Ladies and gentlemen — Shecan, at your service. I eat with my mouth.
One strike of the gavel-block, one open mouth, and half the street is my stage. The Monkey King's Birth, Borrowing Treasure from the Dragon Palace, Havoc in Heaven — I've told these three for twenty years. I know in my sleep where the laugh lands and where to hold the pause. In Tang and Song times my trade was called shuohua — "telling tales" — performed standing in the pleasure quarters. I'm a poor shadow of those ancestors, but for Aolai Town, I do.
This plague year, my stage changed.
Take The Monkey King's Birth. I reach the part where light shoots from the newborn's eyes to the Dipper Palace, and some child always shouts: and then? Did the Great Sage come home? And I stall. Twenty years without stalling — this year, I stall. The children don't know the stele cracked; their parents keep it from them. So I say: to hear what happens next, come back tomorrow. Tomorrow? I don't know how to tell it either.
Then I found a way: I keep telling the old tales, and I tell the news besides. What happened in the peach woods today, whose herbs came home from the ravine tomorrow, which way the bounty-taking young man went the day after — I call it "news-telling." News is harder than old tales. Botch a tale, nobody minds; botch the news and it costs someone their life. So I hold three rules: what I didn't see, I preface with "they say"; what I can't confirm, with "about"; and for the dead and wounded, I give the name before the story — the name first, out of respect.
People ask: Shecan, what's in it for you? Money?
A storyteller works for money — but not only money. Think: if the plague breaks the town's spirit, the town is finished. As long as my stage stands one more day, the town's heart holds one more day. One mouth feeds half a street — not bellies. Breath.
If you've come down from Flower-Fruit Mountain with something fresh, sit in my audience and tell me. Front-row seat, reserved for you.
One condition — don't tell me about the stele. I'm saving the stele. The day the whole of it can be told, I'll tell it for three days and nights without stopping.