The story that I found the most interesting from Part A of the reading was "Why Dog and Cat are Enemies." Stories like this one, which details why dogs and cats are so often at odds with each other, are fairly common in many cultures, but I liked the Chinese take on this idea. The story begins with a husband and wife, who possess a magic ring that gives its owners luck. However, they don't realize the power of the ring, so they sell it and promptly fall into bad luck. The dog, realizing that the ring was magic, makes a plan with the cat to recover the ring again. The cat catches a mouse, and she takes it to the house of the new ring's owner with the dog. When the cat lets the mouse go, it chews a hole through the chest that holds the ring, bringing the ring back to the cat. The cat swims back across the river to meet up with the dog again. On the return trip, the cat takes a shortcut over the roofs of houses--as a result, she beats the dog back to their owners. The husband and wife are pleased that the cat returned the ring to them, and so they reward her. But when the dog returns soon after, the husband and wife don't realize that the dog helped the cat, so they punish him for laziness. Although the cat knows the truth, she doesn't intervene to help. As a result, the dog now chases the cat, and the two are at odds with each other.
Reading this story, I thought it might be interesting to start the retelling from the point when the dog and the cat go on their mission to recover the ring. That way, the readers would be thrown into the action immediately and hooked in. I would have to explain the circumstances and the ring later in the story, but starting later in the narrative might be a way to modernize the folktale to match today's preferred storytelling style.
Bibliography: "Why Dog and Cat are Enemies," Chinese Fairy Tales Unit, R. Wihelm.
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