A teahouse favorite

Along with over 30 pingtan performers of the theater, Wu will perform two shows on Monday and Tuesday at Beijing's Tianqiao Performing Arts Center, featuring 17 performing styles of pingtan.

The shows are part of the Suzhou Arts and Culture Week that runs from Jan 6-20, and the ongoing 22nd Meet in Beijing International Arts Festival and the Meet in Beijing Olympic Culture Festival.

Classic pingtan songs, such as Yue Yun, which tells the story of Yue Yun, the eldest son of Yue Fei, a military commander of the Southern Song Dynasty (1127-1279), and two songs about Cui Yingying, the protagonist of Romance of the Western Chamber, a well-known Chinese drama written by playwright Wang Shifu during the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368).

Besides old classics, new pingtan works include modern takes on old stories and adaptations based on social events or topics.

One of the songs to be performed in Beijing is Heroic Captain, written by Wu and premiered last year, which is based on a real incident. On a Sichuan Airlines flight on May 14, 2018, the cockpit's windscreen suddenly shattered 9,000 meters above sea level en route from Lhasa to Chongqing. Withstanding extreme cold, a shortage of oxygen, strong winds and earsplitting noise, the pilot Liu Chuanjian operated the airplane manually, managing to bring 119 passengers and nine crew members to the ground safely. The story was adapted into the 2019 Chinese movie The Captain, which grossed over 2.8 billion yuan ($441 million) at the box office.

"Usually pingtan performers write original stories after they've gained yearslong stage experience. They know the tempo of the show and the need of the audience. The ability to create new stories and new songs guarantees the longevity of a performer," says Wu, who wrote her first original pingtan piece, titled Wang Fu Qing Chou, containing 15 chapters and over 200,000 words, in 1995, when she was pregnant.