Through our stories, we can learn about ourselves by better understanding our history, heritage, and culture. And by listening to the stories of others, we can gain a deeper respect for our neighbors, both at home and within the world community, and the cultures and traditions from which they come.
Since the beginning of humankind, the best of our values have been passed from one generation to the next through our stories. But when we lose our stories, we are cut off from the roots of our past and we confront the present with a deep sense of loneliness and disconnection.
Today, we are crying out for what storytelling can provide—a sense of place, of meaning, of continuity in our lives. To grow and achieve our potential as human beings, we need to know our stories—for our stories can tell us where we've come from, our family's history, and our cultural and religious heritage.
Through our work, the Center provides the experiences, knowledge, and tools to help individuals and families, organizations and institutions, and communities and cultures capture and tell their stories, renew their storytelling traditions, and ignite new traditions of storytelling in their homes, at their workplaces and schools of learning, and within their communities.
By discovering our stories, we are giving meaning and rootedness to our lives–transforming our lives and our world.
Gengcun is a tiny farming community located on the Jozhong Plain in central China. There, in this ancient village, live some 1,100 people—mostly farmers—who, because of their rich tradition of storytelling, are deeply connected to a sense of history, place, and culture.
On one chilly, cloudy day in November of 1997, 60 American storytellers—a People to People delegation visiting in the tiny village of Gengcun to explore the Chinese tradition of storytelling—sat in the homes of their Gengcun hosts and, together, they shared stories.
This rich storytelling tradition—and this treasure trove of Chinese folklore—remained unnoticed and uncelebrated for centuries. Few of the stories had been recorded, written down, or published. But in the late 1980s and early 1990s, national and regional Chinese scholars and researchers discovered the treasury of traditional Chinese stories in the village of Gengcun.
During the cultural inventory that followed, researchers discovered over 4,300 stories and 134 storytellers living in Gengcun who could tell these old Chinese tales. Among them, 21 villagers could tell more than 50 stories, three could tell more than 300 stories, and one villager, the "king of the storytellers," could tell over 550 tales.
The storytellers of Gengcun have unremarkable lives. They are ordinary people living ordinary experiences. But as they worked—men and women, side-by-side—the Gengcun storytellers shared their stories: in the cornfields, at the warehouse when the cargoes were unloaded, at the feedlots where cattle were bought and sold.
The stories they tell are not the stories of the Hemingways or the Shakespeares, but of ordinary people—stories that reveal to us who and why we are, a process that helps us maintain our sense of history, our heritage, and our active involvement in our own culture.