush Ao Guang under the Heavenly Gate (but spare his life).
-The "Taishan Stone" is used to pin Ao Guang down and revert him to his true form, while Nezha rips off his scales for insisting on pressing charges.
-After Ao Guang gets away and the Verdant Cloud Acolyte died to Nezha's archery accident, Nezha goes off to play with some friendly servant boys in the back garden, and decides to practice the spells on the Heavenly Scroll by turning a bunch of hay stalks and beans into soldiers and playing the commander, sending the servant boys to fight against them.
-Because the stalk & bean soldiers aren't that tough, the game doesn't turn lethal, but the servant boys are still pretty bruised and roughed up when Lady Shiji shows up and captures Li Jing with her treasure.
-Nezha and the Colored Cloud Acolyte have an angry exchange first, where Nezha is like "Tell that old bitch to let my dad out of the cave and apologize first!" while she's like "How dare you be rude to my master! She won't let you and your family get away with this!" before Nezha ends the quarrel via lethal head trauma.
-Also, when Nezha has all his treasures taken away by Lady Shiji, she actually captures him with the Eight Trigram Handkerchief, but his nature as Spirit Pearl incarnate makes him immune to the treasure's knockout effects, and he escapes to Taiyi's place the moment she releases him from the handkerchief.
-As I've said elsewhere, FSYY Guci may be one of the earliest stories that mentioned the "Flooding of Chentang Pass".
-It doesn't actually happen in-story, though. The Dragon King of the North proposes it during their emergency meeting, and the Dragon King of the South is like "Woah, chill out, brothers! Don't drown an entire settlement over one kid and his family! Let's just file a lawsuit to JE together!" The others are like "Good point" and that's it.
-The Four Dragon Kings do take their whole army with them to Chentang Pass after getting greenlit by JE, though. Including the aforementioned Old Turtle comedic relief, whom Li Jing also dislikes with a passion (the turtle then ties him up on the command of one of the Dragon Kings).
-The battle between Taiyi and Lady Shiji is mostly the same as the novel version, with the additional detail that Shiji actually begs Taiyi for mercy after she is trapped inside the Nine Fire Dragon Bell Cover, to no avail.
-Anyways, Nezha rushes back to Chentang Pass after getting the "KYS" advice from Taiyi, and Li Jing yells from the sideline that he should've killed Nezha long ago if he knows he's gonna be such an unfilial menace.
"If I killed myself you'd let my dad go, right?" "Yes." "Well then, give me a sword and I'll do it myself!" *Terrified glances exchanged between the dragon kings as they stood there, frozen, too intimidated to step forth* "The fuck? You darn eels asked for this, and you won't even give me a sword?"
-At which point Li Jing grabs a sword from one of the Dragon Kings and hands it to Nezha. Gee, the Guci sure starts his Asshole Arc early.
-Holy shit, the Guci manages to outdone the novel when it comes to Nezha's suicide.
-Like, the novel version is already pretty graphic, but the Guci has multiple paragraphs describing how he basically performs death-by-a-thousand-slice on himself, until he's pretty much a skeleton being held together by tendons.
-Continuing the trend of Guci! Li Jing being a bigger asshole than he already is, he proceeded to tell the servants to just grab Nezha's remains and toss it onto some heap of dung and dirt in the wilderness. It's Lady Yin who secretly pays for a coffin and asks Li Zhong to collect and bury the body parts.
-Taiyi does tell Nezha's ghost that, if he doesn't receive three years of incense and gets the temple up and running quick, his soul will dissipate, which is a neat bit of addition.
-Li Jing yells at Lady Yin for feeling bad about Nezha, just like in the novel, but also tells her that if she mentions Nezha again, they'll no longer be husband and wife. Again, bigger asshole than he already is.
-Nezha's threat to Lady Yin also gets more specific and intense——“if I'm gonna fade to nothing anyways, I'm gonna curse the entire household with plague and destroy your properties while I'm at it!”
-The "Illicit Cult" implication of Nezha's temple in the original novel is made more obvious in the Guci, where the couple Lady Yin and Li Zhong chooses as temple keepers start to get greedy and organize huge temple fairs to bring in more donations, alerting Li Jing to its presence.
-Thus, aside from destroying the temple, he orders the beating and whipping of the two temple keepers, and when he gets home and learns about Li Zhong's involvement, the elderly servant nearly gets spanked too, but Lady Yin steps forth and stops him.
-Taiyi's first suggestion, when Nezha's ghost goes to him again, is "Go to some other temple and receive half a year of incense there", to which Nezha responds with "All the temples nearby are full and they'll never let me have their incense", leading to the Lotus Resurrection thing.
-After knocking Muzha down with the golden brick, Nezha nearly stabs him with his spear before he escapes via Earth Travel.
-Lastly, my favorite unnecessary yet hilarious change: the decision to have Sage Randeng's entrance take place in a field of watermelons while the Attempted Patricide Arc is going on.
-When Nezha tried to take a shortcut through the melon field to chase Li Jing down, despite Randeng's warning, his wheels got tangled up in melon vines and Randeng basically beat him up with watermelons.
-When Nezha tried to use ranged attacks by tossing his golden brick at Li Jing, Randeng just hit it out of the air with...another watermelon, because his theme is apparently watermelons now.
"Get out of the fucking melon field you coward!" "Get in here if you can, you little shit!" ——A summary of Nezha and Li Jing's interaction during the whole sequence.
-Despite that hilarious sequence, the Guci Nezha story still ends the same as the novel: Randeng drops a pagoda on Nezha and he's forced to recognize Li Jing as his father.
Last Thoughts:
My feeling while reading FSYY Guci manuscript is that there are a lot of neat little extrapolations and additions, but they are overshadowed by the general tone, which oscillates between feral, ridiculous slapstick, and plain boring.
Okay, the "plain boring" is mostly a result of writing an oral performance down in words, since you can no longer hear the music or dramatic voice acting of the preformer.
...But seriously, do we really need a whole new arc about the Marquis of the East's attack on Youhun Pass that doesn't go anywhere?
Especially when the last half of the novel is greatly truncated and summarized in a barebones manner in the Guci retelling, because the storyteller has to finish the entire book in two months in order to get to the next one?
Complaints aside: for obvious reasons (the sheer length), the Guci doesn't have an English translation. However, Meir Shahar does have a translated excerpt of the Guci in Chapter 4 of Oedipal God: The Chinese Nezha and His Indian Origins.
