DIGITAL NARRATIVE • TRANSMEDIA STORYTELLING • CYBERFEMINISM
TRANSMEDIA STORYTELLING PROJECT
Filial piety ( xiào) or ancestor worship was one of the central tenets of Confucianism. Under Confucianism women were the keepers of the family stories: the stories of the male lineage. Meimei is our storyteller who will dare to tell her own story. But under Confucianism, one’s family’s story starts with one’s house. Our Meimei has a particular interest in the village she leaves behind and in traditional Chinese architecture.
To create a literary work for the Chinese market and for factory girls, we turned to Chinese literature to identify an appropriate genre. The natural choice seemed to be the genre of lizhi, a form of inspirational and encouraging story of courage, bravery, and strength. The most famous example of lizhi is a comic strip character called Sanmao Liu Lang Ji (1935) by Zhang Leping. In Wandering Sanmao we found our model for a 21st century heroine. A homeless boy on the streets of Shanghai following the first war with Japan, Sanmao is an iconic figure to a people for whom migration is a major part of their lives. Our Meimei character became Wandering Meimei or Meimei Liu Lang Ji. This genre was so perfect because it has been until now a genre that has only been applied to men and boys.
For structural inspiration for the text, we looked at one of the classic novels of the Song Dynasty, The Outlaws of the Marsh, which tells the story of 108 bandits who steal from the rich to give to the poor. Many of medallion-like structures in the text echo the structures of feng shui and provided inspiration for our electronic literature interface.
The Yingsao Fashi
The gorgeously illustrated Yingsao Fashi is to architecture what Herodotus’s Histories was to historical writing. Completed in 1103 by Li Jie it was the bible for building construction in China for more than 900 years. Compiled from the history of architecture and interviews with contemporary craftsmen, the names given to the house’s parts are drawn from Song dynasty literary language of trees and flowers. It is an important book to Meimei.
The Building Manual explained how to use the principles of the natural world to build a wooden house without any nails or fasteners that could stand for hundreds of years. The feng shui compass is the tool that governs traditional Chinese building standards because when the house is perfectly positioned the house is naturally cooled in summer and heated in winter. The force of the balanced roof is a giant spring that holds the structure in place. It is this strong foundation that Meimei leaves behind as she travels to the strange new world of factory work