Kate Stevens: Traditional Chinese Tales (in English) produced by Jan Andrews (review)

CHINOPERL Papers No. 27 (2007)©2007 by the Association for Chinese Oral and Performing Literature, Inc. Review of “Kate Stevens: Traditional Chinese Tales (in English).” 3 CD set. Produced by Jan Andrews, Storytellers of Canada/Conteurs du Canada, 720 Bathhurst St. Ste 402, Toronto, ON M5S 2R4. FAX 416 588 1355; Phone 416 588 5234 ($35.00 U.S. dollar, including postage) storysave@storysave.ca www.storysave.ca For those who have not had the pleasure and privilege of hearing Kate Stevens’s deep, resonant voice singing Beijing drum songs, or rapping a Shandong clapper tale, first in Chinese, and then in impeccably translated rhyming English; this three-disk set of recordings, approximately 120 minutes, is the next best thing. Kate Stevens, scholar, teacher, and performer of Chinese folk literature, recorded eleven stories, with commentary, in 2001, after she had retired from the University of Toronto. She was not in the best of health at that time, and one can hear her pausing for slightly longer intervals between sentences in the narrative, but, perhaps, that adds to the suspense. The narrative is rendered in informal conversational English, with some dialog in character, but without the histrionics a professional Chinese storyteller might include. Intended for an English listening audience, suitable for the young and young at heart, the narration includes only short segments delivered in Chinese to give a little flavor of the original language, Mandarin, the speech used in the Chinese capital, Beijing. The stories come from various sources. Two stories are drawn from Pu Songling’s (1640–1715) Liaozhai zhi yi [Strange tales from Make-do Studio]. These are accompanied by a short commentary explaining how Pu Songling collected and/or composed the stories. One story entitled “The Magic Cat” was told to Kate Stevens by a modern writer who heard it from her father, who heard it from his grandmother, making the tale at least onehundred -years old in oral transmission. A number of stories are from modern collections of folk literature published in China between 1957 and 1986. These collections include short biographies of the peasant story tellers, some of them non literate. Stevens’ renditions are, however, in her own words. She gives us examples of storytelling as a creative art of taking and giving, not reading aloud from the books, which implies another kind of performance art. CHINOPERL Papers No. 27 270 Two all-time favorites from the Peking drum song repertory, “On Saddle Mountain” (Ma An Shan) and “On the Slopes of Chang Ban” (Chang Ban Po) are included. “On Saddle Mountain” is the story about Yu Boya, the scholar official, and Zhong Ziqi, the filial firewood gatherer, both devotees of guqin (seven-stringed Chinese zither). Their understanding of the music (zhiyin) of this contemplative instrument is so deeply felt that, upon learning of the death of his friend, Yu Boya played a final elegy at his grave side and then smashed his instrument. This is one of the many fables that illustrate the affective power of the zither, in particular, and the value placed on the art of listening to music and words in general. It has also become a proverbial expression of true friendship and understanding. Kate Stevens follows the version of her master teacher, the famous female drumsong artist of Beijing, Sun Shujun. It would be difficult to imagine any better way to introduce the Chinese idea of true friendship to a Western audience than to listen to this version of the tale. “On the Slopes of Chang Ban” is an episode from the sixteenthcentury Chinese novel Sanguo yanyi [Romance of the Three Kingdoms], which continues to be performed by oral storytellers today. In this episode, Lady Mi, one of the wives of Liu Bei, the pretender to the Han throne, sacrifices her own life in order to save the baby prince Adou. With only one horse between herself and the loyal general Zhao Yun, she throws herself into a nearby well so that he can ride and fight his way out of an ambush, carrying Adou. The strong moral and emotional message of this story is communicated with the subdued undertones inherited from the classic drumtale version of Liu Baoquan (1869...