Opening our eyes to the world of storytelling, Peilin Shi invited us along to two events demonstrating her ability to tell narratives across multiple disciplines. Her stories encapsulate her life in the present as well as in the ancestral, tracing her Hakka lineage through spoken word, song and sound.

Starting with her performance at the enchanting venue on Napierhall Street, Glasgow, at The House Art Collective, Shi joined Chisom Okoronkwo’s collaboration with U Belong for the Afro-Scottish Poetry Event 2025. Shi brought several pieces of prose leading with In the Pouring Rain. This piece is a hybrid of English and Hakka, word and song, weaving together the learned, the unlearned, and the relearned. She calls to the mountains and to the Hakka people, transpositioning herself unto her ancestors like a mist over the elevated Eastern Asian mountainscapes. “Where is my Hakka?” she asks, “Where is my Hakka?” she asks again, “Where is my Hakka?” Ending this work in song, she sings in Hakka channeling her resonance with it forming a connection with her identity. 

Her words and song transcends language; emphasising the strength of voice enabling these stories once lost to her now to live on through her. Shi then uses language to transport her listeners; the words travelling to us here in Glasgow – we find ourselves immersed in a people – connected through storytelling, connected through our mythologies of the land we stand. 

Accompanied by the Irish Bodhran, “we’re not too far apart,” says Peilin. Pulling from Shi’s detection of the interwoven properties of storytelling, we see Scottish mythologies are also rich tapestries of folklore, legends, and supernatural wonders rooted in Celtic traditions similar to the veins that run through the taught drum that resonates.

Finishing her segment for Afro-Scottish, she brought out the bodhrán and delivered an upbeat chant. It charged the atmosphere with its symbiotic resonance; the traditions and cultures threading together in tandem as they carried across the worldly-harmony that is storytelling.

Beyond the July poetry gathering came the 5th of August event, the night of Wildcard Storytelling hosted within The Rum Shack’s basement space with bar and stage. A completely different ambience to the previous venue’s chamber to which community was the blood that beat its heart, here it was rectangular cloaked in darkness with its spot lit stage and red rim lit audience, hustled together anticipating the event. 
Focusing on the important part of this venue was of course the storytellers who all followed the theme of Govanhill, as this was a piece of the Govanhill International Festival’s programme. Each storyteller brought wonder and the fantastical to the Glasgow area; from fishboys to the supernatural. Shi conjured a story entailing the “unheard” of multicoloured deer supposedly seen at Queens Park. Inviting us to be like the mist she embodied before, we spill into the landscape of a wild Queens Park where a man travelling through its lush foliage and rivers near drowns only to be saved by a deer with prismatic fur boasting nine colours. This tale oversaw trust and how greed can lead to breaking such a sacred promise resonating with Shi’s history as well as across the world and across the centuries.

Peilin Shi is a wanderer exploring displacement, entanglement, and collective memory. Informed by her Hakka heritage, transcontinental relocation, and global mythologies,
her storytelling bridges theory, archives, and lived experience, as a way to advocate for decolonial and accessible approaches that challenge institutional hierarchies of authorship and knowledge. She is particularly interested in multidisciplinary and multilingual storytelling.

___________

Critical review by A-J Reynolds and Eliza Coulson (gallery bagging).