Reading as Reliving: The Multimedia Pingshu Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Its Republican-Era Ancestors

Abstract: This paper documents a recently published, six-volume series of books entitled Pingshu Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Pingshu Sanguo yanyi 評書三國演義), an edited transcription of pingshu storyteller Lian Liru’s 連麗如ongoing performance of the traditional tale, adapted for the page by her senior disciple, pingshu performer and editor Liang Yan 梁彥. The text of the series merges the narrative worlds of traditional oral storytelling and print media in several fascinating ways, including by attaching a QR code to every chapter that allows users to read while listening to the original performance while they read. Textual analysis supplemented by interviews reveals how the creators used print narrative techniques to recreate the receptive context of oral performance and enable a mode of reading I term “reading as reliving.” A further discovery, that they modeled the project after a precedent—serialized pingshu publication in Republican-era periodicals—demonstrates how written text and oral performance in China have continued to exist symbiotically and how even a badge of hyper-modernity like a QR code can be seen as part of a tradition of oral performers utilizing media revolutions to their art’s advantage.