The return of the storytellers

BEIJING --AS SHE TAKES the stage in the musty dining room theater of the Lao She teahouse near Tiananmen Square, Ma Zumei receives only a smattering of applause. After performances by Chinese opera singers clad in lush costumes and dancers with whirling swords, the sight of this portly middle-aged woman clad in an elegant evening gown has a somewhat anticlimactic effect.

Zumei, a traditional Chinese storyteller, performs in the pingshu style common in China's northern provinces, where the storyteller's stylized, high-pitched voice, accompanied by folk instruments, alternates between passages of prose and rhymed metrical verse. As Zumei whispers her first words, accompanied by a young man playing a three-stringed instrument called the san xian, giggles burst from the younger people and foreigners in the audience. Her shrill voice, cascading tones, and exaggerated gestures are a far cry from the saccharine smoothness of modern popular music. But before long, the audience is laughing and applauding enthusiastically.

''It's a rather plaintive story called 'Just before dawn,"' a Chinese friend of mine explains. ''It's about waking up in a village with the monks walking to the temple, the farmers going off to the fields, the women dressing up, etc., but she's adding all kinds of funny, modern things that are making people laugh," including references to TV characters.

China's traditional storytellers are making a comeback, combining classical stories with contemporary commentary and humor to reach new audiences. Dozens of new and reopening teahouses in Beijing and other cities, such as Chengdu in central Sichuan province, now feature traditional storytellers. Some are even featured on radio shows.

Storytellers figured prominently in China's popular culture for centuries, finding rich material in the country's intricate myths and history. Like the minstrels of Europe, the storytellers preserved ageless tales, taught religion, entertained listeners with bawdy jokes, and engaged in political protest, often with a wry subtlety that infuriated local mandarins, who feared that teahouses, where men spent hours in bamboo chairs sipping tea, playing games or cards, and conducting business transactions, were hotbeds of dissent.

Denied royal patronage, most storytellers performed in streets and public marketplaces, and storytelling was initially seen as a profession of low social standing inhabited by ''scoundrels and scum," as one 12th-century text put it. Only the narrators of Buddhist and other religious texts got any respect at all. It was only in the 17th century that Liu Ching-t'ing, a storyteller who told bewitching tales of the Ming dynasty's battles with the invading Manchu, endeared himself to powerful generals and the royal court.

Liu's prominence gave a new shine to the entire profession, and by the 1700s, storyteller guilds were forming. As the power of the emperor was crumbling in the late 1800s, special storytelling theaters called shu-changs opened across China.

The shu-changs ''became the 'university of the common people,"' said Zumei, ''the way we learned about our ways and our history." And the shuo-shu, or ''telling books," in which storytellers catalog their stories, are some of the only reliable records of ancient China that survive, Zumei added.

But when the Communist Party came to power in 1949, the state clamped down on storytelling. ''It was the time of the Si Qing," says Zumei, referring to the ''four cleans" - a political program seeking to cleanse China of old politics, old thoughts, old economics, and old organizations. ''Suddenly [traditional] storytelling was labeled reactionary and superstitious."

By the mid-1960s, when Mao's Cultural Revolution was in full fury, the art was totally banned, Zumei says. Many storytellers were killed or sent to reeducation camps, and all the teahouses and theaters where they had performed were closed. ''In the end," she says, ''only a handful of us survived."

The art would have died, but in the early 1970s Communist leaders wanting to stir national sentiments co-opted the form to spread Communist ideas. ''We were made to sing good Communist songs," says another storyteller, Chen Xiu Min, 44, who first began storytelling in the only place one could during Maoist years - in a traveling troupe of the People's Liberation Army that performed patriotic skits for soldiers. ''Suddenly new stories were written for us...like paeans to the beauty of Mongolia which inculcated a love within common people for disputed territories."

Chen smirked at the memory. But, she said, ''in a way the army kept the art alive."

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After her performances, Zumei calms her throat with a special tea. Unlike in Western opera, pingshu performers play all the parts in their story, and Zumei has just created nine different voices on stage, including a high-pitched squeak for a village belle and a fast-paced chatter for a loquacious husband. It is such aspects of her art that purists relish, though some say Zumei's ''modernizing" of old stories is pandering to a contemporary audience raised on television and movies.

''It's just an imitation of the real art," said Li Chen, 63, after watching Zumei's performance with his wife and grandchildren. But another man in the audience, who gave his name only as Bo, said he enjoyed the bits Zumei threw in about the stress of modern life and the obsession with fashion. ''It just made me laugh," he said, adding that it didn't strike him that the jokes he liked were modern until it was pointed out to him.

This marriage of ancient tales with modern dilemmas and references is essential to keeping storytelling relevant to audiences, Zumei said. Of course, she added, storytellers have always responded to the times.

Today, however, most of the teahouse stories lack the biting satire of previous generations. The Chinese government is an infamously capricious censor, and storytellers, like other public performers and writers, tend to self-censor their material.

Zumei, for her part, says she steers clear of particularly sensitive subjects, such as the rising rural protests taking place all over China. She also admits quite a few of her new jokes rely on slapstick and sex to tickle audiences, and that the wit of the older stories is gone - along with the days when people ambled into ramshackle teahouses to listen to wandering storytellers.

But, says Zumei, ''We will still have made a difference." The stories ''are part of life here and in one form or another they'll last forever."

Jehangir S. Pocha is Globe correspondent in Beijing.