Women Playing Men: Yue Opera and Social Change in Twentieth-Century Shanghai

Introduction: Opera, Gender, and the City

3 Introduction Opera, Gender, and the City One of the most important cultural changes in modern China was the feminine opera culture that grew out of its Qing period (1644–1911) masculine predecessor. This modern feminine opera culture achieved its most mature form in several popular opera genres, including “ping opera” (pingju), which flourished in Tianjin; Yue opera, which became popular in Shanghai ; and the “boy-singers’ opera” (gezaixi), which thrived in Xiamen (later Taipei). The rise of a feminine opera culture in coastal cities reveals much about the gendered nature of social and cultural changes in the twentieth century. Women’s Yue opera, a popular social and cultural phenomenon created by the actresses and audiences of Yue opera in Shanghai, was a concentrated expression of the historical rise of women in public culture in modern Chinese society. It was also the most popular theater in Shanghai for half a century, from the late 1930s through the 1980s. Although women’s Yue opera originated in the countryside of Sheng county (Shengxian, present-day Shengzhou City), Zhejiang, it took shape in Shanghai in the 1930s, where it underwent two major transformations—from a rural to an urban entertainment and from all-male to all-female performers. The opera thrived in Shanghai in the 1940s to such an extent that it overtook Beijing opera and the native “Shanghai opera” (Shenqu or Huju) to become the most popular theater in the city. In the 1950s and 1960s, the opera gained national and international influence through frequent performance tours as well as films of Yue opera master plays such as The Butterfly Lovers, of 1953, and Dream of the Red Chamber, of 1962, and became, arguably, second only to Beijing opera on a nationwide scale in terms of the size of its personnel and audience. Why and how did a female opera capture such a large audience , and what does Yue opera’s success tell us about the gendered nature of China’s cultural modernity? More specifically, perhaps, as Shanghai nurtured women’s Yue opera, in what sense did the opera embody some of the city’s peculiar gender and popular characteristics? One answer to these questions lies in the love drama that tied the opera, the audiences, and the city together in forging a peculiar urban popular culture. Romantic love became one of the most important themes in popular culture as new patterns of family, gender, and sexual relationships began to emerge in twentieth-century Chinese society, which was undergoing tremendous modernization. While this transformation was occurring nationwide, changing family, gender, and sexual relationships had their most concentrated manifestations in treaty-port cities and generated an overflow of cultural products that reflected these changes in the form of the love drama. The love drama became an essential element in various genres, encompassing elite melodramatic productions of leftist films in the 1930s and 1940s as well as popular literature and entertainment such as “mandarin ducks and butterflies” fiction,1 “Shanghai-style” (Haipai) literature, Shanghai opera, and women’s Yue opera. As a response to the popular need to address these deeply felt changes, this culture of love in turn discursively shaped popular perceptions and understandings of changing sex and gender relationships. Ever since the May Fourth New Culture Movement (roughly 1915–23), popular fiction and entertainment focusing on the emotion of love, or yanqing (lit., “elaborating on feelings”) culture, was a target of criticism from China’s intellectual and political elites, and international scholars overlooked it as they privileged studies in elite culture. This situation began to change dramatically in the 1980s, and a great number of monographs on Republican Shanghai’s popular culture have since appeared. Perry Link led the way with his pioneering study of the “mandarin ducks and butterflies” school of fiction, while in the 1990s, Wei Shaochang, Wang Dewei (David Wang), Zhang Gansheng, Yang Yi, and Wu Fuhui followed up with more detailed and expanded studies of popular fiction in Republican era Shanghai . In the meantime, Paul Pickowicz, Yingjin Zhang, and Poshek Fu examined popular film of the period, and Leo Ou-Fan Lee’s 1999 study surveyed the fields of fiction, film, and café as representatives of a modern urban culture in Republican Shanghai. Together, these works created a rich literature of popular fiction and film in Republican Shanghai and explored the question of the city’s cultural modernity.2 4 Introduction Building on the existing literature, this investigation of women and...