The Moon Opera

by Bi Feiyu

  In the second semester of her third year, Chunlai switched to the Qingyi role. She bore no resemblance to Xiao Yanqiu in her speaking voice, but when she sang, she was an echo of her mentor. The other teachers quipped that Chunlai was born to be Xiao Yanqiu’s rival. When Yanqiu first tried to talk Chunlai into switching from Huadan to Qingyi, the girl had said no. Yanqiu kept working on her, but she wouldn’t budge. Finally, not knowing what else to do, Xiao Yanqiu uttered a phrase that became and remains a source of amusement at the academy. She pulled a long face and said to Chunlai, “If you won’t study at my knee, then I’ll get down on my knee and beg. What do you say?” What could Chunlai say, when her teacher did something like that?

  The people at the academy still recalled how Chunlai looked when she first arrived. She spoke with a heavy country accent and dressed in clothes with ridiculously short sleeves and cuffs, leaving her calves exposed above her socks. Her cheeks pruned up each winter, with red creases lining her face; no one would have believed that she would grow up to be such a beauty. She was a perfect example of the common wisdom that a girl changes dramatically at eighteen. Who could have predicted that such a rare opportunity would come to Xiao Yanqiu? And who would have thought that Chunlai would be so lucky as to be part of it?

  In her twenty years at the academy Xiao Yanqiu had taught legions of students, but there hadn’t been a true singer among them, not one who might carry on the tradition, let alone become famous. Considering herself to be a failure as a teacher, she nearly gave up. But not quite. Of the many kinds of pain one can suffer, the worst is being forced to face unpleasant realities. And that is what Xiao Yanqiu had to do. On her thirtieth birthday, she knew she was as good as dead. Then, over the next ten years, she sat at her mirror watching herself grow older day by day, witnessing the slow death of the celebrated Chang’e. And there wasn’t a thing she could do about it. Her anxieties actually sped up the aging process; she could not hold off death with her hands nor claw it back with her fingernails.

  Time is cruel to a woman. It is merciless and relentless. Thirty years old! Dear Father! Dear Mother! On her thirtieth birthday, she had her first taste of liquor. It was only a small cup, but enough for her to get truly drunk. She cut her kitchen apron into two pieces and, holding one in each hand and pretending they were the long, loose water sleeves of the opera costume, she waved the white, greasy cloth and stumbled around the kitchen, sending bottles of cooking oil, soy sauce, and vinegar crashing to the floor; a shard of broken glass cut her hand and stained the makeshift sleeves with drops of fresh red blood. The red and white water sleeves were flung into the air, then floated down, again and again. Miangua ran into the kitchen and grabbed her, but she looked at him vacantly and called him “My dear Mama.” She recited the line to him in perfect pitch and tone: “My—dear—Ma—ma!” Seeing she was drunk, and fearful that her shouts would be heard, he covered her mouth with the blood-spattered apron. Yanqiu breathed deeply, her diaphragm rising and falling as she expelled the muffled roars of a wild animal. His heart ached to see her like this and he called her name, over and over. Though she turned her head to look at him, she could not speak. Yet the words emerged from her diaphragm, he could see that. She was calling from her diaphragm: “My—dear—Ma—ma—a—a!”

  “A thousand Sheng, ten thousand Dan, but a good Jing is hard to find.” So goes an old, but inaccurate saying passed down by performers from days long gone—one that found no support from Xiao Yanqiu. Granted, it is almost impossible to find a Hualian among all the Sheng, Dan, Jing, and Chou roles, but there certainly aren’t thousands of performers in any one category. From earliest days, Qingyi performers may well have numbered in the thousands, but a mere handful understood the role well enough to grasp its true essence. To be sure, a Qingyi must have a superb voice and an outstanding figure, but in the end, what makes an exceptional Qingyi is the type of woman who takes on the role, not how she sings or how she looks. Anyone born to play the role of a Qingyi, even a man six feet tall, must abandon the idea that his bones are made of clay and start acting as if his body were made of water. No matter which pier you drift to, you are still a cloud formed by water. On the stage, the Qingyi is not a succession of female roles, is not, in fact, even a gendered role. It is, in essence, an abstract concept, a profound form, an approach, a method, a significant natural gift. In a way, a person does not grow into being that woman, for she is not a product of the passage of time, nor can she be characterized by marriage or the biological stages of childbirth and nursing. A woman is just that, a woman. She cannot be learned nor can she be purged from a body. Qingyi is, one can almost say, a woman in name only; or, better yet, Qingyi is a woman among women, the ultimate woman, and a touchstone for all others. She appears on the stage, where she sings, signals with her eyes, and gestures with her hands—all components of so-called “performing” or “acting,” yet never more than simple movements from daily life. She makes you feel that life is just like this—every woman walks like this and talks like this. If you are not that essential “woman,” even if you were sitting on a sofa at home or perched at the head of your bed, you would be a bad performer, because you would be “acting,” and the more you acted, the less you would look like “her.” Hualian, the male painted face role, is the exact parallel to the Qingyi. Hualian is the quintessential man; or, we might say, the quintessential profile of the quintessential man. Everything about man should be simple; body and soul are but a mask. So simple it is an exaggeration, so simple it is endless and changeless. Hence, the decline of Peking Opera began with the decline of man and woman, hand in hand; it was the degeneration of the sexes.

  It was not easy for the gods to create a Hualian, and just as hard for them to create a Qingyi. Xiao Yanqiu was one of the Qingyi rarities; Chunlai was another.

  Xiao Yanqiu saw hope when Chunlai appeared, for the girl was all the reason anyone needed for Chang’e to exist. Like a grieving widow clinging to her only child, Xiao Yanqiu knew that her legacy would live on so long as there was a Chunlai. That was her final compensation from the gods, the last comfort they held out for her. Chunlai had just passed her seventeenth birthday and was, strictly speaking, still a girl. But she had never really been a girl. In a way she had been born a woman, an enchanting woman, a bewitching woman, a woman who could plunge you into bottomless sorrow with a single look. That is not to say she was precocious. She was just born that way. Chunlai entered the golden age of the Qingyi in her seventeenth summer, with a figure that had all the things it should have had and none it shouldn’t. Her waist was graced with a natural glamour that lent her a bewitching quality. A unique and wondrous light sparkled in her eyes. She did not just look at something, she cast a glance—a sidelong one here, a wistful one there. Her eyes embodied the ideal of expressing a reluctant parting and a coquettish sadness of unknown origin. When they were in motion, one would think that she was expressing herself on stage, for she was endowed with a talent to bring the most dramatic pattern down to the level of daily life and the special ability to elevate quotidian movement to the stage. For Chunlai, the adolescent change of voice occurred so smoothly that no one even noticed. For some performers, this change is the gate of hell, a career-ending barrier. They are in perfect singing form at their evening bath, only to discover upon awakening the next morning that demons have stolen their voices.

  Good fortune smiled on Chunlai; everything, it seemed, had been prepared for her beforehand. She may have been a Chang’e understudy, but no one could deny that the spiritual light of the Erlang deity shone brightly down on her.

  5

  Songs are the primary element of Peking Opera. To speak the lyrics is commonly called narrating an opera. The performer atomizes the narrative, turns it into countless fragments and details and transforms the character’s emotion, be that anger, happiness, pain, or melancholy into a word, a smile, glance, or a flinging of the water sleeves, and then folds these all back into the performance as a monologue, an aria, a recitation, or
a stylized gesture. Only after these have been reassembled and molded into alternating spoken and sung lines can the actual rehearsals begin. First comes the ensemble rehearsal. An opera is not the work of one person alone; it is, first and foremost, a study in interpersonal relations. With so many performers crowded onto a stage, they must learn to communicate, to cooperate, to exchange ideas, and to take others into consideration. This carefully conducted process is the ensemble rehearsal. But it does not end there. The performers also need to develop a connection with the orchestra, with the gongs, the drums, and other instruments. How could anything called “opera” exist without the winds, the strings, and the percussions? Bring all the instruments together, and you have what is called the sound rehearsal. But there is yet more, the dress rehearsal, which approaches an actual public performance, as the actors play to a virtual audience. The headdress must be worn, the face must be painted, and everyone plays a part as if it were a real performance. Only when that is done can the curtain for the big show be raised.

  Nearly everyone noticed that from the first day of opera narration, Xiao Yanqiu appeared to be trying a bit too hard, working too much. She had kept up with her routine, but she was, after all, a forty-year-old woman who had been away from the stage for two decades. Her unyielding work ethic, in contrast to the rashness of the young, was like a river, flowing east in the spring and displaying defiance and dignity. Yet it was hopelessly clumsy, with giant eddies and swirls that fought to turn back at the moment of merging with the ocean. It was an exhausting struggle, presenting the illusion of swimming against the tide, an involuntary downward slide, an unstoppable flow. Truly the passage of time is like water seeking lower ground; no matter how hard you try, the sad reality is that spilled water cannot be recovered. You strain to drag the ox by the tail, only to end up having it pull you into the water.

  By the time of the opera narration, Xiao Yanqiu had successfully shed ten pounds. She was not losing weight so much as clawing it off, with earnestness and considerable pain. It was a battle of stealth, devoid of gunpowder, but producing significant casualties nonetheless. Her body was now her enemy, and she carpet-bombed it with an avenging madness, all the while closely monitoring the situation. During those days, she was not only a bomber jet, but also an accomplished sniper, as, rifle in hand, she watched her body closely. It was her ultimate target, and she unflinchingly pulled the trigger whenever the slightest movement caught her attention. She stepped on the scales each night to see if she had met the strict, self-imposed demand of daily weight loss. She was determined to claw off twenty-five pounds, returning to her weight of twenty years before, for she was convinced that, so long as she shed those twenty-five pounds, her life of that period would return. The morning light of those days would once again cast her peerless figure onto the earth.

  It was a long, cruel battle. Liquids, sugar, lying down, and hot foods are the four enemies of weight loss. For Yanqiu eating and sleeping were the magic words. She tackled sleep first, allowing herself only five hours a night; beyond that, she neither slept nor sat. Then she attended to what she put into her mouth. Neither rice nor water was allowed, especially hot water. All she ate were fruits and vegetables. Beyond that, like the insatiable Chang’e, she swallowed large quantities of pills.

  Results were easy to come by at first. Her weight plummeted like stocks in a bear market. She lost the fat, but gained skin, which, like a found purse, hung from her body limply. This extra skin gave the illusion that she was more form than content. It was a strange impression, one both comical and loathsome. Worst of all, it showed most in her face. It gave her a widow’s mien; staring at her reflection in the mirror, she felt every bit as dejected and despairing as a widow might.

  But the true despair was yet to come. Once she began to see the results of her weight loss regimen, she suffered from lightheadedness, a clear sign of malnutrition. She was becoming lethargic, was often dizzy and fatigued, grew anxious, and suffered from nausea and a lack of energy. With all this came a notable weakening of her voice. After the opera narration was behind them, preparations entered the dry-run stage, which meant an even greater depletion of energy. Her voice lost its power and sounded less steady, a bit shaky. As her breathing faltered, she had to tighten her vocal cords and, as a result, she sounded less and less like Xiao Yanqiu.

  It never occurred to Yanqiu that she would one day make a fool of herself, and in front of so many people. While demonstrating a particular sequence for Chunlai, she tattooed her voice; in plain language, she croaked. Nothing is more embarrassing to someone who makes a living with her voice. What emerged sounded like the scratching of glass on glass or a hog on the back of a sow, not something that had come from a human throat. Every performer’s voice tattoos once in a while, but Xiao Yanqiu wasn’t just any performer, and she was mortified by all the eyes fixed on her. For her, those looks were not knives; no, they were poison, which draws no blood and causes no pain as it takes your life. She decided she must save face, that she had to recapture her dignity in front of them all. So, taking a deep breath to calm herself, she signaled to start over. But twice more she tried, and twice more she failed. Her throat itched horribly, as if a swarm of tiny bugs were crawling over it. She felt a cough rising in her throat, but managed to swallow it through sheer steeliness of will. Bingzhang, who was sitting off to the side, brought her a glass of water and, in an attempt to sound casual, said, “Here, take a break. Let’s all take a break.” But she refused the offer; to accept the glass at that moment would have been so unlike her. Turning to the performer in the role of Houyi the Archer, she said, “Let’s try it again.” This time she did not tattoo her voice, but only because she stopped before reaching for the high notes. Releasing a long sigh, she stood frozen.

  No one dared come talk to her, no one dared even look at her. She forced herself to remain collected, but that too took its toll. People should never be too anxious to recover their dignity after a blunder; sometimes, the more they try, the greater the loss. Yanqiu swept her eyes over the people around her, but they seemed to have reached a tacit agreement to pretend that nothing had happened. This felt like a conspiracy, as cruel as an open accusation. She wanted to give it one more try, but her courage had left her. Bingzhang held up his glass and announced loudly, “Your teacher has a cold, so we’ll stop here. We’re done for the day.” Xiao Yanqiu looked at him with teary eyes, fully aware of his good intentions; but what she felt like doing was rushing up, grabbing him by the collar, and giving him a couple of resounding slaps.

  The room emptied out quickly, leaving only Xiao Yanqiu and Chunlai. Not daring to look at her teacher, Chunlai bent down and pretended to gather up her things. As she fixed her eyes on her student, Xiao Yanqiu marveled at the lovely profile, and at the girl’s cheeks and chin, which held a luster normally seen only on fine china. She was lost in thought, as she silently repeated the question: Why don’t I have that kind of good fortune?

  The girl straightened up, unnerved by her teacher’s gaze. “Come here, Chunlai,” Xiao Yanqiu said. The girl stood still, unsure of what to do. “Chunlai,” Yanqiu said, “I want you to sing that part for me.” The girl gulped. How could she dare do that at a moment like this? All she could do was quietly say, “Teacher.” Yanqiu moved a chair over and sat down. Though she was confused and anxious, Chunlai knew from her teacher’s attitude that there was no getting out of it. So she calmed herself as best she could, struck a pose, and began to sing.

  Xiao Yanqiu sat there studying the girl intently and listening carefully. But after a few moments her mind began to wander, and she glanced up at the full-length mirror on the wall. It was like a stage, cruelly showcasing her and Chunlai. Unconsciously, she began to compare the two of them. The contrast made her look so much older, ugly even. Back then she’d looked like Chunlai did now. Where had she gone? The saying that you mustn’t compare yourself with others is so unkind. Yes, you mustn’t compare yourself with others, but you also mustn’t compare your present sel
f with your former self. Mirrors will gradually reveal what is meant by “Green mountains cannot cover it up, and it will flow east with the river.” Xiao Yanqiu felt her confidence slip away like water seeking lower ground. She recalled the elation she’d felt at the beginning of her comeback, and realized that the happiness would, like a puff of smoke or a passing cloud, vanish without a trace. Her resolve wavered and she considered withdrawing; but she couldn’t. Chunlai, of course, had more to learn, but in broad terms it would not take the girl long to surpass her. Given her youth, there was no limit to what she could do one day, and this thought brought Xiao Yanqiu waves of sorrow and pain. She knew she was jealous.