The puppet master from Indonesia
On the day Taiwan Panorama visited the couple, Chen had been invited to perform at the Bao Gong Temple in Dounan Township, Yunlin. The performance was to be part of a ceremony held by a local family to thank the gods for their protection over the past year. With everything in their truck, the couple drive to the venue, and within ten minutes of arriving, everything is ready to go. Like a Transformer, the truck changes as the couple lift up the roof and set out a wooden frame, and just like that the little truck has become a glittering stage.
Before the show starts, they light some incense and joss paper, praying for the stage to be “cleansed.” Feeling ill and running a fever of 39°C, Chen steels himself and finishes writing the playbill that lists the date, the gods being honored, and the donors. Then he says a few auspicious words and turns the performance over to Yek.
The show begins with the customary “pan-sian” (banxian) curtain-raiser, using wooden puppets to portray gods relaying the wishes of the people to the heavens.
One by one, Yek introduces immortals representing wealth, fortune, and longevity, making sure they move with a majesty that befits their status as deities. All of the puppets she will be using are set up behind the stage, alongside script sheets with notes in Bahasa Indonesia to make sure she gets them out in the right order. Each puppet has its own distinctive music and rhythm, and so Yek can tell just from the music who should be coming out next. Explaining her process later, she demonstrates the different gaits of male and female puppets, with the females walking more sensually and the males more quickly and heroically.
Yek says she only found out that her new husband was the head of a puppet theater troupe after she arrived in Taiwan. Po-te-hi doesn’t really exist in Indonesia, so she found the puppets intriguing. She started learning the art from her husband and his uncle, with Chen taking her on as an apprentice and not letting their relationship soften his strict teaching style. Learning puppetry involves learning the special facial features and characters of each of the puppets, as well as when they take the stage and how they move. “At first I couldn’t keep the puppets’ faces straight in my head, and the language barrier made it even harder,” says Yek, embarrassed. “I would send them out at the wrong times, and had to rely on my husband to rescue the show.”
Her first performance was the story of the mad monk Ji Gong, and she still remembers how nervous and scared she was, afraid she’d screw up and ruin everything.
When asked what the hardest part of learning po-te-hi was, though, Yek responds that “as long as you really, really want to learn, there’s nothing too hard to figure out.” Getting hit in the head by puppets during practice is common, and as their heads are propped up by the fingers, swollen fingers are far from unusual. On top of that, when she first arrived Yek spoke no Taiwanese, and had to ask what every sentence meant. A believer in the idea of “no pain, no gain,” she stuck to it, and now she travels all over the island with her husband to perform, but even still she is always watching and learning—real-world experience is the easiest to remember, she says.
A hard worker by nature, Yek has invested years into her practice, and now can control three puppets with just two hands, enough to put on a full show solo.
Performed in booths set up in front of temples, po-te-hi shows are usually intended to thank the gods for their protection and good grace.
