Four Sisters of Hofei : A History (9781439125878)

by Chin, Annping

  The administrators at Ta-hsia recognized Ling Hai-hsia’s talents right away. In fact, she did so well in the first year she was there that the board of education in her home county wanted her back, and they were ready to give her the position of principal of Haimen county’s own middle school for girls. Ling Hai-hsia took the offer, but the job turned out to be taxing, much more complicated than she had anticipated. Haimen county school was a big institution; it received funding from the municipal government and was, as Ling later discovered, closely tied to local politics.

  Yet even as she was facing these problems in her own career, Ling Hai-hsia was planning for Yuan-ho’s future. As soon as Yuan-ho graduated from college, Ling had her employed as dean at her father’s private school. Whether Yuan-ho wanted the job or not was probably not seriously discussed with her. By this time, Ling was also taking charge of other aspects of Yuan-ho’s life. She appointed herself Yuan-ho’s adoptive sister and declared her older brother to be Yuan-ho’s adoptive brother. During winter and summer breaks, Yuan-ho stayed with Ling’s family in Haimen. Young men who showed an interest in Yuan-ho could not enter the front door until Ling Hai-hsia had inspected them. Yuan-ho had many admirers—she was the school queen at her university—but, according to her sisters, few made it to the shortlist.

  In a brief chronological biography based on Yuan-ho’s own account, the four years she spent in Hai-hsia Middle School, from 1931 to 1935, were left blank. When asked about these years—what were students like and what were some of the problems she had to handle as the school dean—Yuan-ho usually has little to say. This is not because she cannot recall what happened. Rather, it seems Yuan-ho was not interested in her job. “It was, after all, Ling Hai-hsia’s school,” she explains.

  Ch’ung-ho’s illness in 1935 was of consequence to Yuan-ho. It gave her a chance to leave Haimen and go home to her own family. She could have returned to her school and her job after she had delivered Ch’ung-ho. Instead, she remained in Soochow and learned k’un-ch’ü from a Mr. Chou Ch’uan-ying. This, too, was of consequence. The next year, she fell in love with her future husband at a benefit concert in which both of them were performing.

  Yuan-ho had gotten much better as an amateur actor in her year of study with Mr. Chou. Unlike her earlier teacher, Mr. Yü, who specialized in female roles, Mr. Chou always played male characters, particularly young scholars and officials (hsiao-sheng and kuan-sheng). He taught Yuan-ho to sing, walk, and gesture like a man in an opera. From that point on, Yuan-ho and Ch’ung-ho often paired up as man and woman, scholar and young lady in romantic scenes. But if an occasion called for someone to play the part of a young lady and Yuan-ho knew the part well, she could easily make that adjustment. “Playing a role is about becoming that role,” Yuan-ho says. “If you have learned well all the nuances in singing and gesturing that give a character its distinction, then it doesn’t matter whether you are a woman playing a man or a woman playing a woman because art is not about who you are. In fact, you should never bring any part of yourself—of your private feelings—to the stage.” Her sister Ch’ung-ho is even more insistent on that last point. She contends that a performance without total self-abstinence cannot have integrity. And she herself, long ago, had decided that she would never allow herself to be enamored of an actor—professional or amateur. “Romantic attachment ruins the art,” she says.

  Yuan-ho did fall for an actor, though not on stage and long after the actor had quit his profession. Still, it was his performance of a scene from an opera that was the catalyst. When it happened, Yuan-ho was already twenty-nine. By her society’s standards, she was late for marriage and even late for love. It is possible that during those four years in Haimen she realized that she did not want to follow Ling Hai-hsia’s path or her plan—that it was not enough just to have students to guide, a school to administer, and Ling Hai-hsia as her companion. So when she came back to Soochow, she was ready for an adventure. Her own description of how it happened tells us a lot about what she was like in those years.

  In 1935, when I was learning the hsiao-sheng [male scholar] role from Mr. Chou, a classmate of my brothers Tsung-ho and Yin-ho would sometimes drop by our house. If he showed up while I was having my lesson, I would stop right away. I knew who he was, Ku Ch’uan-chieh. A few years back, he was one of the hottest hsiao-sheng in Shanghai. He had since left his opera troupe and was now attending the same school as my brothers in Nanking. I would stop singing when he appeared because I was too embarrassed to continue. I didn’t know him well then because he was my brothers’ friend.

  Then, in 1936, the Firemen’s Association of K’un-shan sponsored a benefit concert. This was a big deal because K’un-shan was the place where k’un-ch’ü originated six hundred years ago. Professional actors and members of the opera clubs from Soochow all wanted to help out. My brothers and I also decided to go.

  At the concert, Yuan-ho was onstage twice, performing the male-scholar role in two different scenes. That year Ku Ch’uan-chieh was also in K’un-shan for the same purpose. After he decided to leave the stage, Ku rarely sang in public. Occasionally, when he knew that his mates from the opera troupe were performing in Shanghai, he would show up and join them in a scene or two, out of nostalgia and out of affection for them. But as Yuan-ho’s teacher Chou Ch’uan-ying observed in his memoir, Ku’s performance no longer measured up to the grandeur and the subtlety it once had. Chou would know: he and Ku had started in the same troupe together when they were kids. Both sang hsiao-sheng roles, and at the height of their careers, the two were considered near equals.

  Ku Ch’uan-chieh probably also realized that his stage presence and his technique were not what they used to be, and so he avoided occasions like the K’un-shan benefit concert. Why, then, did he go? Some said it was because of a young woman. He was pursuing her at the time, and she was going to be in K’un-shan. This woman was also from Soochow, the daughter of a silk factory owner. Her family forbade her to be near Ku Ch’uan-chieh; they even objected to her singing k’un-ch’ü. So she stole quietly away to K’un-shan when she learned that there was a chance for her to perform. Yuan-ho knew her. They were in the same opera club in Soochow, and this woman played the female lead opposite her male lead in the love scene from The Red Pear. Once Yuan-ho even encouraged her to run away with Ku, but “she didn’t have the nerve.”

  In K’un-shan, Ku Ch’uan-chieh sang two of the most demanding roles in the male lead repertoire: Emperor Ming-huang in “Jolted Back to Reality” and the young official Wang Shih-p’eng in “A Mother’s Reunion.”1 “Jolted Back to Reality” is scene 23 of The Palace of Eternal Life. Written in the early Ch’ing, the play uses a familiar story from the T’ang dynasty to comment on late Ming gaiety and insouciance—why these could be attenuating—while restating the late Ming’s romance with the idea of love: that love transcends death and all things impermanent. At the beginning of “Jolted Back to Reality,” the T’ang emperor Ming-huang is seen drinking with his favorite consort, Yang Yü-huan, or “Jade Bracelet,” in the imperial garden under the moonlight. The emperor coaxes her to drink more. Jade Bracelet swoons from the effect. Delighting in what he sees, the emperor sings:

  Holding my cup,

  I watch her closely,

  I am wordless.

  I see a blushing flower on each cheek.

  A drooping willow,

  A pliant sprig.

  Lazily swirling,

  She is my delicate oriole,

  My indolent swallow.

  The first half of the scene ends with the palace women escorting a languorous Lady Yang offstage to her chamber, the emperor’s gaze still fixed on her. Suddenly the mood changes. Drums are heard in the distance: their sound “makes the whole world shudder.” The prime minister enters. He announces: “General An-lu Shan has rebelled. His army is approaching the capital.” The emperor is shocked. He quickens his steps; he speeds up the tempo of his recitative. He paces back and forth, stopping only to reflect on what discomfort thi
s might bring to his Lady Yang.

  The role of the young official, Wang Shih-p’eng, in “A Mother’s Reunion” is just as difficult as that of Emperor Ming-huang. A son leaves his young bride and his mother to go to the capital to take the examination. He is placed first, gets an official position, and prepares to send for his family. Meanwhile, his wife and mother have learned from an unreliable source that he has a new bride. His wife’s family forces her to remarry. She throws herself into the river and vanishes. The scene Ku Ch’uan-chieh performed begins with Shih-p’eng’s mother arriving at the capital in search of her son. She finds him and, instead of feeling overjoyed, she is suffused with grief. Meanwhile, he is confused and anxious. He wonders where his wife is. Did she not get on with his mother? Is she all right? Is she ill? Is she dead? The actor and opera critic Hsü Ling-yun explains the difficulty of playing Shih-p’eng: “The character is bound by propriety to comfort his mother since she seems so distressed, but in his heart he is worried about his wife. He is vexed but cannot make this plain. He is unquiet but must appear calm. His patience with his mother must seem forced. This is the first thing the actor must grasp.” Hsü continues: “And as Shih-p’eng’s suspicion deepens, his manner becomes more and more unnatural. This is something the actor must also convey.” Throughout this scene, the tension is sustained by the circularity of the conversation between Shih-p’eng and his mother and the circularity of their movement on stage. They are both unable to say what they mean: one is restrained by social decorum and the other by what she knows.

  Ku Ch’uan-chieh sang “A Mother’s Reunion” the first day of the concert, “Jolted Back to Reality” the second day. By the third day, he was exhausted and simply could not be persuaded to do another scene. Backstage, the Chang brothers, Tsung-ho and Yin-ho, cajoled him into giving them and Yuan-ho a private concert of “Written While Plastered.” This is a short scene taken from the Ming drama Variegated Brush. Usually performed without the rest of the play, the scene is distinguished by its quick energy and pure lightness and is a vehicle for actors to show off their skills. The context is again the court of Emperor Ming-huang. This time, the emperor and Lady Yang play supporting roles to the poet Li Po, a man with great panache and wonderful peculiarities. The peonies are in full bloom in the imperial garden, gorgeous and lush like Lady Yang. The emperor, enchanted by the sight of these two beauties, sends for Li Po. He wants the poet to compose new lines, “fresh verses,” to celebrate the occasion. But Li Po is in a wineshop, drinking with friends. Two eunuchs come to fetch him, and Li Po refuses to move. “I am gone, gone,” he tells them, “so I can’t go anywhere else.” The eunuchs prop him up and deliver him to the emperor, who instructs the attendants to “find some elegant paper for Li Po to write on.” He then orders his chief eunuch to take off Li Po’s boots so that the poet can write more comfortably. He gestures to Lady Yang to hold up the inkstone for Li Po, “to give him encouragement.”2

  “Written While Plastered” is about drunkenness—the different stages of drunkenness, and Li Po’s drunkenness. Yuan-ho’s teacher, Chou Ch’uan-ying, once remarked that only a good actor “is able to bring elegance to Li Po’s dissolute state.” Li Po must remain imperious in his addledness. “He only seems to have let everything go,” and this distinguishes him from other drunks. Both Chou Ch’uan-ying and Ku Ch’uan-chieh had learned this role from Shen Yüeh-ch’üan, the consummate k’un-ch’ü actor of his generation. Ku Ch’uan-chieh’s performance of Li Po that evening was “sublime, perfect in execution,” Yuan-ho said, and she was enraptured.

  Yuan-ho had seen Ku onstage many times when she was a university student in Shanghai. She and three female classmates from Ta-hsia were sort of a gang—they called themselves “the four warrior guardians of the Buddha’s temple” (ssu-ta-chin-kang)—and nearly every Saturday and Sunday afternoon they would go to an opera at an entertainment center (yu-le-ch’ang). They would always see a matinee because at their university all students were expected to be back at their dormitory before dinner. Evenings were meant for studies. Also, matinee tickets were cheaper, half the price of evening shows. In 1926, for a tenth of a silver dollar, one could spend a whole afternoon in an entertainment center, seeing an opera (k’un-ch’ü, Peking, or a regional opera), a play, a musical, a magic show, a comic skit, a t’an-t’zu (ballade) performance, or a mao-erh-hsi opera sung entirely by a girl troupe.

  From 1927 to 1930, when Yuan-ho was a student in Shanghai, Ku Ch’uan-chieh, was getting top billing on the theater program. Yuan-ho and her friends were fans, but they did not go to the theater just to see him. They loved operas and did not dote on particular actors. Once they wrote a joint letter to him—this was years before Yuan-ho met him in person—asking him to attempt the scene “Finding the Painting and Questioning the Painting” from The Peony Pavilion. The scene was rarely performed because the male principal sings solo from beginning to end, and most actors found the part too taxing. “Like-minded friend from the same literary circle,” their letter began. “So serious, and so proper, isn’t it?” Yuan-ho now says. “A few weeks later, he actually honored our request. We couldn’t believe it! And it was a wonderful performance.”

  Ku Ch’uan-chieh was two years younger than Yuan-ho, so he was twenty at most when he received this letter. It is possible that he was charmed by the four young ladies’ earnest appeal. He could also be doing his best to oblige his audience. The k’un-ch’ü troupes at the time were competing vigorously and nervously against other forms of entertainment for a share of the audience, and usually under the same roof, in the large entertainment centers that had become very popular in Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s. This meant that while a k’un-ch’ü performance was going on, twenty or forty feet away a regional opera troupe or a jazz band might be onstage in the theater next door or just down the hall. “If you don’t sing your heart out,” Yuan-ho’s teacher said, “your audience is going to get up and leave, and move to another part of the building.”

  K’un-ch’ü used to have its own theaters in Shanghai. The first one was built in 1851, in a bustling part of the city. It was called the Garden of Three Elegances. Unlike the entertainment centers of the 1920s and 1930s, this was a small and intimate space with a tended garden in front. In the 1860s and 1870s, there were many more such theaters, some considerably larger. Most of them were located in the foreign concessions, along Canton Road and Fukien Road. A theater monthly from this period described one: “In front of the stage, you will find five or six rows of square tables with five or six tables to each row, and five seats to each table.” There were also box seats on the second level and chairs to the right and left sides of the main hall, with a small wooden table in front of each chair. Tea was free, but only customers sitting in the main hall and in the boxes were entitled to teacups with covers and to snacks: “On each table there are six small plates of nibbles—melon seeds, cheap fruits, and slivers of cakes. During intermission, a sweet soup is served—osmanthus flower and crushed walnut dumplings in spring and winter, mung bean or lily bulbs in summer and autumn. The food is usually not tasty, so customers rarely touch their snacks.” An advertisment dated February 2, 1880, for a new and bigger Three Elegances Theater tells us the cost of going to the theater: “Three silver dollars for a table in the main hall. Separate seats are half a dollar each. A box is three and a half dollars; separate seats in the box are also half a dollar each. To hire a prostitute to watch the performance with you is seventy cents extra. Standing room is thirty cents in the back of the theater, and twenty cents at either side. The minimum charge is ten cents. For foreigners, it is a dollar.”

  Paying to see an opera was a radical concept in Chinese society. During the first two hundred years of opera’s history, from about 1500 to 1700, gentry and merchant families either hired troupes to perform for small gatherings on holidays or special occasions, or they supported their own “family troupes” that would be on call all the time and perform any scene on demand. It did not matter if the owners w
ere connoisseurs: “It was simply convenient to have a moderately good opera troupe around all the time to provide entertainment for your guests. On the whole they were for social purposes.”

  Depending on the pleasure of their employers, the troupes performed either in rented reception halls or on large luxury boats. In a reception hall, the stage was a piece of red woolen carpet at the center. Around the back and two sides of the stage were tables set up for a feast. Women and children could view the performance from behind a curtain. If the venue was a boat, the stage was in the bow and the kitchen was in the stern.

  By the 1730s, another venue appeared. It probably began as a money-making scheme. Some clever entrepreneur in Soochow decided to open a dinner theater. He hired waiters, cooks, and opera troupes. Wealthy merchants simply rented a room from him, and he provided food, drinks, and entertainment. His idea caught on swiftly. By the 1780s there were more than twenty such restaurants in Soochow alone. But dinner theaters were mainly for socializing. The clients concentrated more on what they were eating and drinking and saying to each other than on the opera being sung onstage. A contemporary described what it was like:

  Inside, the cooks are roasting lamb and gutting carp to take care of the hosts and guests while the proprietor asks the actors to put on the latest opera. A balustrade surrounds the entire dining area. Outside, people could get a good view of the performance onstage. They could watch to their hearts’ content all the operas the human world could create. Do they know how the story ends? Prosperity allows only a viewing like this. So you find your pleasure through the hullabaloo.