I love Storytelling

 In the last 15 years, I tell stories whenever  I have chances.  But the adventure into the storytelling was an accident. It was a byproduct of something else of  totally different intention. 

In 1997, when I was still at Kimberly-Clark, I had the chance to take an online Technical Japanese class.  The company wanted me to translate Japanese technology articles to English so that they could learn Japanese technology.  

I was thrilled as I would have an opportunity to learn another language, Japanese.  Although Japanese is quite different from Mandarin which I learned since elementary school,  the Kanji in Japanese is the same as in Mandarin.  I worked very hard on learning Technical Japanese because I was confident of being successful in this new language.  I was.  Three years later, I was able to translate most of the technical Japanese articles into English. 

Then, I got ambitious.  I wanted to be able to translate English stories into Japanese.  My teacher smiled.  He said that I could try  and he would be happy to take a look; but he warned me that translating English back to Japanese required another level of skill.

He was right.  I tried to write the script of the Hiroshima story back to Japanese; but I was unsuccessful. 

However, something amazing happened.  Hiroshima itself is an  interesting but very sad  story.  The story starts with the Trinity Project, proceeds  to the President's cabinet meeting to decide whether to drop the bomb on Japanese soil.  Then, there was the aftermath. Because I knew the Hiroshima story inside out, I began to tell this story to other people; starting first with my family, then to a Taiwanese group, then to a storyteller guild, they all became hits.  The storytelling was very successful, and I began to fall in love of storytelling. 

Although telling Hiroshima to a big audience was very successful, the story’s script was not my story.  I took the script from a popular movie.  What I did  was really tell other people’s stories.  What I need is actually to tell my own stories so that stories become authentic.

My next story was the bonding between a grandfather and a grandson.  In 1987, we took Victor and Leo back to Taiwan.  Victor was 10 years old and Leo was 8.  My dad was walking with us; Victor and Leo came along.  My dad was a heavy smoker.  During the walk, my dad smoked one cigarette after another.  Victor spoke.  He spoke in broken Taiwanese, “Grandpa, smoking is not good for you, “. My dad tried not to hear it, and continued to walk.  A month later when we were back in the States, we received a letter, saying that my dad quit smoking because Victor said so.  That storytelling was also very successful. 

By the time I was venturing into storytelling, I retired from my first career of Kimberly-Clark, and began my another 20 year career at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.  Although I took a deep salary cut from the industry job to a teaching career, I loved the work of teaching, research, and service. More importantly, I have audiences. 

During the teaching career, I participated in many storytelling events and observed other great storytellers’ styles.  Some used music as part of tool very effectively.

My story of Sakura incorporating a Japanese folk song was also very successful.  The story told of a Japanese widow who lost her husband during the Japanese-Russian war planted a Sakura tree in her backyard to commemorate her husband.  50 years later, Japan was in another war with the American. The Japanese authorities wanted to cut the tree for the war materials.  The woman chained herself to the tree to protest.  That story was also well told.

In short, I enjoy very much storytelling and I also enjoy very much to write those stories.  However, those adventure came from my failing intent to translating English into Japanese.