Hsu Fu-neng lives for the shadow puppet show. Numerous visitors--drama scholars, postgraduates, government cultural organization staffers, and reporters--make their way to his tiny house in a remote village, seeking guidance and inspiration.
"Come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out." So said the manager of the puppet theater in Thackeray's Vanity Fair . But for Hsu Fu-neng(許福能), 74, Taiwan's foremost exponent of shadow puppetry, the play goes on. Since his wife died of cancer thirty-seven years ago, he has been living alone in a small two-storied cement house down a short alley in Kaohsiung county's Mito village, near the tiny fishing port of Nanliao. Although his three daughters are all married and have their own families in different parts of the island, he has no plans to move.
"I prefer life in the countryside," Hsu says, "I like the open spaces, clean air, the easygoing neighborhood--the carefree life, in fact." Although a little hard of hearing, his mind is as clear as a bell, and his hands remain as deft as ever. After rising at five o'clock, he generally spends the morning working on new shadow puppets or keeping his equipment in good repair. Then, after a simple lunch, he mounts his motorcycle and either goes out for a joy ride or visits friends. "I'm usually in bed by ten," he says. "Once I turned seventy, I gave up working as a chef. Now I'm free to concentrate on my real interest, shadow puppets."
Hsu is in a truly fortunate situation, because since the 1960s, when Taiwan's shadow puppet theater began to decline in the face of competition from movies and the video industry, it has been virtually impossible for shadow puppeteers to earn a living from performances alone. That is why most members of Taiwan's shadow puppet troupes have to take daytime jobs, just as Hsu himself once did.
This morning, Hsu is busy making a new puppet under an awning in his front yard, which is littered with the timber-and-steel frames that he uses to build his open-air stage, rolls of leather, and a number of amplifiers. "I like to work outdoors in summer, because it's cooler," he says, selecting a knife from among the many on the nearby table. While he works on a dragon's head, a neighbor's little girl brings in her younger brother. "He's the greatest shadow puppet master in Taiwan," she proclaims proudly. It is no exaggeration: Hsu performed at the Hong Kong Arts Festival in 1990, in the United States and Canada in 1994, and in France in 1995, and he is currently preparing for another performance in France next year. But for now he pays no attention to the girl--his head remains bent over his work and his hands never falter.
To make a new puppet, Hsu first draws the outline in pencil on the leather. Then, he cuts out the shape and focuses on the details, using colored marker pens to paint the figures. It takes him two to three days to finish one puppet. He makes all his knives himself, and has a mechanical grindstone to keep them sharp.
Hsu's troupe presently consists of six people, most of them family members. "One of my older brothers is in his eighties, but he still plays the drum as part of the musical accompaniment," Hsu says. "And his son plays the two-stringed Chinese violin." Because Hsu himself is getting on in years, however, his younger brother has succeeded him as principal performer.
Besides Hsu's relatives, his troupe boasts a number of apprentices. "They're from neighboring villages, usually in their thirties," he says. "Nowadays, fewer and fewer people are interested in learning shadow puppetry, because they can't see any future in it. Besides, government sponsorship came too late--the older generation of shadow puppet masters had all but died out then."
Hsu is referring to the fact that in 1985, the Kaohsiung County Cultural Center mounted a shadow puppet theater workshop with the intention of training about fifty primary and secondary schoolteachers in this ancient form of theater. Participants learned about the history and background of shadow puppetry and were given the opportunity to make puppets, write plays, and produce their own performances.
Since then, with the help of financial assistance from the Cabinet's Council for Cultural Affairs, the center has been able to fund the few surviving shadow puppet troupes and help them improve and refine their art. Since 1993, it has also success fully organized annual shadow puppet workshops that pass down the skills to interested amateurs under Hsu's supervision, and in 1994 the center opened a Shadow Puppet Museum.
According to Chang Yueh-ying (張月英), head of the department of exhibition and promotion at the Kaohsiung County Cultural Center, shadow puppet theater originated with performances put on at temple ceremonies or to celebrate festivals such as weddings, anniversaries, and housewarmings. Such performances were usually a means of thanking the gods or goddesses of various folk religions for granting the wishes of supplicants.
They took place behind a screen, usually either three by five or five by seven feet in dimension. Nowadays, half a dozen or so electric bulbs are used to back-light this screen, behind which the performers manipulate their puppets by means of bamboo sticks connected to the figures' joints. As long as the puppets are held close to the screen and in front of the lights, their shadows will create a clear image for the audience on the other side.
Shadow puppetry remains highly impromptu, another throwback to its origins. For example, only after a performer has picked up a specific puppet do the musicians know what kind of music to play, and in practice it is difficult to predict when the puppeteer will actually take up a particular puppet. For this reason it is impossible to use recorded music as an accompaniment, a limitation that does not apply to ordinary puppet shows or Taiwanese opera.
This does nothing to make the promotion of shadow puppetry any easier. In Chang's opinion, what is needed is not so much preservation as revival. How to mount more performances and attract larger audiences remain vital issues. "The life of shadow puppetry lies in the performances," she says. "To encourage troupes to ferret out performance opportunities, our policy is to give a subsidy only after a troupe has performed on at least one occasion. Because the birthdays of many Taoist deities fall in July, there are usually more temple festivals at that time, and it shouldn't be too difficult for a troupe to get its chance. We hope that, with some government sponsorship, these troupes will eventually become self-supporting."
According to Chang, Taiwan's shadow puppeteers need to adjust their mindsets a bit, and realize the need to put on plays that people actually want to see. She recalls how in 1988 the government arranged for various troupes to tour thirteen villages and townships. Her assignment as tour coordinator turned out to be an uphill job. She had to persuade the puppeteers to provide such audience-friendly aids as scene breaks and subtitles projected onto screens at the side of the stage giving explanations of the action. It simply had not occurred to them that such things might be necessary.
There are five elements to shadow puppet theater: the performers, the musical accompaniment, the play, the stage, and the puppets themselves. At present, Chang thinks, the plays and the music both leave much to be desired. "Shadow puppet plays used to be rather loose in structure," she says. "I think they should be more condensed, so as to create a climax. And if they want to attract younger viewers, the dialogue will have to be more colloquial." She points out that as most of the plays are rich in literary language, many young people simply cannot understand them.
"The music gives rise to more technical problems," Chang goes on. "Traditionally, the musicians don't refer to written music, because they haven't received any formal training. But that makes it very difficult for newcomers to follow their cues. Consequently, we have to ask college music teachers to transcribe the notes."
According to Tu Chieh-ming (杜潔明), a pipa (Chinese lute) teacher at Tainan Normal University, this is a far from easy task. The accompanists play to harmonize with the performers' singing. As each performer sings to a different pitch, the accompanists are unable to stick to just one key. Tu gets around this problem by locating the lowest and highest notes in the performance and working out an ad hoc scale between them.
There is a further problem with the histories of the various surviving troupes, which are in oral form. Several reputable drama scholars have been commissioned to reduce these histories to writing. Hsu's own troupe, the Fu Hsing Ko, is being chronicled by Shih Kuang-sheng (石光生), a professor at National Cheng Kung University's Graduate School of Arts. "At a time when shadow puppetry is on the decline, recording its heyday in the years after Japan's surrender at the end of World War II is the least we can do," he says.
In comparison with other forms of traditional folk drama on Taiwan, like conventional puppet shows and Taiwanese opera, Shih thinks the greatest attraction of shadow puppet theater lies in the immediacy of its live performances. "The sensations one has when watching a shadow puppet show are unique and vivid," he says.
Shih is pleased to note the steps that are being taken to preserve the genre. "The government is doing more than just recording the history of individual troupes," he points out. "The Kaohsiung County Cultural Center is successfully transform ing shadow puppetry from an entertainment for Taoist deities into an educational tool."
Chang says that the annual Kaohsiung County Cultural Center workshops have done much to popularize shadow puppet theater. Most of those attending are schoolteachers, and on returning to their schools they pass on what they have learned to their students during extracurricular activities. The center has also been promoting paper shadow puppet shows, which appeal more to younger children because kraft paper is easier to cut than leather. "Now, the best students not only write their own one-act plays, they handle all the puppets themselves throughout the performance," Chang says.
It is probably no coincidence that Taiwan's five extant shadow puppet troupes, including Fu Hsing Ko, are all located in Kaohsiung county. It is a commonly held belief that in the seventeenth century, when the anti-Manchu general Koxinga came to settle in Taiwan, some shadow puppeteers from Chaozhou in Guangdong Province followed in his footsteps and made their home in the southern part of the island. Over the last two hundred years, the descendants of these settlers have been passing theatrical traditions down to their heirs and successors.
Hsu Fu-neng's Fu Hsing Ko Shadow Puppet Troupe is one such legacy, inherited from his father-in-law Chang Ming-sou (張命首), the troupe's founder. Hsu recalls the years of his apprenticeship. "I started learning shadow puppetry when I was eighteen," he says. "I've never liked being tied down, so I didn't go for a job in the village administration office or the police, although those jobs weren't very hard to get."
In another significant indication of how things have changed over the years, Hsu freely admits that what motivated him to enter the profession then was money. "At that time, you'd get paid as much for putting on a shadow puppet show as you would for three or four days' manual work," he recalls. "My teacher was the local shadow puppet master, and his house was very close to ours. I often found out about his performances from posters and went to watch. Eventually I decided to quit my job in the sugar factory and follow him."
Hsu spent two years as an apprentice, doing a lot of daily chores and using his spare time to practice the skills he had picked up through observation. He married his teacher's daughter when he was thirty-one, thirteen years after the start of his apprenticeship. "I was afraid people might say that I only learned shadow puppetry because I was after my teacher's daughter," he says.
Four years after his marriage, in 1959, Hsu took over his father-in-law's shadow puppet troupe. Although Hsu was in charge, his father-in-law continued to play an active role. "He was good at literati plays, while I mostly performed martial arts plays," Hsu explains.
Among the most famous literati plays are Su Yun Crossing the River, Tsai Po-chieh Becomes Prime Minister , and Kao Yen-chen Cuts His Flesh to Heal His Parent . But martial plays such as The Birth of Prince Lee Na-cha, Chao Tien Leads A Reconnaissance Party to Hsi Chi, and Cheng San-pao's Voyage to the South Seas , are more popular with contemporary audiences.
Perhaps Hsu's favorite play is the one he wrote about Prince Lee Na-jah, based on the anonymous Ming-dynasty Chinese novel, The Legend of Deification. It relates how Lee was reincarnated from a celestial pearl that had been created by three Taoist masters, and charged with helping a rebellious warlord topple the tyrannical Shang emperor. As a child, Lee was always causing trouble and he finally went so far as to cut open his body, tear out his bones, and send them to his parents. His soul had nowhere to rest, so he appeared to his mother in a dream and begged her to build him a shrine. His mother complied, but his father ordered the temple to be destroyed. A Taoist master helped him by molding a body for him out of a lotus. Lee then wanted revenge on his father, but because their joint efforts were required to overthrow the emperor, another Taoist sage finally succeeded in reconciling father and son.
According to Hsu, literati plays are more difficult to stage, because "the performer has to sing all night." He means that such plays usually contain more dialogue and songs, which require both a prodigious memory and good acting ability on the part of the performer. The play may last for several hours, during which the puppeteer has to provide distinct voices for the various characters, including the female ones, and this will involve singing for a very long time.
Nearly all of Taiwan's local shadow puppeteers are descended from ancestors in Chaozhou on the mainland. As a result, the songs in shadow puppet literati plays are sung to the tunes of Chaozhou operas. After these mainland artistes moved to Taiwan, however, they adopted the southern Fujian dialect and used it to write their plays.
Chang Yueh-ying says that typically there are at least three musicians backstage, playing a variety of instruments, includ ing the two-stringed Chinese violin, drum, and gong. Many shadow puppeteers are excellent craftsmen, able to make the musical instruments they play during performances. This is particularly true of the erhu, or two-stringed violin. Numerous accompanists feel that the bridge of the standard instrument is too short to create the majestic atmosphere they seek, so they prefer to make their own.
As for the show itself, Hsu explains that there are usually two performers behind the screen. "The one on the right plays the main characters, while the one on the left plays the antagonists," he says. Hsu takes out some of the folio-sized folders in which he keeps the heads of his shadow puppets. The cover of each holder bears a description, such as "Main Characters," "Villains," or "Spirits." Shadow puppet heads are interchangeable, so that four or five of them can be used with a single body. The bodies, however, have to be kept in stainless steel boxes, because the sticks used to manipulate their joints necessitate extra storage space.
Almost without exception, the protagonists are just and upright heroes and heroines. Hsu takes out a copy of The Legend of Deification. "This is one of my models when I'm writing plays," he says. "Generally, I write according to conventional moral codes." He flips through various volumes of his plays, all handwritten with a brush or a fine signature pen and photo copied on white or brown sheets of paper stitched together. The lines between the different speeches are marked with red ink, as an aid to the performers.
"My plays are based on the so-called three human bonds and the five constant virtues," Hsu says. (Confucius taught that in order to maintain the desirable hierarchy of ruler and minister, father and son, and husband and wife, everyone should cultivate the five virtues of benevolence, justice, courtesy, wisdom, and honesty.) Hsu is quick to point out, however, that "only saints can actually manage to practice the five virtues together."
Hsu is a stern traditionalist. Just as he writes his plays in accordance with the demands of social education--the orthodox function of most Chinese theater--he also closely follows every other aspect of the historically correct art form. In cutting out puppets, for instance, some shadow puppeteers now enlarge the face and give it two eyes and a partial profile. Hsu, however, sticks to the conventional 30-centimeter-high silhouette, showing only one eye.
He takes his visitors inside his house to the room where he stores his puppets. He picks out the head and the body of his most popular character, Prince Lee Na-cha, and skillfully assembles the puppet. "Look closely," he urges, demonstrating how the prince adopts the fighting stance and how he mounts the stage in style. "This is formidable, even for drama scholars."
Watching him, you know that this man is dedicated to his art. The Spartan room is bare of furniture. Several stainless steel boxes are scattered around the floor. Five erhu hang on the wall, wrapped in cloths. The only decoration is a black-and -white photograph high on one wall: a woman standing beside a table. It is Hsu's late wife. She looks down on him, lost in enthusiasm for his twilight art, and she seems to be smiling.