Four Sisters of Hofei : A History (9781439125878)

by Chin, Annping

  Those who were leaning against the balustrade, watching the opera, were usually servants and drivers waiting for their employers to finish feasting. They were the authentic audience, precursors to modern theatergoers. They would stand for hours because they were captivated. By the nineteenth century, the true enthusiasts bought a ticket at the gate, if they could afford it, and enjoyed an opera with or without a seat. Tea was still served, and snacks, but people hardly touched them because they were not there to eat and drink. By the early twentieth century, it was entirely possible for the master and mistress of the house to share their opera box with their servants. This was probably not a common sight, but Tou Kan-kan and Chu Kan-kan had often gone to the theater with their mistress.

  It had taken the Chinese a long time to relax their rules about who could sit next to whom at a concert, but once k’un-ch’ü became commercialized, the change was inevitable. Yet even as certain social inequities began to disappear in that world, others remained stubbornly fixed. The actors’ status was the slowest to change because it was hard for the Chinese to modify their views about entertainers. Up to the nineteenth century, actors were barred from taking the civil service examinations and so forbidden to have the chance, allowed to most men, to improve their social station. Even Confucius, a teacher of moral justness and human compassion, seems to have held strong opinions against entertainers. One early commentary says that at the height of his career as the judicial commisioner of the state of Lu, Confucius ordered the execution of a group of dancers and musicians, who had been entertaining at a peace-signing ceremony between the state of Lu and the state of Ch’i. “The dancers wore feathers and waved swords and shields as they danced,” the account states. “The musicians played drums and shouted wild cries.” Confucius considered their entertainment barbaric and offensive, a violation of the rites that were proper to such an occasion, and he told the officers of Ch’i, who had hired the troupe, to have the members put to death. This story has raised many questions about Confucius’ judgment—whether he overreacted to a minor offense and whether he punished the wrong party. After all, it was probably the officers who instructed the troupe on what numbers to perform. And even if they were the wrong numbers, why should this have had any consequences on the signing of the peace treaty? In Confucius’ view, it seems, the wild dance foretold a dark intent, perhaps a sinister design, and he could not simply sit back and let this intent come to fruition. To show the state of Ch’i what he knew and what he was capable of, he imposed a penalty severe enough to demonstrate his own strength but not so offensive as to jeopardize the peace between the two sides. Someone had to be punished, he decided; best that it be the musicians and dancers.

  Yuan-ho’s teacher Chou Ch’uan-ying once remarked, “People regard k’un-ch’ü opera as elegant but the professional performers as lowly.” Tabloid history would like for us to believe that the Chinese regarded actors as lowly because of their sexual ambiguity. But this mean perception of actors had been around hundreds of years before some of them began to don women’s clothes and transform themselves into women on stage. Actors were lowly because they were from desperately poor families. No parents would have sold their son to an opera troupe unless this was their last resort. There was a common expression: “As long as you still have three pecks of rice, you wouldn’t send your son to an opera troupe.” And once a child entered an opera school, his parents had to sign a contract stating that “from now on, Heaven would decide whether the child lives or dies” and the parents could no longer have any say about their child’s life. Ku Ch’uan-chieh was from a Soochow family, the youngest of three boys and a girl. His father was a local schoolteacher. The situation at home was so hard that his parents had to send him and an older brother, when they were twelve and thirteen, to an opera training school.

  Actors were also beneath others because they were skilled in the ways of giving pleasure—something nearly all the early philosophers, particularly the Confucians, found disquieting and vulgar. Confucians felt that the skills of actors were underhanded, easily winning but bearing no relationship to self-knowledge, and that they were unfair competition to attempts at moral persuasion. Most rulers preferred spending time with singers and dancers to listening to their ministers’ counsel. And the morally astute would point out that it was not just rulers and the rich who were susceptible to entertainers’ sway. One thirteenth-century scholar accused entertainers of luring ordinary people away from their work, of wasting their time and energy, and of encouraging proper women to have salacious thoughts. And a sixteenth-century Confucian, in his private “Family Instructions,” tells his sons that interactions with actors may be hazardous because “what actors know is only how to juggle for power; what they talk about is only voice and veneer; what they pursue is only food and wine.”

  But k’un-ch’ü was an elegant art; it demanded much more from its performers than did other forms of entertainment. This was clear from the start of its flourishing. Scholars took an interest in it, as did musicians, poets, playwrights, men of taste, and men of imagination. They kept refining it and improving it, making corrections and adjustments, and writing new dramas that were compatible with k’un-ch’ü music; they also put pressure on the actors to do better, to add something new, and to claim some originality for themselves in a scene that had been performed hundreds of times before. It was expectations like these from critics, connoisseurs, and a generally alert and well-informed audience that helped to refine the aesthetics of k’un-ch’ü.

  Even when k’un-ch’ü was in vogue, and actors were working under the most favorable circumstances, they could not better their social standing. Within the context of k’un-ch’ü, they could be seen as elegant, but outside of it, they remained lowly. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when k’un-ch’ü was in its glory, the opera troupes could name their price, and the stars among them could ask for horses and sedan chairs, brocade and ginseng broth in addition to their remuneration. Yet despite their vastly improved financial situations, they could not increase their social worth. Society’s rules made certain of this. When the Ch’ing poet and critic Yuan Mei could not keep his hands off the young actors he patronized, the historian Chang Hsüeh-ch’eng publicly denounced him as a “shameless fool,” someone who had “no regard for distinctions.”

  Social etiquette also worked to keep the worlds of actor and patron apart. An actor often spent many hours giving private lessons to families living in comfortable houses. Afterward, he went somewhere else to spend the night—a room he shared with other actors or a boat near the dock. And when things were going badly, he could rely only on his own family and friends. Most people who had studied with professional actors did not know what became of their teachers after their lessons had stopped. Ch’ung-ho said: “Professonal actors could not even sit down and have a meal with you although they had been instructing you at k’un-ch’ü in your house. My family was an exception because my father didn’t care for such rules.” Her teacher, A-yung, often showed up for dinner wired from his snort of opium. Wide-eyed, he would talk for three hours about this and that—his life on the road, actors he knew—forgetting that he was there to give Ch’ung-ho her lesson. He would have a couple glasses of wine and some dried shrimp. By ten or eleven o’clock he would suddenly droop, his eyebrows would collapse, and his skin would grow darker and more wrinkled. Then he would slowly make his way to the door and disappear into the dark.

  Rules became more exacting when professionals and amateurs appeared on the same stage. Actors had been singing with guest artists since the beginning of k’un-ch’ü performance. By the nineteenth century, a new phenomenon appeared. The popularity of k’un-ch’ü had declined. Professional actors could hardly find work themselves, much less guest spots for enthusiasts, and so amateurs formed their own k’un-ch’ü clubs. Sometimes several clubs would rent a theater together and stage a joint program. (The theater owners could hardly refuse the opportunity, since the clubs provided their own c
ostumes and headdresses, hired their own extras, and then paid for the use of the space.) Members of a club would work with a professional actor for weeks to prepare themselves for a public performance. To draw a large crowd, the apprentices could advertise that the master would appear with them. But this was the amateurs’ show: they made the arrangements and paid the expenses, and they wanted to play the leads. Moreover, most gentry considered it improper for a professional actor to have equal weight with them in any situation, even a fictive one. So the teacher could have only walk-on parts.

  This practice continued into the twentieth century. In 1936, Ch’ung-ho was associated with a large opera club in Nanking that boasted many celebrities: top officials from the Republican government, wealthy industrialists, writers, composers, university professors, and an older brother of the last emperor. That year the club hosted a k’un-ch’ü troupe from the north, and the local celebrities and the actors gave several performances together. At the time, Ch’ung-ho worked with Han Shih-ch’ang, an experienced actor who specialized in female leads.

  A few days before the performance, Ch’ung-ho learned that her plan to have Mr. Han play the maidservant opposite her Li-niang had met with firm disapproval. The man who objected most strongly was Ch’u Min-i, a senior member of the club. Ch’u was also a prominent figure in the republican period, known for his work in medical education, public health, and the arts. (He had received a medical degree in France and had traveled extensively in Japan and Europe.) He was a sophisticated man, yet he could not allow a professional and an amateur to undertake roles of equal importance onstage. He called it a breach of propriety. Ch’ung-ho had just turned twenty-three in the spring of that year, so she was a mere youngster, but she would not yield. Insisting that the rule was unreasonable and wrong, she withdrew from the program. This could have ended in a deadlock, which, her brother Tsung-ho pointed out, might have been awkward for the actors. They appreciated Ch’ung-ho’s show of loyalty but also needed to be on good terms with the amateur clubs in order to survive.

  All of this explains why Yuan-ho’s marriage to Ku Ch’uan-chieh came as such a shock. Shanghai’s society page described it as a case of “a gentry woman marrying beneath herself.” Yuan-ho believed that her father would have given full consent to her plan to marry Ku. (She wrote to him about it, but her letter arrived a few days after he died.) She also believed that her father would not have worried about who Ku’s parents were, how he ended up as an actor, or what others might say of the class disparity between the two families. Ch’ung-ho had another point of view. She believed that if you loved k’un-ch’ü well enough you could never be involved with a k’un-ch’ü actor. Did Yuan-ho fall in love with Ku Ch’uan-chieh’s art? Or did she fall in love with him because he sang “Written While Plastered” backstage? Was he more intoxicating up close?

  A critic said this about Ku Ch’uan-chieh when Ku was only eighteen: “Seeing one of his performances would make you ruminate for the next ten days.” Ku had grace and presence, and he was a superb ruler onstage. His best roles were the big kings, those who made grand their weakness and fallibility, men such as Emperor Ming-huang and Emperor Ch’ung-chen, the last Ming ruler, who hanged himself from a tree in his garden on the last day of his dynasty. Ku had a tendency to frown, and this became his distinguishing trait onstage—it made him an even more convincing tragic hero. His colleague Chou Ch’uan-ying remembered that once Ku Ch’uan-chieh was so consumed by the role of Emperor Ch’ung-chen that after he uttered the last line, “this most wrenching regret that a dynasty’s three hundred years should finish in a day,” he rushed backstage and coughed up a mouthful of blood. After that episode, he stopped playing the role.

  Chou Ch’uan-ying always thought that Ku had the genius of an actor. The two had grown up together—both came to the Ch’uan-hsi opera school when they were kids. The school had opened in 1921, and it was the only one in Soochow that specialized in k’un-ch’ü. Chou Ch’uan-ying said: “Most people wouldn’t want to go to a k’un-ch’ü school. If they had to learn opera, they would probably go to a Peking opera school. We ended up in a k’un-ch’ü school because we were poor and because we heard that the school was good and we were also from Soochow. Soochow has always been best in k’un-ch’ü.” Families in Soochow must have known about Ch’uan-hsi by word of mouth. Five boys from Chou and Ku’s neighborhoods started in the school at the same time.

  Ch’uan-hsi was located in a desolate part of town, where families stored occupied coffins not yet ready for burial. In China it was common to see coffins on a temple ground or a vacant lot, either exposed or under a temporary cover; until they found a suitable gravesite and an auspicious date, families would wait for months, sometimes years, to bury the dead. Their attempt to do the right thing for the deceased often had a disagreeble, if not spooky, effect on the living. The actors who attended this k’un-ch’ü school could recall, years later, the dread of being so close to the dead when they were children. Chou Ch’uan-ying said:

  Our school bought half of “Five-mu Plot,” which was the name of this place. The coffins on our side were moved next door. In front of the school was an execution ground. On one side was the funeral home, which was always dark and eerie. We were all so young at the time, the oldest being no more than fourteen or fifteen. The younger ones among us would be too scared to go to the privy at night unless we had an older brother or a group of friends guarding us. I remember there was a boy with the nickname “Little Eggplant.” He was literally frightened to death.

  The founder of this school, Mu Ou-ch’u, was both a practical man and a dreamer. He learned enough English to get into the Chinese Maritime Customs Service and then earned enough credits through a correspondence school to get himself enrolled in an American university. His education in Western things was thorough—science, language, mathematics, agriculture, economics, and politics—the kind of education that Chang Shu-sheng had wished for all Chinese. In 1922, with a bachelor of science degree in agriculture from the University of Illinois and a graduate degree in textile industry from Texas A & M, Mu was already the owner of three cotton mills and a bank in Shanghai. The year before, he and a group of opera specialists and enthusiasts had met in Hangchow to discuss the future of k’un-ch’ü. The old Ch’üan-fu actors were probably not going to be around in another ten years, they said. What would happen to k’un-ch’ü then? Who would keep this art alive? And what could they—bankers and industrialists—do to help? At this gathering, Mu Ou-ch’u decided to make a huge contribution—fifty thousand silver dollars, according to some sources—to start a k’un-ch’ü school for boys. He was also willing to cover all the expenses.

  Mu Ou-ch’u had many ideas for his school. He wanted it to be a modern-style school, where physical punishment was forbidden and students learned to read and write in addition to receiving opera training. The school provided room and board. Every child was well fed. The instructors were the old actors from the Ch’üan-fu troupe, and among the staff were Yü Ts’ai-yun, Yuan-ho’s first teacher, and Shen Yüeh-ch’üan, the most venerated k’un-ch’ü actor of his time. Mu Ou-ch’u called his school ch’uan-hsi—“to pass on what one has practiced.” The name evoked an idea, found in the Analects, that later became central to the Confucian discussion of knowledge and its transmission. The Analects says that Confucius’ disciple Tseng Ts’an asked himself every day, “Have I passed on to others [ch’uan] anything I have not tried out [hsi] myself?” Every actor trained at Mr. Mu’s school had the word ch’uan in his stage name. The word identifies them as the ch’uan generation of actors.

  From the beginning, Ku Ch’uan-chieh’s teachers noticed that he had unusual gifts: an expansive and shimmering voice, and movements that were light and lithe. They took care to cultivate them but never singled him out. All the boys were treated equally—this was also the style of the Ch’uan-hsi school. Later, when they began to perform in the theaters in Shanghai, it became apparent very quickly that the audiences were coming to se
e Ku Ch’uan-chieh and a handful of others. Even so, their patron, Mr. Mu, saw to it that these actors did not always get top billing, that they sometimes took walk-on parts and played supporting roles. Chou Ch’uan-ying explained it in this way: “We were all classmates and brothers, sat at the same table and ate from the same pot. We were all professionals on the stage, trying to earn a little spending money on the side.” There were slight differences in their pay, but “they were always appropriate.”

  In 1927, Mu Ou-ch’u’s textile business faced serious financial troubles, and he had to withdraw his support. Two other industrialists, Yen Hui-yü and T’ao Hsi-ch’üan, took over the school. They changed the name of the opera troupe and many of its rules, creating a “star system” and huge discrepancies in salary and amenities. Those actors whom Mr. T’ao and Mr. Yen liked to plug got special treatment: “They stayed with T’ao and Yen, had meals with them and lived separately from their colleagues.” T’ao and Yen did not allow their favorites to play supporting roles. The “stars” decided which scenes they wanted to be in. “They would arrive in rickshaws with their patrons at their side just before they went onstage. And they would leave the same way, usually as soon as they finished singing.” These actors also received private gifts, “silk in the summer, fur in the winter.” Chou Ch’uan-ying thought that their new patrons did a lot of harm to the troupe, spoiling the love and loyalty the actors had for one another, and spoiling their work and their morale.

  In 1931, Yen Hui-yü and his partner decided to terminate their contract with the Grand World Entertainment Center, where their actors had been performing, and to cut their ties with the Ch’uan-hsi troupe altogether. Yen was willing to send his favorite actors to college if they wanted to go. Out of the three he plucked, only Ku Ch’uan-chieh took the offer.