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Chinatown Opera Theater in North America. By Nancy Yunhwa Rao. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017. xiv + 415 pp. 75 illus. Cloth $95.00. Paper $29.95. Electronic $26.96. Historian Henry Yu ends his important essay on the “Cantonese Pacific” with a markedly aural injunction: Only if we recover the lost voices of the nineteenth century Cantonese Pacific will we understand that the rhythms of their lives must be understood not merely as a result of inclusion and exclusion but as their own conscious agency and their advance to their own tunes.1 In some ways, Nancy Yunhwa Rao’s Chinatown Opera Theater in North America is the quintessential response to Yu’s call, for there is little doubt that the defining tunes of the Chinese diaspora in the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth were, in the most literal sense, those of the Cantonese opera. With her detailed study of the second “golden age” of Chinatown theaters—the 1920s—in North America, Rao adds to recent English-language work on Cantonese opera as a transnational art form and business,2 and she does so in a way that draws on an impressive variety of sources, many of them featuring thespians, their promoters, and their fans in their own words and voices. From Chinatown newspaper write-ups to playbills to sound recordings, the reader is afforded a glimpse of a complex web of commercial interests and theatrical rivalries at the very heart of the Chinese immigrant experience. Much of Rao’s contribution stems from her articulation of the important role of Cantonese opera in Chinatown communities in the 1920s, her aim being to “release these theaters from their repressed silence and perpetual invisibility, as well as separate them from the myths about them” (p. 9). Chief among these myths are the notions of marginality—of actors just passing through, of theaters’ questionable moral standing, of Chinese opera in the American musical imaginary—and fixity —of an unchanging repertoire and performance practice divorced from the geopolitical realities and dominant aesthetic trends of the day. By contrast, Rao “consider [s] Chinatown theaters to be dynamic, rather than timeless” (p. 12), wherein their dynamism is borne of commercial, cultural, and civic engagement, not isolation. Specifically, Rao argues that Chinatown opera theaters were influenced by five key factors: (1) the audiences’ varied and shifting expectations of the genre; (2) the theaters ’ places in the community as establishments and cultural institutions; (3) Chinese performers’ immigration status as the exclusion laws evolved and the ways immigration enforcement shifted; (4) the interactions between local 1 Henry Yu, “The Intermittent Rhythms of the Cantonese Pacific,” in Connecting Seas and Connected Ocean Rims, edited by Donna R. Gabaccía, and Dirk Hoerder (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 393–414, quote from p. 414. 2 See, for example, Wing Chung Ng, The Rise of Cantonese Opera (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2015). 90 CHINOPERL: JOURNAL OF CHINESE ORAL AND PERFORMING LITERATURE 37. 1 theaters in a transnational network; and (5) individual performers and their performing styles. (p. 12) The book examines each of these factors in some depth. Given the apparent complexity afforded Cantonese opera houses in this work, it is perhaps only to be expected that Chinatown Opera Theater in North America is a rather hefty tome. Geographically as well as conceptually ambitious, over the course of the book’s five parts, comprising twelve chapters, its introduction, and its epilogue , the reader is ushered through much of the North American circuit traversed by actor after actor: Honolulu as a stopover midway across the Pacific; Vancouver, Victoria , Seattle, and Portland in the Northwest; San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Mexicali further south; and Montreal, Boston, New York, Havana, and Mexico City in the East. There are a dizzying number of actors, actresses, opera troupes, and theaters mentioned throughout, which, while sometimes difficult for the inattentive reader to follow, testify to a vibrant cultural sphere predicated on the movement of people and the novelty afforded by star arrivals and departures. Whether directly to and from China and Hong Kong or another stop on the North American theater circuit, Rao convincingly illustrates that the movement of talent was crucial to the Chinatown...

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