Nine Generations of Pi Wu Lazi (Pi the Fifth, the Hot Pepper) in Yangzhou Pinghua

NINE GENERATIONS OF PI WU LAZI (PI THE FIFTH, THE HOT PEPPER) IN YANGZHOU PINGHUA CATHRYN FAIRLEE Independent Scholar and Storyteller There is no real reason an Irish American child growing up in a lumber and fishing village in northern California should be fascinated with China, but I was. Perhaps it was receiving Tales of a Chinese Grandmother when I was eight years old and reading it over and over. A year of intensive Chinese language study in Taiwan in 1968–69 as an undergraduate prepared me to make long, independent trips to the People's Republic of China six times, beginning in 1977. For the past twenty-five years, I have been a collector and performer of traditional myths, epics, and folk tales from all around the world but with a special interest in the oral literature of China. Since 1999, I have been a full-time professional storyteller and have performed to many audiences in many countries. This paper focuses on the ways that a particular story has been told in a particular Chinese storytelling tradition, ways that include my attempts to perform portions of the story in English, both by myself and in collaboration with the foremost living Chinese performer of the story.1 The storytelling tradition is Yangzhou pinghua 揚州評話, a tradition in the Yangzhou area that specializes in long narratives performed without musical accompaniment that dates from the seventeenth century.2 The story is a humorous, lowbrow, forty or so hour one, known either as QINGFENG ZHA 清風閘 (Qingfeng Sluice) or CHINOPERL Papers No. 29 (2010) 1 This article is indebted to the fieldwork I did while writing a master’s thesis on Chinese storytelling from 2007–2008. 2 For an introduction to Yangzhou pinghua, see Vibeke Børdahl, The Oral Tradition of Yangzhou Storytelling (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1996).©2010 by the Conference on Chinese Oral and Performing Literature CHINOPERL Papers No. 29 PI WU LAZI 皮五辣子 (Pi the Fifth, the Hot Pepper).3 This paper will follow the history of the story from its oral creation by a storyteller through nine generations of tellers and two publications, to the present time. It is the first full length study in any language on the history of this story and its tellers through its 230 years of evolution. This pinghua story, whether written or told, was formally referred to by the name of QINGFENGZHA, the title that appears on the novel published in 1819 in thirty-two chapters (hui 回) and about 90,000 characters in length.4 Qingfengzha was the name of a location near Yangzhou that no longer exists. In the subsequent process of eight generations of tellers orally recreating and expanding the story, it was again redacted from a contemporary oral version in 1985 into a book of 340,000 characters called Pi Wu Lazi.5 The title of this new book refers to the name of the main character, who was originally called Pi Wu laizi (Pi the Fifth the Rogue) in the 1819 novel but who eventually began to be called lazi 辣子 (hot pepper) instead of laizi (rogue). The original story seems to have been created by an extremely popular storyteller of humble birth named Pu Lin 浦琳 before 1800. In its current oral form, it takes about forty hours to tell, customarily in two hour segments per day, and is one third longer than the 1985 book. The Story There are several aspects of this story that are intriguing. Unlike most pinghua, or its northern cousin pingshu 評書, we know the name of the storyteller who created it and something of his life. Although Pu Lin was likely nearly illiterate, he was extraordinary enough to be praised in two contemporary books written by literati. Oral stories with strong autobiographical elements were unusual in China two hundred 3 Following a convention used by Vibeke Børdahl, SMALL CAPITAL LETTERS will be used when referring to an oral repertoire, italics for book titles, and English translation in ordinary letters for the subject matter of a certain ‘story.” See Vibeke Børdahl and Margaret B. Wan, eds., The Interplay of the Oral and the Written in Chinese Popular Literature (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2010), “Notes to the Reader,” p...