Ni Wawa

In an essay I'm translating from Chinese to English, the author remarks of a certain famous Chinese novel that the protagonist's hometown is known "for its iron-forging and tofu-making industries, as well as ni wawa, the best-known local products." What are ni wawa?

Wawa 哇哇 can mean "dolls" or "babies" in modern Chinese, but since ni 泥 usually means mud, we can guess that probably ni wawa means "mud dolls;" babies, after all, being of uncertain economic benefit, rarely make the lists of best-known local products.

Dolls, though are the pride of collectors and craftsman alike, who I presume appreciate the same uncanniness that creeps me out.

A careful search reveals that the town of Wuxi in China is still where companies like the "Mega Tech Trading Company" produce clay figurines like the ones pictured above. Both manufactured and handcrafted clay figurines have a 400-year history in Wuxi, says the catalog, three times. "Few visitors to Wuxi," the copy goes on to threaten, "Leave without buying at least one clay figurine as a souvenir or gift."

Apparently the clay in the hills of nearby Huishan is of very high plasticity, and good for molding the dolls, also known as Huishan niren ("Huishan clay people"). The Communist writer Guo Moruo is said to have praised a product with the power to cause "anyone, past or present, to appear in the palm of your hand" 人物无古今，须臾出手中. If Guo was not exaggerating, perhaps I could find little emperors, courtesans, eunuchs -- maybe even Communists! But so far nearly every doll on the internet represents the same figure, Da Ah Fu 大阿福, or "Big Lucky."

This 18th-century figure can serve as some indication that the figure of Big Lucky is far from a modern innovation. As we can imagine from the example, Big Lucky was an ancient god or cultural hero who warded off evil in folk tales, such as one in which he prevents the Nian monster from eating all the rays of the moon and the sun.

If ancient folk deities in China evolved into today's clay dolls, it is possible that even Western porcelain dolls carry forward some hint of ancient Chinese pagan practices? After all, I find a reasonable hypothesis that European art of porcelain dolls owes something to the huge uptick in Chinese exports back in the 17th and 18th centuries. Hence, "Archbishop Jason Polland" likely makes a good historical point when he sings a Chinese children's song about ni wa wa costumed in the deliberate anachronism of Steampunk:

Archbishop Jason Polland. "泥娃娃 (Ni Wa Wa)" from Shake Some Dust on Vimeo.