Long ago in medieval China lived a warrior named Wu Song.
So the story began – roughly translated from Chinese – as performed by Eric Shepherd, lecturer of Chinese in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures Wednesday night.
Under the flourescent lights of an everyday classroom in Hagerty Hall, a rapt audience was transported into the legendary world of Wu Song, a Chinese hero and popular folk character in Chinese myth. It was told using a traditional technique called Shandong kuai shu, a form of storytelling originated in the southwest of China’s Shandong province. Literally kuai shu translates into “fast tales.” The stories are told ever-changing tempo depending on the emotion at hand.
The night’s story hat was a humorous short story about a calender year in the life of a man who was born in January and died in December. Accompanied with the beat of brass Mandarin duck plates, called yuan yang ban, Shepherd captured the audience with his rapid, enthusiastic storytelling and the skillful use of the flat, half-moon discs sandwiched between the fingers of his left hand.
Shepherd then moved on to tell his main story, a lively rendition of an excerpt from “The Water Margin,” a popular 120-chapter Ming Dynasty novel, called “Wu Song Kills the Tiger.”
Shepherd placed the audience in the middle of Wu Song’s journey home to see his older brother, whom he has not visited for a long time. On the way he stops at by an inn with a flag posted out front that reads, “three bowls of our wine and you can’t cross the ridge,” meaning that the strength of the wine is so terribly potent that more than three would knock an ordinary man to the floor. Wu Song orders his allowance of three, drinks them and compliments the innkeeper. Yet he wants more. Wu Song drinks eighteen bowls of the wine. The innkeeper, feeling responsible for Wu Song after so much alcohol, tries to get him to stay at his inn. He refuses to stay, believing the innkeeper is making it up excuses.
Shepherd’s vocal abilities separated the roles of the narrator, Wu Song and the innkeeper, making it easy for the audience to separate the different speakers. Both stories were told entirely in Chinese and transcended cultural barriers as Shepherd threw himself into the performance, drawing in the audience with his vocal inflections, varying tempos and overall dramatic skills. The captivated audience was hypnotized by the (almost) musical quality of Shepherd’s storytelling and the flashing of the brass discs as he effortlessly kept the rapid beat.
By the final bow, the audience seemed to release a collective sigh as it was pulled back to reality.
A question and answer segment followed the performance and Shepherd informed the crowd on a brief history of kuai shu, his training in the art of ballad telling and some of its background.
According to an excerpt from his dissertation, in kuai shu performers combine rhymed and rhythmic narration, character dialogue, various dramatic techniques, rhythmic musical accompaniment, humor and exaggeration to create a complex form of popular entertainment. The type of stories told are typically about everyday happenings that everyone can relate to, but with a twist to make it comical.
Shepherd has the distinction of being the only foreigner trained in this kind of storytelling in the Shandong dialect. His interest in this form of storytelling began during his research for US/China Links, a program connecting interns with Chinese culture and customs, when he wrote a book on banquets in China and the importance they have on maintaining relationships of all kinds. It was at these banquets, he said, that he saw his first kuai shu performance and developed an interest. His training began when he was introduced to his master Wu Yanguo.
Shepherd apprenticed from 2004-05 under third generation master storyteller Yanguo, the best and most famous apprentice of Li Hongji, a master who studied under Gao Yuanjun, the founder of the modern version of this genre from the southwest of Shandong.
“Li and Wu taught me just about everything I know about storytelling in China and both promoted me heavily in China in all forms of media,” Shepherd said. “Both Li and Gao were national figures in China and performed for leaders such as Zhou Enlai in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.”
The training process began with a ceremony to signify his submission to his master and approval by all the other masters. In the beginning, Shepherd said he shadowed Yanguo, going with him to various events, doing everything his master said. All in accordance to his ballad-telling training.
“I was the performing monkey,” Shepherd said referring to his apprenticeship.
After a few events, Yanguo taught Shepherd the rhythm for the brass plates and it was weeks before he picked it up. With the rhythm down, Shepherd was then taught words. During this stage, he was still attending events with his master and would practice at banquets. Building the movements, then adding the words to the beat was as the final step. Shepherd was then thrown into his first performance unexpectedly as he thought he would be videotaping his master’s event but was then told by the troopmaster to emcee which led into a surprise performance.
“I got off the stage and the troupe master asked me, ‘Are you ready to tell a story?” I said, ‘No, I’m not ready for that,’ and then he went onstage and announced me,” he said.
From that first performance, Shepherd went on to a variety of shows: propoganda events, company meetings and banquets. Through his training he said he encountered parts of the Chinese culture he never knew existed. He went from the academic and business world to interacting with everyone from construction workers to military people.
“I went through a culture shock even though I had been in China for a number of years,” Shepherd said. “This was a sector of society I’d never been in.”
With his return to the states and teaching Chinese at OSU, Shepherd said his experience can be used offstage and in the classroom. It broadens his techniques for teaching, he said.
“If a student doesn’t understand something you can show them through movement,” he said. “Also it allowed me to understand how Chinese people think and that can be applied to my teaching situation.”
