Adventure classics – Can even a revolution kill love?

Farewell to My Concubine

by Lilian Lee

***

Hong Kong author Lilian Lee appropriated the plot of a classical Chinese opera for her tale of tragic love, Farewell to My Concubine. But she added a twist to the ancient story of General Xiang Yu and his faithful to death lover Lady Yu Ji by assigning their parts in her 1992 version to the pair of actors who play them on stage. The pair of male actors.

“I didn’t really emphasize the problems of homosexuality,” Lee said in an interview with journalist Lawrence Chua. “In traditional China, in Beijing opera, men always played the female roles.”

But chosen to play female leads since the age of nine, tragic hero Cheng Dieyi can’t separate himself from the roles he plays, including Lady Yu to his best friend Duan Xiaolou’s General Xiang. Unable to return Dieyi’s passion, Xiaolou marries beautiful courtesan Juxian—Chrysanthemum.

Lee determinedly places her characters against the backdrop of China’s tumultuous 20^th century history, making them come of age as Japan invades China at the beginning of World War II. When Xiaolou is arrested for resisting the Japanese, Juxian pleads with Dieyi to intercede for him. The Japanese agree to release Dieyi’s friend in return for a private performance by the famous actor. In return, Dieyi makes Juxian promise to desert Xiaolou. But who has the right to ask a lover to leave her beloved? Lady Yu did not and neither can Juxian.

Xiaolou is freed but infuriated by Dieyi’s collaboration. In the end, however, it will take China’s Cultural Revolution of the 1960’s to finally separate the pair of lifelong friends.

“Even in the New China,” Lee wrote, “people still liked to watch the old operas.” But more and more, the old operas are replaced by new revolutionary operas with titles like Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy and The Red Detachment of Women (a picture of which illustrates this post). And “Old Society” artists such as Dieyi and Xiaolou are Once Dieyi’s “collaboration” of entertaining the Japanese becomes known, he, Xiaolou and Juxian are tortured in attempts to make them denounce each other. Dieyi breaks, revealing Juxian’s past as a prostitute, and causing her to be sentenced to a labor camp. When Xiaolou enters their apartment for the last time, on his own way to a labor camp, he finds Juxian hanging. “She had put on her bright red wedding dress . . . (and) pinned a red flower into what was left of her black hair. Only a bride could wear that crimson blossom.”

It’s more than Xiaolou can bear. He and Dieyi part forever. Or do they? Because after all, a considerable part of China’s 20^th century upheaval remains to be told.

“I know about the Cultural Revolution because of the many interviews I did about it,” Lee said in her interview with Chua, "(but) when I wrote the novel, I wasn’t emphasizing the Cultural Revolution. I just wanted to tell a beautiful story about love.”

Want more about Lee? Read Chua’s complete interview at http://bombmagazine.org/article/1586/lillian-lee/.

(Next Friday, Adventure classics continues a May of historical fiction with another classic Chinese story of love, this time in a more traditional setting, Tsao Hsueh-Chin’s Dream of the Red Chamber.)

Adventure classics – The times were against them

Farewell to My Concubine

by Lilian Lee
                                                                            

Surrounded by the Han army, Xiang Yu’s soldiers were few and his supplies exhausted. With him were the beautiful Lady Yu, who followed wherever he went, and his favorite steed. ‘My might shadowed the world,’ he said, ‘but the times were against me and my horse runs no more. What more can I do? Ah, Yu, my Yu, what will your fate be?’

(Adapted from Basic Annals of Xiang Yu)

This story of the fallen general in the wars to unite China in the second century BCE is the basis of Lilian Lee’s 1992 historic novel, Farewell to My Concubine, the most recent of centuries of retelling the story of tragic heroism and love.

image: wikimedia commons

Set in a time of turmoil, Lee reset it against the background of China’s 20^th century upheavals. But this time around, she reconfigures the romantic leads as a pair of actors who play the roles of Xiang Yu and his adored concubine. Or did she?

In the classical tradition of Chinese opera, all roles are played by men. By a twist of fate, gentle and handsome Cheng Dieyi becomes cast as a dan, a female lead, while his combative classmate in their opera school, Duan Xiaolou, is cast as a sheng, a male lead. Rising to fame, they become most noted for the parts of Lady Yu Ji and her lover Xiang Yu in the opera, Farewell to My Concubine.

It was a role Dieyi would take to heart. Except that in this version, the beauty has a rival for the warrior’s love—an equally beautiful, and unambiguously female rival. For much as Dieyi adores his friend, Xiaolou feelings for him are only those of a brother. When his heart turns to love, Xiaolou only has eyes for the courtesan known as Juxian—Chrysanthemum.

The two actors met as children in opera school in 1929, two decades after the overthrow of China’s last emperor and the establishment of the Republic of China. During their 10-year apprenticeship, their China, like that of Xiang Yu, has been torn by wars between rival factions. Now on their own in 1939, they take the stage as world war looms. With China occupied by Japanese troops, the young actors are faced with the choice of performing for their enemies or resisting them.

One day, “just as the opera reached its most beautiful and moving point,” Lee writes, “a group of Japanese soldiers filed into the theater.” As ushers hurry to empty seats for these escorts of Japanese Marshal Aoki), Xiaolou stops singing. As if enacting his heroic part in real life, he jumps into the audience, fists swinging, shouting “‘The show’s over! This damn theater is full of devils!’”

But once offstage, his immunity from reality vanishes. There will be no graceful exit, no delighted applause, no rapturous fans at the conclusion of this scene.

(For the summary of Xiang Yu and Lady Yu, I am indebted to Jannis Jizhou Chen’s essay, “The Forgotten Themes of Farewell My Concubine – A Comparative Analysis between the Novel and the Film,” available at www.academia.edu/9803820/. The illustration for this post is of a late 18^th century emperor in ceremonial armor. Next Friday, Adventure classics continues the discussion of Lilian Lee’s Farewell to My Concubine.)

Adventure classics – Nowhere to hide when all is opera

Farewell to my Concubine

by Lilian Lee

***

“. . . life is just a play. Or an opera,” Lilian Lee writes in her 1992 novel of hopeless love set against the backdrop of China’s 20^th century struggles. “It would be easier for all of us if we could watch only the highlights. . . but the players have no choice. Once the curtain goes up they have to perform the play from beginning to end. They have nowhere to hide.”

The two young boys who will become known as Cheng Dieyi and Duan Xiaolou meet for the first time in 1929 (the 18^th year after the overthrow of China’s last emperor, Lee lets us know), as apprentices in the centuries-old art of classical Chinese opera. The school where they study singing, acting and martial arts for stage fighting is a repository for the orphaned and abandoned, the young castoffs hoping for a start in life. It’s also a place of Dickensian grimness, misery and abuse, but all in the name of art.

image: Wikimedia commons

Originally called Xiao Douzi (Little Bean), Cheng arrives at the opera school with his opium-addicted, prostitute mother. Seeking a refuge for her nine-year-old son, the mother begs the school’s Master Guan to take the boy, extolling his beauty and intelligence. But during the master’s examination, Douzi “kept his right hand carefully hidden in his coat pocket, where he seemed to be fingering some mysterious object.”

What is it, the master demands, and is horrified to learn that Douzi has a vestigial sixth finger. The defect, the master insists, will disqualify the boy from working as an opera singer. In the uncertain political and economic circumstances prevailing in China at the time, the master has more than his pick of the brightest and most beautiful apprentices to choose from.

Douzi’s mother flees with him to the school’s kitchen, searching desperately, but not for food.

From the kitchen, the students heard a piercing cry and find the little boy whimpering. “The cleaver had cut through flesh and bone, replacing his deformity with an open wound. But he had survived the shock. He was going to live.”

Twelve-year-old Xiaolou, then known as Xiao Shitou (Little Rock) for his head so hard he can break bricks against it, is the biggest boy at the school. He protects the wounded younger boy from the school’s bullies. And although willing to hide in the older boy’s shadow, Douzi decides initially that he’s mostly full of hot air and “wasn’t worth getting to know very well.”

“But we are still in the theater,” Lee writes. “Still, their story is not that simple. When one man loves another, it can’t be simple; and it’s hard to know how to begin. . . The lights dim again until there is nothing but a lone spotlight shining center stage. A faint creak, and the curtain parts. It is their first meeting.”

And with their 10-year contracts of apprenticeship signed, Douzi and Shitou have survived the first of the many perils that assail them during the tumultuous 20^th century. The best – and worst – is still to come, as the specter of war with Japan looms over their country.

(Next Friday, Adventure classics continues a May of historical adventure with Lilian Lee’s Farewell to my Concubine.)