Reading Notes: Chinese Fairy Tales, Part B

    This week I chose to read the Chinese Fairy Tales unit. The stories I read are from The Chinese Fairy Book by R. Wilhelm and translated by Frederick H. Martens. This was not one of my favorite units to read, so far. The stories in Reading A and Reading B were creative and well written, but they were just not my style. I found most of them difficult to follow along with because I found myself thinking of other things while reading the stories. However, I did like more stories in Reading A than I did in Reading B, but there were a few stories that I did enjoy from Reading B.

    The first story that I enjoyed reading was Fox-Fire. This story was a cute tale of a fox and a farmer. The farmer had stolen the fox’s ball of fire that also happened to be the elixir of life. The farmer became a wealthy man, and he was able to live a happy life. He had the ball of fire for thirty years and the fox finally retrieved it from him. This story was fascinating because even though the fox was angry, he knew that the farmer was poor, and he let him become wealthy and live happily, even though he could have retrieved the ball of fire at any time.

    The second story that I enjoyed reading was The Maiden Who Was Stolen Away. In this story, a maiden was stolen by a storm and placed on top of a pagoda with a young man. This man insisted that she was there to marry him, and she could not leave unless she agreed. I was surprised when this young man turned himself into an ogre. This story was fascinating, and I enjoyed that the maiden ended up being rescued by her brother and not a prince.

Another story I enjoyed was The Flying Ogre. It was a short and simple story, but it was still fascinating. The theme that I picked up with ogres involved in Chinese Fairy Tales is that they can be very deceiving and can turn themselves into beautiful humans. This is ironic since they are deemed to be hideous.

Pagoda from the Maiden Story