Introduction Lawrence Levine's Comment on Afro-American
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INTRODUCTION I have attempted to present and understand the thought of people who, though quite articulate in their own lifetimes, have been rendered historically inarticulate . Lawrence W. Levine1 Lawrence Levine’s comment on Afro-American folk singers and sto- rytellers can also be said of pingtan storytellers, the protagonists of the present study. As a time-honored oral art with a history of two cen- turies, pingtan storytelling is “a synthetic performance medium that combines oral narration, dramatic dialogue, singing, and the music of stringed instruments” in telling stories in the Suzhou dialect.2 In the broadest sense, storytelling is a subgenre of theater.3 Since the Communist victory in 1949, varieties of “spoken and sung arts,”4 pingtan storytelling included, have been identified with quyi (literally, melody and art), which could variously be translated as “storytelling,” “ballad-singing and storytelling,” or “performed narrative arts.”5 In the People’s Republic of China (PRC), quyi and theater (xiju) are sub- sumed in a broader category of xiqu to facilitate supervision and man- agement by the government. Therefore, all policies published by the PRC regime to reform theater in China could be readily applied to pingtan. In the past six decades, the time frame of this book, pingtan storytellers, like other quyi performers, told stories about swordsmen, officials, scholars and beauties in imperial times, trumpeted heroics of Communists in both the pre- and post-1949 eras, and imparted to millions of listeners themes of patriotism, filial piety, honesty, loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), anti-imperialism, and so forth. 1 Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), ix. 2 Mark Bender, Plum and Bamboo: China’s Suzhou Chantefable Tradition (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 3. 3 Elizabeth Wichmann, Listening to Theatre: The Aural Dimension of Beijing Opera (Hono- lulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991), xiii. 4 Chen Yimin and Liu Junxiang, Chinese Quyi Acrobatics Puppetry and Shadow Theater (Beijing: Culture and Art Publishing House, 1999), 1. 5 Vibeke Børdahl, “Introduction,” in The Eternal Storyteller: Oral Literature in Modern China, ed., Vibeke Børdahl (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1999), 2. 2 introduction Jokes in their stories raised laughs, while sentimentalism and tragedies drew tears. In stark contrast to their eloquence on stage, nevertheless, pingtan storytellers were markedly inarticulate off stage. The two most influential and productive pingtan theorists/historians, Wu Zongxi (b. 1925) and Zhou Liang (b. 1926), are both former Communist cad- res. Rarely have pingtan storytellers had their autobiographies writ- ten and published. When granted opportunities to speak in interviews and meetings, they as often as not internalized official ideologies and adopted government-sanctioned rhetoric for self-expression, wittingly or unwittingly. Therefore, the historian Tang Lixing (b. 1946) holds that what pingtan storytellers failed to realize was the fact that they were actually telling lies on and off stage.6 As the eldest son of Tang Gengliang (1921–2008), a prestigious storyteller, Tang Lixing recently assisted his father to author and publish an autobiography, arguably the only one by storytellers. Having grown up with his father’s story- telling colleagues and accumulated source materials for his father’ book as a social historian, therefore, Tang Lixing has undoubtedly first-hand experiences of pingtan storytellers’ inability or reluctance to speak sincerely and boldly under political and economic pressures. Nonetheless, one may take the risk of oversimplifying the rela- tionship between storytellers and political authorities if such silence is interpreted as pingtan storytellers’ hopeless impotence vis-à-vis the Communist state as if a misplaced gesture or a misspoken word on stage would lead to disastrous consequences. Throughout the PRC’s history, pingtan storytellers engaged in complex interactions with Communist political authorities to win political favor, seek employ- ment security, maximize profits, and gain artistic autonomy. They were by no means defenseless prey to the omnipresent and omnipo- tent state. Rather, they scored some victories in the process. Their negotiating power stemmed, first of all, from pingtan storytelling’s immense popularity since the 1930s, particularly after the rise of radio broadcasting in Shanghai and its neighboring areas.7 By the late 1950s, a government report indicated that listeners in Shanghai, who enjoyed pingtan performances in performing venues or on broadcast 6 Tang Lixing 唐力行, interview with author, August 3, 2010. 7 Carlton Benson, “Manipulation of ‘Tanci’ in Radio Shanghai During the 1930s,” Republican China, Vol. 20, Issue 2, 1995, 117–146; Carlton Benson, “From Teahouse to Radio: Storytelling and the Commercialization of Culture in 1930s Shanghai,” PhD Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1996; Laura McDaniel, “ ‘Jump- ing the Dragon Gate’: Storytelling and the Creation of the Shanghai Identity,” Modern China 27, 4 (October), 484–507..