Singing Dead Tales to Life: Rhetorical Strategies in Shandong Fast Tales

Shandong kuaishu, literally “fast tales,” is a northern Chinese narrative performance1 tradition with more than one hundred years of documented history. This tradition involves a single performer who integrates rhymed and rhythmic narration, character dialogue, various dramatic techniques, rhythmic musical accompaniment, humor, and exaggeration to bring to life stories and characters in a form of popular entertainment. Performers describe the genre as a folk art that combines the artistic telling of stories with rhyme and rhythm. Fast tales are performed throughout northern and central China for a wide range of audiences and occasions. Performers appear on and off proscenium stages, on television, radio, and the Internet as well as during rural bazaars, as part of holiday variety shows, and for celebratory banquets (Shepherd 2005). Story scripts, or jiaoben, are also regularly appreciated as a form of popular literature in various written and electronic formats. Enjoyed by young and old speakers of northern Mandarin dialects, Shandong fast tales are indigenous to and often representative of Shandong Province, a coastal region of northeastern China known also as the home of Confucius and the cradle of traditional Chinese thought. Shandong, literally “east (of) mountains,”2 refers to a geographic, political, and cultural region located on the eastern edge of the north China plain and extending outward to form a peninsula that appears on the map to point directly at the center of the Korean Peninsula. It is bordered to the north by Hebei Province, to the west by Henan Province, and to the south by Jiangsu Province. Jinan, situated in the heart of Shandong’s agricultural west, is the provincial political capital, while Qingdao, located on the southeast coast, is the provincial economic center. Covering an area of more than 156,000 square kilometers (slightly smaller than the state of Oral Tradition, 26/1 (2011): 27-70