East Asian Personas 101
How to Begin Your Journey to the East
By Laurel A. Rockefeller, in society, Juru Biya/Jin Ming-Yue
The Asian persona—few choices in SCA could be rarer. Normans, Saxons, Celts of all possible combinations, Vikings, Germans, English, Romans, Italians, French, Spanish—these we find in plenty in society—yet despite the historical populations in Asia far outnumbering Europeans, the percentage of Asian personas in SCA has typically remained tiny. Quite simply, it is easier to create European personas and find people who know things to help in persona research and garb making, easier to learn European history, than it is to pursue Asian choices. While this writer believes that the number of personas representing Africans and Indigenous Americans also needs to increase, this paper will address the basics on how to get started with an Asian persona. This is a paper that I was urged to write before presenting my year-long research results on Jurchen/Manchu names (Jurchens renaming themselves Manju Jin in the 16th century). To those in the Horde who encouraged me to pursue this research on behalf of all in society, many thanks.Choosing to play an Asian persona can be quite a change to someone already established in any kingdom in SCA. I started out as Anne de Lyons, unconsciously reenacting a past life in which I was a French nun taken by the Mongols for displaying a special ability to heal with music and eventually brought into the service of the newly crowned Khan, Yuan dynasty founder Kublai Khan. Yet as I mundanely changed focus as a history major from medieval to Asian (I am about 10% Chinese and wanted to learn more about my heritage), I found that a European persona no longer made sense. By then, I understood that I was really moving into the direction of needing to play a persona from Beijing—a Chinese persona made more sense than trying to play some Marco Polo game that wouldn’t be plausible by keeping the original French persona. And besides, playing a Chinese outright has certain advantages to it. For one, if you make a mistake, the authenticity police are much less likely to catch it! For another, a Chinese or other East Asian can legitimately not touch food with the fingers (which is considered rather rude in Asian cultures)—chopsticks are the rule and what a wonderful rule it can be! And don’t forget the tea—the food is a great bonus for Asians!
So how do you do it? What are the basics to know? Here are a few starting points:
Names
In Asia, family names are presented first, followed by personal names. In China, grammar requires you sequence everything from largest to smallest units—addresses use country for the first line and name for the last line. For the most part the same rules apply in Korea, Mongolia, and Japan. In specific ethnicities in China, names can be more complicated than surname personal name. In the Qing dynasty (1616-1912), Manchu names expanded from clan personal (the custom prior to Nurhaci, first Qing emperor who united all 66 Manchu tribes) to tribe clan generation personal. Pronounciation of many clan or tribal names also shifted—Aisin was Anchuko until the 16th century. Mundanely, my name is thus seven characters long, a result of that Qing dynasty shift in naming practices. That said, unless research shows otherwise for your specific persona, use a standard format of surname followed by personal name. For the most part, personal names will be bisyllabic in Chinese—two character compounds—so the first character is the family name and the last two are personal name. Likewise, do not feel confined with regards to personal names to words listed as personal names. In these languages, pretty much any word or combination is fair game for use in a name. Therefore my personal name is Biya—moon or month—which, while not on the list I will provide in a separate article, stands as a personal name based on meaning and the shaman heritage of the persona.Genders
Unless you are playing Japanese, you are mercifully spared the pains that European personas have with gender and words. In Chinese, Korean, Manchu, and Mongol, gender has no impact on how a word is said. For the most part, names are based on meaning. Only in obvious situations is one word specifically more appropriate for one gender in a name than for another. For example, Chinese "Meigui" could not be a name for a man because it means "rose" and flower names are reserved for females even as names with war or definite masculine connotation would be reserved for men. However words like "guang" (rays of light), "ming" (bright), "shi" (stone), and "ling" (clever, elf) could be legitimately used for either males or females. Likewise, when speaking these languages, gender will tend to be ambiguous—you cannot tell from a subject or direct object what gender either the subject or the direct object is. Spoken Chinese doesn’t even have "he" or "she"—both words are pronounced precisely the same!That said, if a person ventures into Japanese territory, be aware of the fact this is the reverse in the Japanese language in which males speak one dialect and the females speak another. How a word is pronounced and which word you can use will greatly depend on what gender you are and the gender(s) of your audience. To make it tougher, Japanese uses Chinese characters (Kanji) plus two native phonetic systems developed by Japanese women around the 9th century CE. Linguistically, Japanese is probably the hardest choice in terms of learning the basics of the language, Japanese lacking the simplicities that most other East Asian languages feature.
Ethnicities
Contrary to what people believe, East Asia, while comprised of very few nations, probably has more ethnicities than their European counterparts. In China, the dominant ethnicity is called the Han. You’ll hear Chinese say "hanyu" to refer to their language—the term means "language of the Han." It was the Han kingdom of "Zhong Guo" that Confucius (which is Latin for his proper name, Kongzi) politicked in and that Qin She-Huang was king of when he conquered his neighbors and created the unified Chinese nation in the mid 3rd century BCE. In unifying China, more than 150 different ethnic groups were put under a single central government ran from Chang An (the Long Peace), now called Xi An, located close to the modern Chinese-Mongol border. The ethnicities within China have been and are diverse, many with their own writing systems for their own languages.Two important non-Han groups for SCA would vacillate between independence and conquest by the China and can be considered both Chinese and independent from China when creating your persona. Those two are, of course, the Mongols and the Jurchens (renaming themselves Manju Jin [Manchu] in the 16th century). Of all the peoples of China, only the Mongols and their cultural/linguistic Jurchen relations have ever ruled over the Han and the other ethnic groups in China. If considering a persona who is Chinese but not Han, Mongol and Jurchen/Manchu are your easiest bet with the most information about. Search under Jin and Song dynasties (Jin being ruled by the Jurchen Aisin clan and Song by the Han Chinese emperor), Yuan for the Mongols in China, and Qing dynasty (Manchu rule over all of China, including the south) for historical information and books showing artifacts and cultural information on both Mongol and Jurchens/Manchus. The Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Ontario, Canada publishes outstanding books and folios covering their huge Chinese collection—including gowns worn by Empress Dowager Cixi—one of the most famous female sovereigns of the past 1000 years. One book by R.O.M., In The Presence of the Dragon Throne, is a must read when pursuing a Chinese, Korean, Jurchen/Manchu, or Mongol persona. It provides readers with patterns for clothing. (ISBN 0-88854-195-3) This is the book I suggest for anyone pursuing garb for an Asian persona. Start with this book and then, if your area isn’t there, continue with other R.O.M. books showing artifacts from every dynasty and corner of China.
Of course one challenge in pursuing a Mongol or Manchu persona is language. While it’s safe to say that most personas would know standard Chinese, a name and other fundamentals should ideally be in the language of the ethnicity. Linguistic information can be hard to come by. To help encourage Jurchen/Manchu personas, especially hard given the decimation of Manchus from racially-motivated violence in the early years of the 20th century and compounded by the millions killed in Japanese concentration camps, I have compiled a list of proper names in the Manchu language from material supplied to me from Peter E. Hauer of Linguasoft in Vienna, Austria and colleague Andrew Shimunek who has been working to translate the Manchu-German dictionary into English. Yuen Timur in Korea has been helping with my analysis and catching my errors for me. That work will be available shortly and I hope to provide it for SCA use to anyone who is interested in developing a Manchu persona.
Even should a Mongol, Manchu, or Korean persona be started, since these cultures used Chinese as their main trade language, you will need to pick up a Chinese-English dictionary and learn a few basics. Knowing what you would be called in Chinese is a good thing—even if later, like me, you discover and use a name native to your persona.
Dictionaries
For standard Chinese, make sure you get one using HAN YU PINYIN—this is the standard established in the 1960s that eliminated the confusion created in the 19th century when every country had its own spelling for every Chinese word. Wade-Giles is the name of the old system for the US and unfortunately people still tend to use it more than pinyin—never understanding just how confusing it is to do so. Wade-Giles will mislead you when it comes to pronunciation. In SCA, it’s going to be important to pronounce your name and other words correctly (not to mention in the real world) because there probably won’t be people in the room who can help you. Chinese isn’t exactly medieval Latin, you know! Some common Wade-Giles examples are "tofu" and "Tao te Ching."What makes Wade-Giles bad is that Chinese words aren’t actually pronounced like that at all and since every letter in a romanized word counts (unlike European languages that often have silent letters in words), you can create serious confusion. A "tao" is not the Dao (as in Daoism, a mystical religious philosophy at the heart of Asian psychology)! "Tao" in the most common usage is a measure word indicating a group of something—like a bouquet, a set, a gaggle, a pack, a pride—you get the idea. On the other hand, if you sound out a word using pinyin, once you understand the basic pronunciation rules for the letter combinations, you will say it more or less accurately, depending on if you use the correct tones.
So when you buy your dictionary, the starting point for any sort of name or basic conversation you want to engage in, make sure that you are buying one using pinyin. Most students of Chinese use the Oxford University Press’ Concise English-Chinese Chinese-English Dictionary (ISBN 0 19 584048 8).
Cultural Basics Commons to Most Asians
Let’s assume for a moment that mundanely you are not Asian and not raised in Asian culture. To play an Asian, you need to know a few basics of the cultures. I’ll talk about China, but these apply to just about everyone since China was and largely is the superpower of Asia—especially in SCA’s time frame.
Kongzi, not Confucius.
We hear the jokes about Confucius, but Kongzi (let’s be Asian here and not use Latin) was a shrewd politician from the 6th century BCE (before common era—we don’t use BC and AD when discussing Asian history—CE is common Era—as in the last 2003 years). He lived in the central province of Zhong Guo (middle kingdom) that was back then a virtual rain forest. Kongzi was mostly interested in getting power for himself from all the main kings of Han ethnicity and Han influence (remember Han is the ethnicity of ancient Zhong Guo). His main contribution to world history was that he read many books and decided that five most deserved to be preserved of all the ancient texts (texts that were no less than 1000 years old at the time he read them). The Yi Jing (Wade-Giles I Ching) was one of them. The Yi Jing today is considered a divination manual, but it was very serious stuff to the highly scientific Chinese who were already long established in keeping astronomical records. In Kongzi’s day, the Yi Jing was considered science. The Spring and Summer Annals were considered critical history books. Together, the five books he considered critically important for all were called thereafter the Confucian classics. These are the books that great pains were taken to keep preserved when Qin She Huang went book burning and destroyed most of the ancient texts written during the many millennia the Chinese kingdoms and peoples had known long before. Thus, the books of Kongzi’s choosing are among the oldest (if not the oldest) complete works still in existence. In the first millenium of the common era, these five books were the most influential books in all of Asia, being foundational for the Han-controlled Tang dynasty—a dynasty that fashion shows to be probably the most decadent and demeaning to women of all the dynasties—and the dynasty that Japanese culture is modeled after!Prior to the Tang dynasty when Japan borrowed nearly everything from China, Japanese were ruled by an empress and goddess worship dominated. After the Tang borrowing, Japan became the fiercely patriarchal culture it is today. No doubt Japanese women would have been happier had the Han not ruled when Japanese boats landed on the mainland!
The Way of Daoism
Laozi is the name given to the unknown author (probably female) of the Dao de Jing, another cornerstone of Asian culture. Filled with paradoxes that make you think, the Dao de Jing is mystical, common sensible, and deeply philosophical. Whereas the books chosen by Kongzi are largely about how to interact with other people socially and how governments should rule, the Dao de Jing and Daoism as a whole is about cultivating the inner person and pursuing Enlightenment. Yin (pronounced eeen) and Yang (pronounced Y ah ng) come from the DDJ. Dao means "way" and is part of the word "to know" (zhidao). Daoism is fundamentally scientific and requires a person to observe the world around her or him in order to understand the paradoxes. Its teaching is largely about balance and harmony, probably the two virtues most valued in Asian societies and the foundation of Asian psychology. Science, religion, art, music, medicine, martial arts, even politics—these are all Daoist in nature, following the principles in a myriad of ways.Because Asians believe so strongly in harmony, balance, and individual enlightenment, aggression, especially warfare, has been very limited. Ethnic and religious based aggression are almost unheard of because of these critically Daoist values. Dynastic cycling was one thing; invading another country with anything but ideas and loaning technology, that was completely another. Military actions against other countries were rare and today is still considered a big no-no (current Chinese foreign policies remain very Daoist, very anti war). In the Ming dynasty (1369-1644 officially), China had the power to conquer Europe—but didn’t—and pulled back its exploration vessels that went to Europe and Africa. Exploring was considered a waste of money; there was nothing to gain for China by doing so. In a culture where religion was and is considered a strictly personal matter (as long as religious groups don’t get involved in politics—Chinese rarely made the mistake of mixing the two), where people had superior technology compared to their neighbors, and where they could make domestically everything anyone wanted or needed, there was simply no reason to war with neighbors, colonize other areas, or work to subjugate another people. Lucky for Europe and unlucky for China!
Trade—don’t war—with your neighbors.
As mentioned, Jurchens/Manchus and Mongols would go back and forth between being independent from China and being part of China. From 1215-1369 the Mongols actually ruled over China. From 1210-1215 the Jin capital called Beijing withstood the first great siege the Hordes threw at any nation. To my knowledge, it was the longest siege the Hordes ever attempted. Whereas later cities in Europe fell in 5 days, the Jin capital lasted 365 times that, aided by the similarities of the two sister cultures. In large part, those similarities happened from trade and other peaceful exchanges between all the ethnicities in East Asia. No area shows that principle better than clothing. Han Chinese clothing tended to be bulky—in the Ming dynasty, a single coat might include more than 10 meters of silk. Mongol and Manchu clothing, however, tended to be economical, originally being made of furs and leathers. Whereas with time, the Jurchen/Manchus began using woven fabrics, the Han and other groups adopted closer fitting garb for military use, seeing the advantages Jurchen hunters and warriors gained by light and close fitting clothes. Just imagine trying to fight a battle with huge sleeves! Han warriors fought better thanks to Jurchen sensibilities. Chinese armor owes much to Jurchen design. And of course it is important to note that the clothing most people associate with China is not Han at all—but Manchu. Likewise, the Korean dress is actually Han from the Han dynasty that was adopted through trading.Table Manners
Fingers are for chopsticks and spoons—not food! Especially in SCA period, Asians tended to look down on Europeans because of table manners. If there was any way at all to avoid it, food must not be touched by the fingers while dining! That’s what chopsticks, knives, and bowl-like spoons were for. For sanitary reasons, most food was briefly seared to kill bacteria (stir frying) and eating food purely raw was avoided lest illness occur. Using lots of utensils kept the food very clean—though interestingly enough, most people would share bowls with another unless there was a good medical reason for it. Shallow bowls were/are used instead of plates to make eating with chopsticks and spoons easier. Dishes tended to be make of ceramic materials—stoneware for everyday and porcelain for special occasions like Spring Festival (Chinese New Year).Well, how do you like lesson one? Please feel free to email me at manchugal@juno.com or manchugal@yahoo.com if you have any questions and I will try my best to answer you. I do not know everything (not even close) but I hope this article will help you in beginning the process of pursuing an Asian persona.
(raises a glass) gambei!