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So go and get some books. Hi there. Welcome to New Books and East Asian Studies. I'm your host, Carla Nappy.
I just spoke with Chewie Angkha about his new book, Gilded Voices, economics, politics, and storytelling in the Yangtze Delta since 1949. And that came out with braille publishers just this year in 2012. Now this is a really interesting book. And the stories that Chewie Angk tell.
Hi there. Welcome to New Books and East Asian Studies. I'm your host, Carla Nappy. I just spoke with Chewie Angkha about his new book, Gilded Voices.
Economics, Politics, and Storytelling in the Yangtze Delta since 1949. And that came out with braille publishers just this year in 2012. Now this is a really interesting book. And the stories that Chewie Angk tells about how he came to this project and the interviews, especially that brought him to this book, are equally fascinating.
And so I'm going to keep this intro short and let you get right to the main event. But I will say that this is a book that's really interesting, not only for what it's arguing about the connection between politics and the market and how we understand cultural history of modern China, but also in its emphasis on the importance of taking genre and literary forms seriously when we are evaluating the historical power and impact and significance of documents. And so I had a great time talking with him, and I hope you'll enjoy. We're here today at New Books and East Asian Studies to talk with Chewie Angkha about his recent book, Gilded Voices, Economics, Politics, and Storytelling in the Yangtze Delta since 1949.
Now one of the really interesting things about this book, and one of the reasons that I was really excited to read it as a historian of China, is that it's not just of interest to scholars of literary and performance studies, scholars of theater, but also gives historians, and historians, I think, of all periods of Chinese history and beyond, actually, a window into a really interesting form of performed history or performed historiography in modern China. So welcome to New Books and East Asian Studies to you, the Yangtze Delta and thanks so much for being with us today. Thank you. Oh, it's a pleasure.
Yeah, it's my pleasure. So could you start us off by saying a little bit about what brought you to this field? What brought you to this particular field of Chinese history and also to this particular topic within that broader field? OK, very good.
Actually, this is not a traditional first book for young scholar. This is not based on my dissertation, but it was derived from my dissertation research. It was like four years ago, or actually, five years ago, it was in the summer of 2007. I went to Shanghai to conduct the research to expand my dissertation about a famous elopement happening in 1929.
I interviewed a pin-pan artist who continued to tell the story about the elopement from 50s all the way to the 2000s. He talked about not just how he performed the story, but also a lot of other things about the pin-pan story, others, communist officials, the censorship, and other things. So I was very interested in this. And I think it should be my second project after I revised my dissertation to be my first book.
But things changed dramatically. Eventually, I had chances to interview other pin-pan story tellers, and I figured that the whole generation was getting old. A lot of people I mentioned in my book, as you can see, actually passed away in the time span of five years between 2007 and now when I was working on the book. So I think it was a pricing task for me to finish the book as soon as possible.
So this was the major reason why I started to work on the book in 2008 and 2009, and a few years later, the book was published. So I think it started as just a byproduct of my dissertation, but it ended up to be my first book. And I think another factor behind my working on this book was about the conflicts of the artists and the state throughout the 60 years in the People's Republic of China. I think the theme was extremely interesting because I always assumed previously that the state always dominated the society, the audience, or along.
But as I interviewed all those artists and their listeners, their fans, I figured that actually the audience, the artists, the performers, had a lot of initiatives and they challenged the authorities of the political authorities. So this was the major reason I think I had something very different to say. So I think my book would have become the first one to examine the market's role in mediating between the states and the artists in People's Republic of China, especially before the 1970s. So this was the reason why I started the book as my first project instead of my dissertation.
Thank you. That's fascinating. And that's actually really interesting to hear about it. But I'm asking, what was the topic of your dissertation and what part of the project actually led you to this interview in the first place?
OK. Dissertation was about sensation locases in Shanghai in the 1920s. The first one was a murder of a prostitute in 1920. And the second one was a sensational elopement between a young lady from a wealthy family and her male servant in the late 1920s.
Storytellers started to tell the story of the elopement as early as in the 1930s. In the 50s as well as in the 1980s, 90s and 2000s continued to perform the story on stage. Initially, I tried to revise the second half of my dissertation to be a book. I would like to examine how the same story was represented in different ways, in different periods of time in modern China.
To examine the urban culture and how urban culture made the impact on policymaking and the consumers' personal identities. So this was the project I had in my mind before I came back to Shanghai to conduct the interviews with the art of this. Great. And then actually, it sounds like that story of the elopement is the basis for one of the Ping-Pans stories that you talk about in chapter six of this book, I think.
Exactly. Exactly. So wonderful. This is all really interesting to hear about.
So why don't we actually get right into the book? First things first, for our listeners, especially those of whom we never have heard of Ping-Pans storytelling, let's start at the very beginning. So this is a book about Ping-Pans storytelling. Can you explain for our listeners what Ping-Pans storytelling is?
What is that and how would you define it? OK. Ping-Pans storytelling was originated in the Yangtze Delta to be more specific. It was created in Sudo, a prosperous city ever since the Imperial times in China.
The storytellers used the Sudo dialect to tell the stories about the wars, the politics, the romantic loves between scholars and the beauties and the many other things. In people's republic of China, the storytellers were required to tell the stories about the Chinese Revolution and the Communist Party, as we can all expect. The Ping-Pans storytelling was actually a genre of two sub-genres. The first one was called the Tans.
Actually, there are a lot of scholars in even in North America who specialized studying time-sitting in period times and in modern times. Tans were basically storytelling art with musical accompaniment. And there was another sub-genre which was Ping-Pans. Ping-Pans was a musicless sub-genre of Ping-Pans.
In Ping-Pans performances, the storytellers just told the stories without any music. And usually, Tans' stories were about romantic loves and the Ping-Pans stories were about the wars, the good actors, and the Knight-Arrens martial arts or something like this. So Tans was a more masculine sub-genre and Ping-Pans was a more masculine sub-genre. Great.
Great stuff. So the book uses this example of Ping-Pans storytelling to re-examence cultural reform in the People's Republic of China. And in doing so, you, I think, very effectively challenged some widely held assumptions about that history in several ways. And one of the major assumptions I like that you challenge, I'd like to ask you to talk a little bit about.
And this comes up right at the beginning of the book. Ultimately, the book argues that the role of the party or state has been overemphasized in this history. While that of the market has been largely over-wooked in scholarship about this phenomenon or scholarship rather on cultural reform, especially before the Cultural Revolution. So can you talk about this way that you're trying to change scholarship on cultural reform by emphasizing or at least recovering a space for the role of the market?
OK, good question. For a long time, we have an assumption that the Chinese Communist Party was very good at disciplining the whole society, including the artists and their consumers. And we also had the assumption that the Communist Party and the Communist regime were specialized in collecting the artists. As a result, all artists, including the performers, became propagandists in a sense.
They were required. They were forced to propagate the agenda, social and political agendas of the Communist China. So this was the impression we have after reading a lot of scholarly works we have nowadays in North America, in China, and in many other places in the world. But after I interviewed the artists, especially the art in China artists in China, I got a different conclusion that actually the art the state was not that omnipotent and omnipresent.
There were a lot of hosts in the system. A large number of especially pin-ton artists relied on the market to survive and survive. The government was not able to patronize all the pin-ton artists because of the lack of financial capability. The government might issue a lot of documents to urge all the local governments to collectivize those artists.
But in reality, it was unrealistic. It was economically realistic. As a result, the artists, most of the pin-ton artists self-employed in the most part of the People's Republic of China. They were self-employed artists in the 50s, and they were self-employed artists in the 80s, 90s, and at the present.
So very clearly, there was a gap between the political pronouncement and the reality in China. So this was the reason I would challenge some large-scale assumptions about the cultural reform in China. We always pay a lot of attention to what the political documents had to say. But we usually ignore what the real issue was in the Chinese society and the pin-ton storytelling was the window through which we can better understand the Chinese society, politics, and the market.
So this was my intention when writing the book. Thank you. And in fact, that was one of the really interesting and surprising things in the book for me is how important you're arguing that market forces were. And I think it's a very refreshing perspective to this kind of a case study.
Now, another thing that the book tries to do, and you're very explicit about this in the introduction, is to argue for kind of continuity in the way we understand this period, and specifically for continuity between the Maoist and post-Maoist period. You argue here that the cultural revolution was actually not a watershed in the history of King Tan storytelling. So can you talk about just briefly the importance of this recourse to continuity and this argument about continuity for you? OK, good question.
Some scholars have discussed the continuity between the Republican China and the peoples of Republic of China. Basically, a lot of those scholars don't believe that 1949 was not a watershed in the Chinese history. There were a lot of continuities. In a similar fashion, I would argue that late 1970s was not a watershed either.
In terms of the cultural reform and cultural measurement, we can see the continuities in Maoist China and the post-Maoist China. Let me give you an example. For throughout the peoples of Republic of China, culture was always a second-tier thing. Economic development in different forms has always been the key issue for the government.
So in both periods of time, Maoist and the post-Maoist China, the governments tried to apply the ways, the rules, they got from economic development or economic reform to the cultural realm. So for example, as I have pointed in the third chapter, the government tried to use the way of planned economy to the development of the Pintan culture in the 50s and 60s. In the similar vein, in the 80s, the government went again, tried to borrow the ways of a contracted system in Chinese in the Chinese to revitalize the Pintan troops and artists. So in both cases, I would argue that actually the governments always believed that the culture was just the afterthought behind the economic development.
So in this sense, I would say they shared certain measures and approaches to deal with the cultural development and reforms in China. So this is the reason I would argue that actually post-Maoist China and Maoist China had a lot of similarities. Interestingly enough, my book actually didn't cover the cultural revolution because it is my belief that cultural revolution was an exception in the Chinese history in the past 60 years. It was only during the cultural revolution that could the government really dominate society and the culture in China.
And another aspect about the continuity between post-Maoist China was about the flexible approaches and policies adopted by the political authorities. In both times, the political authorities always took artists livelihood into consideration when they tried to push for some radical cultural reforms or changes in China. So in both cases, the artists livelihood would have become a barrier of cultural radicalism in the communist party. So I would say this was the reason I argue that we needed to pay some attention to the continuity between Maoist and the post-Maoist China.
Thank you so much. Now, you've already in the introduction, you mentioned a wide range of kinds of sources that you brought to this project. You've already talked a little bit about some of them in mentioning, in particular, the importance of interviews. Now, you've already talked about the ways that that shaped the direction that your story took and ways that are very, very fascinating along those lines, sort of saying with the topic of interviews, were there any major surprises in the course of these interviews for you?
Because I know that it was a major part of this project. You talk about them a lot in the book. It clearly shaped the direction that the book took. So any major surprises or were there any interviews individually that particularly stood out for you in the course of your research?
Actually, the very first interview was already a surprise to me. The artist who told the story about the elopement in 1920s cried. I was very surprised. I didn't expect such emotions in an interview like this.
He told me that he suffered a lot in the 80s when he tried to gain profits from telling the story. In the beginning, before I went to his home, I had the assumption that the Chinese government in the 80s and the 90s must support the artist to tell or perform those kinds of stories because it had a lot to do with the nostalgia for old Shanghai, the capitalism and the globalism in Shanghai in the 20s and the 30s. But I was totally unexpected that he actually had a lot of troubles in staging the story. He told me that his story was abandoned in Shanghai.
The Shanghai Bureau of Grants consistently harassed him where he performed the story in the Jiangsu and the other parts of Jiangsu Delta. So this was the major reason I eventually decided to write a book like this. I think it was interesting. It was a sad story and it was interesting to explore the life and the careers of the storytellers.
There were some other surprising things in my interviews, of course, for example, a storyteller who was imperged in the late 50s, refused to receive my interview. He was purged in the late 50s because of the incident I mentioned in a chapter of my book. He was sent to the remote Western province of Qinghai, actually. He stayed there for almost 20 years.
So he must have a very good story to tell about the conflicts and the revival of his career in the late 70s. He was a very successful storyteller, a very successful self-employed storyteller throughout the history of People's Republic of China. But he just refused to say anything to me. And one more thing.
Those who, a lot of storytellers who did conduct interview with me actually might not tell the truth. I'm not suggesting that they were lying in the interviews. But they could find a better way to hide their intentions. So I needed to be very careful when I analyzed their remarks after I started to work on these interview scripts.
So this was another thing I would like to mention. That's so interesting. There are now a million things that I want to ask you. OK.
But I won't do that because I'll move off. There's so many other things that I want to ask you about the book. So one of the other kinds of sources, though, that I think I want to ask you about before we move into the chapters, is something that you mentioned being very important and very powerful at the beginning. And this was the importance of archival sources.
Now, you mentioned that some of the archival materials that you quoted in the book, in addition to being really central for how you understand the story, are no longer publicly available. So can you talk for our listeners about the archives you use in the ways that they shape your project? OK. Archives are particularly important to my project, because only the archive, only with the assistance of the archives, I can give a big and complete a picture about the lives and the careers of those artists and the world of Pinton art as a whole.
According to the rule of Shanghai Municipal Archive, documents that files of 30 years of age would be open to the government, to the public, I should say. So that means, right now, I can review the archives in 1982 and before, of course, those sensitive documents have all been hidden by the National Municipal Archives. Those produced during the anti-right-est movement in 1957, and those produced during the Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1976, were basically gone. I cannot do any research about these things.
So it was a pity. I was infuriated when I searched for those archives. And this was another reason why I couldn't really write a chapter about the Cultural Revolution. Another thing was about the missing of some opened archives.
I used to see a couple of documents about the young Pinton artists' protest in the 1960s. They tried to withdraw from the state-owned troops, and they tried to establish their own Pinton performing enterprises. This was a very interesting story. Basically, this kind of information gives me the idea that in the 1960s, there were some resistance and protests in Shanghai, but not just the Shanghai, but in many parts of China.
But because the specifically artist has become very famous nowadays, I don't know for what a reason. And in what way, she was able to ask the Shanghai Municipal Archive to withdraw this file from the whole package. So after a couple of years, I was able to find the document, I think, in 2007, but in 2010, I was no longer able to read it. This was another thing I found very interesting about the archives.
One more thing was about the instructions written by some bureaucrats of communist party. And some instructions were written in a half-headed way. I don't think the persons who made the instructions actually started very carefully. They just arrived at what were in their mind.
So these information were very important, because it's used that they were thinking something else. And as I have said in the book, actually, when reading the archives, we can understand what the communist party officials initially thought about certain issues. And then they changed their mind. So the process of decision-making was very illuminating to my book.
And in other cases, some texts were deleted from the archives, but we can still read them. So I think if I work even harder, I may even get some more interesting and inspiring conclusions by reading the between the lines. See that is the start I have regarding the archives. Thank you so much.
Now, as we move into the next chapter of the book, the first chapter introduces many aspects of ping-tong storytelling, including the organization of the students, the modes of performance, the types of spaces that the performances of placing, the types of skills employed, et cetera, et cetera. You introduce here some of the most important elements of a ping-tong performance. And those elements include humor. They include something called stuck-ins or things.
Yes. Oh, yes, which is really interesting. It becomes important later on to the story. They include elaboration episodes and flexibility.
Now, this actually brings us to a really interesting conceptual point that you make. So one of the things that you do in the book is that you're re-examining the assumption about the effectiveness of the communist party censorship efforts in this period, right? Yes. In fact, the history of censorship in the context of ping-tong actually plays a major role in many of the chapters of the books.
So in this first chapter, you're arguing that the very structure and the very nature, the very form of ping-tong as a mode of performance actually helps make it censorship unfriendly. So you're actually arguing that one of the things that impacts this history of censorship, or the kind of failure there of in certain respects, interestingly, is the form itself of the genre. So can you talk about that a little bit? Actually, I have a strong bit of the form of a specific genre matters.
So when we talk about a specific cultural form, such as the film, the drama, or wherever the novel, we need to understand what's the uniqueness of a specific form. So I'm studying ping-tong storytelling. I'm not studying, say, Beijing Opera, or Chinese novel, or Chinese painting. So I need to ask myself, what was unique to the ping-tong storytelling?
And eventually, I concluded that the ping-tong was, first of all, a highly individualistic art. The ping-tong storytelling were able to garner high-profit high-profits with two or three, even one storytelling. So they had a tendency to resist to the characterization effort by the state after 1949. Another thing about the ping-tong storytelling was the flexibility in performance.
So in most of the cases, the audience would expect that the storytellers could tell something outside of the story, because the storytellers, as well as the listeners, were actually very familiar with the storytellers, especially those classic stories. So they needed to get something new on the database. So this was required by the market. So for generations of storytellers, they learned how to perform in a very flexible way on stage.
So if that was the case, I would argue that the sensors would have no chance to listen to the real storytelling on the stage, because as soon as the sensors came, the storytellers would automatically change their confidence and the form. So this would make this ping-tong storytelling censorship and friendly. And the ping-tong storytelling had a very interesting aspect, such as the organization. So ping-tong storytelling would become a very useful case for me to battle the assumptions about the communist party's ability to collectivize the artists, because most of the ping-tong storytelling has remained self-employed.
It is actually because of the characteristics of ping-tong organization. So this was the reason I explained some characteristics of ping-tong storytelling in the very first chapter. But I was not just talking about what the ping-tong was in the first chapter. I talked about ping-tong organizations, ping-tong modes of performance, ping-tong training, and lack of text, because all these things had strong political implications.
And they would contribute to ping-tong artists who resisted through the status supervision and the intervention in the past 60 years. So this is the reason I detailed the ping-tong in the first chapter. Thank you so much. Now, we've talked a little bit about state censorship.
And the next chapter actually gets us to complicate this story by raising the issue of what might be called self-censorship. So this is a chapter. So in the context of the chapter, it's now the early 1950s. And communist cadres are pushing for a sweeping reform of ping-tong storytelling in order to fit the broader CCP agenda.
Now, this chapter explores one result of this, which is called, or which you translate as cutting the tail of the ping-tong performers that has been described as a kind of self-censorship. Can you describe that for our, talk about that a little bit for our listeners? Yeah. The first chapter was set in three years immediately after this CCP takeover of China.
So this was a crucial plan for all ping-tong storytellers, because they needed to make a decision about how to deal with the new historical times. Some of them would be willing to join the enterprise, performing enterprises organized by the CCP. And some of them would choose to be the self-employed and storytellers, just like before. But the one thing was very confusing in the first several years of the People's Republic of China was to what extent the new regime would tolerate the classic stories.
According to a lot of radical leftists in CCP, the classic stories were filled with feudal ideologies, such as polygamy, such as the loyalty to the emperors. So everyone was confused, not just the storytellers, but also the government bureaucrats, the CCP officials. So in this confusing times, storytellers tried to survive the regime change by censoring themselves. They cut the tail of feudalism.
So I translated it as cutting the tail. Actually, this was done by Chinese. But it didn't work, to be honest. What I tried to point out in the first chapter was, first of all, even though until today, a lot of ping-tong historians in China continue to boast that the cutting the tail movement was very successful because virtually all the ping-tong storytellers quit their classic stories and started to tell the new stories.
But this was true, as I have said in the book. Actually, a lot of storytellers secretly are openly resisted to the movement of cutting the tail. They continue to tell the classic stories. Some of them initially agreed to quit to the classic stories, but eventually they resumed telling the classic stories.
So my point was, the cutting, the movement of cutting the tail never really prevailed in China, in Yangtze Delta, because there were still a lot of storytellers who continued to tell the classic stories. And the second, the movement of cutting the tail was actually supported by the government. And the governmental coercion was very clear in the process. The Carter's actually secretly punished the artists who continued to tell the stories, the classic stories.
And the Carter sometimes criticized that the journalists and magazines who didn't approve of the staging of the new stories. And the movement of cutting the tail ended in 1952. Actually, it gives us some idea about the market's role in the process. The artists simply couldn't survive by only telling the new stories.
They had to make money by telling the classic stories. The audience just didn't buy. So from this, we can just end up that the government, even though the government tried to push for a total reform, total change in contest storytelling, it just didn't work out. The storytellers would starve if they continued to tell the new stories and the quick to the classic stories.
So the government had to take the storytellers' livelihood into consideration this time. So this would reason why the movement of cutting the tail ended very quickly after it was implemented in 1951. Just one year, I would say. But at any rate, my point was this moment was never really completely carried out.
It was initiated by some progressive storytellers. But in the end of the day, it was the storytellers who succeeded in resisting to the movement. They initiated themselves. So from this, I can point out that the radical cultural movement in the early people's republic of China was not that successful as the historians in China choose to believe.
Now, even given that, one of the really interesting things that you go on to show in the course of the book, and this is both in the next chapter, and also throughout the other chapters, is that there were actually quite substantial or significant transformations or evolutions of Ping Tan Azur genre over the course of this history. So we're laid in the book. Excuse me, in one of the last chapters, you mentioned, for example, the kind of transformations that emerge from the availability of Ping Tan storytelling on television, and the fact that you actually were able to experience in your own research some of these stories through the internet. Now, one of the transformations early on in this genre is something that you describe in the next chapter here that comes directly from some of the implications of chapter two.
And this is the development of a new genre of Ping Tan stories that were called middle-length Ping Tan stories. Now, because this seems so, the development of this new genre of Ping Tan seems actually really important, not just for this chapter, but for actually setting the stage for what's going to happen later. Can you talk a little bit about this new genre? I think it's three hour long stories.
And why is that important? And why was that so central to what happened in the story of Ping Tan? Yeah, middle-length Ping Tan stories were extremely important, especially for the CCP officials. Because initially, it was created in order to promote the social and political agendas for the Communist Party.
But it turned out to be a major amusement for the city residents in Shanghai and in many other big cities in the Yangtze Delta. So the thrust of the argument in chapter three was that the politicized culture sometimes would have become entertainment. So initially, I tried to invent a term, entertaining politics to indicate the process. This genre, the middle-length story, the middle-length Ping Tan story was created in early 1950s.
Initially, the storytellers cooperated with the government to try to complete a story within three hours. So if that's the case, Ping Tan storytelling would be very similar to drama and the films in terms of the length. And the storytellers didn't expect the success of the genre because they still felt that the full-length stories were the mainstream genre Ping Tan storyteller. But unexpected that.
And unexpectedly, listeners in the Yangtze Delta welcomed the middle-length stories because of the change of working rhythms in the cities. And because of the length, a lot of previously non-fence such as students and workers would become the Ping Tan listeners. Because previously, they didn't have time to enjoy Ping Tan on a daily basis. They could not afford to go to theaters or ski houses to listen to Ping Tan stories every night.
But when the middle-length Ping Tan stories were performed, they would have the chance to go to theaters. I use the term storyhouse of course in my book. When is the week, for example? So in this sense, the creation of a new genre rebuked the Ping Tan story as a mass entertainment in Shanghai and in other big cities in Yangtze Delta.
So this was the point I would like to make in my chapter. But another thing about the chapter was that even though the CCP officials tried to infuse revolutions and other ideologies into the stories, but the audience enjoyed the middle-length stories as entertainment, not as political indoctrination. So from this, I argue that even the political culture, even the propaganda or whether we take an entertainment in the 1950s and the 60s, in essence, propaganda and entertainment share something in common. That means both propaganda and entertainment should capture the audience.
So this is the reason I would say that Ping Tan, the middle-length Ping Tan stories were extremely successful as a new subgenre of Ping Tan storytelling. Even though by nature, it started as a political culture. But eventually, the audience received the stories for different reasons and the purposes. And they were taken as pure entertainment for a lot of listeners.
On the contrary, on the other side of the story, I would argue that because of the creation of the middle-length Ping Tan stories, the government officials were very satisfied with the new creation because they could use this new job to compete with self-employed story tellers in the market, which resulted in some conflicts of what we can see from this next chapter. So by studying the middle-length Ping Tan stories, I would say the government, the cadres, the CCP officials were good at creating new markets to both garner profits and promote as a ideology. So this is the dual roles of middle-length Ping Tan stories in the 50s and the 60s. Thank you so much.
Now, in the interest of time, what I'm going to do is, I'll just briefly mention some of the things that you do in some of the chapters along the way, and then sort of bring us to the last part of the book, which also is a very interesting continuation of this set of arguments that you're giving us that really seem to prioritize or ask us to prioritize the form of a genre, the form of either a literary or performative genre in looking at the historical implications that emerge from that form. So you've already mentioned this conflict in the next chapter, that arose between state-employed and self-employed Ping Tan story tellers. And you describe the implications of this and the effect of this on the communities of Ping Tan story tellers. Then you take us through the period after the Great Glory, which was completely disastrous, as many of the listeners will know.
But after, as the economy revived and cultural control sort of loosened what that cultural thought meant for Ping Tan story tellers and the ways that that affected the kinds of troops that grew up out of that and the kinds of people who were actually engaged in these performances and the sort of forms of resistance that they were able to enact using these new troops and this new sort of cultural thought as a platform. You then move us into the reform era, right? And just look at the new emerging market that arises, especially in the context of this formation of five collectively owned troops in Shanghai and the way that what happens after they lose their professional status and the cultural revolution basically deals a really crushing blow to this as a profession. And in that chapter, or in chapter six, listeners will remember that you mentioned actually early on what brought you into this book project in the first place, which is an interview with one of the authors about this Ping Tan story about an elopement.
So you mentioned two self-employed performers in this chapter. And then I'll sort of bring us into the later chapters after I ask you about this. One of these performers that you mentioned, his name was Yang Zhejiang. Yes, Yang Zhe River, basically.
Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now this storyteller is really, really interesting because as you tell us, he was a, this brings us into issues of intellectual property and authorship because this is a first Ping Tan storyteller who actually used the legal system to defend intellectual property rights. So because that's potentially of a really wide interest to a lot of different kinds of people who might be interested in this book.
Can you talk about that a little bit for us? Yeah, Yang Zhejiang has always been a unique storyteller. Because first of all, he didn't receive any training as a storyteller. He was from a wealthy family which had a lot of relationships with the Goming down nationalist bureaucrats before 1949.
Because of this, he lost everything. His parents were arrested by the communist authorities after 1949. He lost his job, his properties, everything. So he had to embark on a storytelling career to survive in the 50s.
He didn't receive the training, so he couldn't sing. So he could only tell the Ping Hwa stories without music, without musical accompaniment. But he was a very different person, essentially, because he had received a high education. He was a university graduating in Shanghai in the 40s.
So he had the ability to write the stories better than anyone else in the world of Ping Tan. And most of the Ping Tan stories, by the way, especially in the older generations were illiterate. They couldn't write about themselves. So Yang Zhejiang could write.
So in the 80s, he was banned from the world of Ping Tan for 10 years. In the time span of one decade, he developed four stories. And actually, in his lifetime, he wrote many more than just four. One of the stories was very popular.
It was about the country emperor in the Qing dynasty. This story was extremely popular so that some Ping Tan story tellers, especially the Yang Ping Tan story tellers in the true, true Ping Tan truth, aim to learn the story from Yang Zhejiang. And they end the fame and the fortune because of the story. In the late 1990s, Yang Zhejiang learned that these people, these artists became nationwide, Ping Tan, nationwide popular Ping Tan story tellers.
They end their fame because of the story he wrote. So he was very angry about that. I don't know if they actually negotiated with each other in the 90s before Yang Zhejiang brought the lawsuit on the court. And many story tellers in the 1990s did believe that Yang Zhejiang would win the lawsuit, to be honest, because Yang Zhejiang always was always punished by the political authorities in the 50s, in the 60s, in the 70s, and the 80s.
But at this time, China was entering into a new age. China was about to join the WTA. So intellectual properties became a very sensitive issue, nationwide. And in the court wrote that the Shoojo Ping Tan's troop had to discuss with Yang Zhejiang, negotiate with Yang Zhejiang in order to work out a deal.
Eventually Yang Zhejiang got some conversations from the Shoojo Ping Tan troop. I interviewed Yang Zhejiang personally before he died. This was really a shock to me, actually. He was very proud of that.
Eventually, he could win something from the state, according to himself. But this was a very unique thing in the world of Ping Tan, because for hundreds of years, disciples learned the stories from their masters. And before the masters adopted those disciples, the disciples' family would pay some money, usually like $100 or $200 or something like this. So if the fees have been paid, that means the disciples would automatically get the rights to tell the stories, develop their own masters.
But in this case, Yang Zhejiang actually challenged the century-long practice in the Ping Tan storytelling. And the Shoojo Ping Tan troop was very unhappy with this, is that it is actually because of this reason. If this practice was vetoed by the lead authorities, it would be impossible for the masters to pass down their stories to their disciples in the future. So Yang Zhejiang was sometimes regarded as a black sheep in the world of Ping Tan storytelling because of this.
But you can understand, the most interesting part of the story was the new environment, the new legal and economic environment in the late 1990s, which enabled Yang Zhejiang to win the lawsuit against the Shoojo Ping Tan troop. So that was the interesting part. Thank you so much. Now, Enrita, I don't want to keep you pretty long.
So before we wrap up, there's just one more thing that I'd like to ask you. And what I'll do is I'll mention for listeners. After this chapter, the final body chapter before the epilogue looks at the rise of Ping Tan stories about the political histories of the PRC and the CCP since the late 1990s. And so this brings us into very modern context.
So one of the things that happens is that specifically, we see a transformation in the spaces of Ping Tan and to Ping Tan story houses into public spaces for socialization of retirees and for the elderly. And so there's a really interesting component to this story, which is about the kind of history of social management of the elderly and retired, and which is really, really interesting and I think surprising in this chapter. But you think that I want to ask you about very briefly before we wrap up, it's another element of the story that I think actually very interestingly bears on historiography, and it's very surprisingly. So you argue here that the stories of one of the artists will be gone, like the stories of Yang Tijang, who just were talking about, they actually so they counteractive state efforts to, as you say, obliterate unapproved memories.
So unapproved memories of the kind of nasty bits of PRC history from listeners lived experience. And so you're arguing here that these performances actually functioned as a form of history making for the audiences. They functioned as a form of collective memory. And this is actually really interesting from the perspective of just the way we think about the formation of historical records.
And so I'd love before we wrap up here, if you could say a little bit about that and that aspect of what's happening here. Yeah, the last part of the book was about the reconstruction history of people's Republic of China and CTP in the stories. So I was basically talking about the two things. First, it was about the Asian society in China.
And the government faced a real challenge about how to deal with the Asian society in China, how to manage, how to pacify these retirees. The second one was about how these retirees received the pin-hand stories in their day to day life. I think pin-hand was important for the retirees in the Yang state, essentially, because it gives them the chance to go to a story on a daily basis. So they could stay with the same group of listeners every day.
So a kind of public group came into being because of this. When they were in the story houses, they enjoyed the so-called political stories, the stories about the PRC and the CTP's history. And in the meantime, I argue that in the past 60 years, a lot of historical events were erased from the Chinese historiography. The government sponsored the historians were reluctant to talk about things like a cultural revolution as well as the Tianan massacre.
But interestingly enough, all these events found mentioned in the stories by Ligong, Yang Zdai, and many other storytellers. So these storytellers helped these elder storytellers to reconstruct their memories, to remind them what was going on when they were young. And these retirees, these older listeners, had been red guards, or the people who were purged by the communist party or as the sented-down youth. So the storytellers played a very significant role to help them refresh their memories.
But in the meantime, the storyteller reminded that they were not only the victims or the actions of the past, they were just the good people who lived through the past. They were just like the communists in the classic stories who survived the wars, the natural disasters, the good that was among the emperors and the bureaucrats in classic stories. So in this sense, the political pin-hand stories played a very important role to assure these older listeners of personal identities as a people who lived through the past six decades. So this was the point I would like to make.
Thank you so much. Now, Chidion, we've taken up a lot of your time. Thank you so much for being here today. Now, there's a lot in the book that, it's a very rich book and there's a lot that we didn't have a chance to talk about in our hour today.
Is there anything in particular that we didn't cover but that you'd like to point out for our listeners? Actually, those who may not yet have had the chance to read the book. One thing I would actually point out is that I always think genre matters. This is the reason why I put the chapter one function as an introductory chapter of pin-hand storytelling.
I think pin-hand storytelling tellers were particularly good at resisting the state intervention and supervision because of the genre. They were trained to be elusive sometimes. So this was the reason why it's extremely interesting and illuminating to study the pin-hand storytelling and its relationship with the politics and the market. Another thing is that sometimes later, I may want to write another book about the pin-hand storytelling during the cultural revolution, but it's going to be hard.
I think it's going to be a good compliment to this one. Wonderful. And so now that this book is out, what's next for you? What can we look forward to reading next or at least what project is particularly inspiring you with the woman?
I need to go back to my dissertation, definitely. So I'm actually writing a second book. The title might be The Love Between Huang and Lu Women's Agency Consumer Culture and the Conservatism in 1920s China. So as I have said, the book centers on the elopement in 1920s.
The young woman whose last name was Huang eloped with her sweetheart, her servant from Shanghai to Sudo. And it was a national sensation. News journalists from Sudo, but not just limited to these two places. The journalist from Beijing and many other places all covered the case in great detail.
The dramatists played the elopement on the stage. The novelists wrote a number of novels based on the elopement. There were three at least three films made for the story. So there were a lot of going on because of the sensational elopement in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
So by using this case, I would like to argue that all these entertainers, filmmakers, journalists, novelists, collectively denied the subjectivity of Chinese women in this period of time. They all called for the women's return to home. So they prioritized the family value over women's independent will in this case. So by doing this, I would argue that the nationalist conservatism in the 1930s was built on a social consensus to revive or restore the traditional morals such as family value.
In the book, I will piece together several different aspects of historical research. I will put together such as legal history, women's studies, media studies, and journalist history, and some like this into a one book by focusing on this case. So I think I'm in good shape of completing this book pretty soon because I have written several chapters. And it's a bit because it was part of my dissertation.
So that's what my second project. Well, that sounds great too. And so good luck with that research. And thank you so much again for taking the time to talk with us today.
Thank you. You've been listening to new books and East Asian studies. Thanks so much for joining us. And we'll see you next time.