Operatic China: Staging Chinese Identity across the Pacific (review)

Operatic China: Staging Chinese Identity across the Pacific by Daphne Pi-Wei Lei is an important study of Chinese opera and the performance of Chinese identity. The book has a broader scope than most studies of similar subjects as it covers both sides of the Pacific from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. This multinational perspective allows Lei to draw on Chinese studies, performance studies, and American studies to investigate "the uniqueness of Chinese opera and its relation to identity performance by Chinese, for Chinese, and against Chinese, on and off stage" (2).

To Lei, the usage of the term "Chinese opera" in the West constitutes a Lacanian lack by framing Chinese theatre as a "translation," "a Chinese version of Western opera" (8). Its focus is to draw attention not to "the special features that Chinese theatre has but the expected Euro-American theatre features that Chinese theatre does not have" (10). Chinese opera conflates different forms of song and dance–based Chinese theatre into "the distilled, most concentrated, and most ethnic experience of all Chineseness, . . . a double for Chinese culture and the Chinese people" (5). This framing then allows stereotypes of Chinese opera such as effeminacy to be inscribed onto Chinese identity. Furthermore, these stereotypes are so culturally entrenched that they have been accepted and adopted by Chinese modernity, Asian American theatre, and contemporary pan-Chinese films.

As a study of cultural performance, Operatic China pays more attention to amateur performance and paratheatre than professional productions. Here, Lei is well served by the concept of "racial split," based on such notions as the Brechtian split of an actor's experience, the Lacanian mirror image, Kristeva's separation of body and waste, Fanon's black skin and white mask, and Geertz's concept of cultural performance. For Lei, the temporary and incomplete racial split facilitates the performance of "this kind of Chinese [versus] that kind of Chinese" (14), especially by amateur performers. It is also applicable to Asian American theatre, from its Fanonian hyphenated identity to the inward Orientalist gaze.

After an introduction, the book's five chapters roughly follow two historical periods. The first three chapters are devoted to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when a weak Chinese image created chaos and reform at home and discrimination in the United States. The last two chapters focus on contemporary theatrical and film practices at a time when China prepares for global gaze. Each chapter studies one or two "contact zones," defined as "a geographical, social, and ideological site . . . nurtured by negotiation, assimilation, and conflict" (3).

In chapter 1, Lei examines the othering of Cantonese theatre in frontier California, which started before the arrival of the first Chinese troupe and resulted in the self-orientalizing of later Chinese theatres to fit their ghettoized status. In chapter 2, Lei explores two types of identity performance during the late Qing period. The first type was new Western-style spoken-drama productions in Tokyo by Chinese students hoping to represent a modern identity; the second took place in coastal Chinese cities where existing border-crossing plays that depicted Chinese interactions with northern "barbarians" were modified to perform new encounters with Western "barbarians" from the ocean. Chapter 3 focuses on the use of theatrics by anti-Qing rebels as Lacanian doubles mirroring between life and theatre.

Moving back to the Bay Area over a century later, chapter 4 analyzes the racial split in Cantonese theatre between theatre and paratheatre, virtual and real Chinatown, and generations of amateur actors. Chapter 5 examines the reliance on Hollywood stereotypes of Chinese opera in two virtual contact zones: Asian American theatre, and pan-Chinese films. In her conclusion, the author criticizes Zhang Yimou's ballet version of Raise the Red Lantern for its thematized Chineseness by presenting Beijing opera as the perfect match for ballet—the ultimate Western high art.

Lei's book makes several invaluable contributions to the study of Chinese identity performance. Her chapters on...