A Tribute to Kate Stevens, Storytelling Mentor

CHINOPERL Papers No. 27 (2007)©2007 by the Association for Chinese Oral and Performing Literature, Inc. A TRIBUTE TO KATE STEVENS, STORYTELLING MENTOR I was at a weekend of epic storytelling in Vancouver in February of 2004 when a compact disk title attracted me. It was called Traditional Chinese Tales by Kate Stevens, recorded by Canadian storyteller Jan Andrews for StorySave. I have been a storyteller for twenty years and, having lived in Taiwan and traveled in the People’s Republic, naturally love Chinese stories. It impressed me that there was only one story on the disk that I knew. Her recording has animal tales, stories of magic, a fable, a legend, two drum song selections and two from my favorite collection of Chinese classical tales, Pu Songling’s Liaozhai. A friend who knew of my background saw me looking at the CD and said, “You should meet Kate Stevens.” “Who is she?” The list CCHINOPERL Papers No. 27 22 of her credentials was astonishing! She had lived in Taiwan, traveled in PRC, done her doctorate in Beijing drum singing, taught Chinese literature, and translated her own stories. Hearing that she sings in Chinese, the sale was made. Kate lives in the city of Victoria, in a house she found while visiting the Chinese cemetery there. I live a few hours north of San Francisco. This was not going to be easy, to arrange a meeting. I was introduced to a mutual friend who promised to get me her number and warn her that a total stranger wanted to talk to her about Chinese storytelling. Kate was quite gracious and happy to share mutual enthusiasm for a favorite subject. We wrote back and forth–snail mail– and arranged our visit for July after the National Storytelling Conference in Washington. It took a car, a ferry, a bus, and a cab to get there. I found Kate outside in her green backyard, filled with vegetables, flowers, and a tai chi platform. We had Chinese tea that unfolded from curls to tadpoles in the boiling-hot water. Kate has tantalizing shelves of recordings of performances of Beijing drum songs, clapper tales, and patter tales. Not only had I never seen a drum song or clapper tale performed, I had never heard of the genre! When I began telling stories, the tales I learned were mostly folk tales, legends and myths. Though I am familiar with such books as San Guo, Honglou Meng and Shuihu zhuan and have seen pieces of opera from these literary classics, I felt quite ignorant about them. Meeting Kate inspired and encouraged me to add to my repertoire. Having learned some Chinese during one year, over thirty years ago in Taiwan, I have just enough language left to travel independently in China. I have almost no written skills. Kate shared some of her videos of tellers with various vibrant styles and wrote down characters for some key terms with which I was not familiar. She demonstrated playing her collection of clappers and her Peking drum. I had so many questions and less than one day with Kate. We compared book titles and had quite a few of the same ones. She recommended more books and the Cheng & Tsui catalog as a good source. She loaned me my first CHINOPERL to read the autobiography of the drum singer Zhang Cuifeng (written Jang Fairlee, A Tribute to My Storytelling MentorFai 23 Tsueyfenq). (I have since become a subscriber.) I felt like a gold miner, finding her brain a treasure. Our first visit was rich, but brief, and we continued to write. She sent me an excellent Chinese-English dictionary and tempted me with a story in Chinese as a challenge. She sent tapes of folk songs and songbooks, as she knows I like to sing. I was able to visit again on Boxing Day in 2005, and she delighted me by gifting me with a drum that belonged to her teacher. I grin with pleasure just thinking of it. From the first hearing, I loved the Beijing drum song “On Saddle Mountain” from her CD, as she learned it from her teacher Sun Shujun. She has added the ending as sung...