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ix Preface This book attempts to seize a moment in the history of Chinese women, of Shanghai, and of China’s nascent modernity before it is lost. It presents a social and cultural history of the unique phenomenon of an all-female theater, “women’s Yue opera” (nüzi Yueju [lit., “women’s Zhejiang opera”]), or simply “Yue opera” (Yueju), in the context of the rise of an urban popular culture in modern Shanghai. Women’s Yue opera, which originated in the Zhejiang countryside, became a popular form of theater, specializing in love dramas, between the 1930s and 1960s in the metropolis of Shanghai . Banned during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), it was revived immediately after, only to become a theater enjoyed by a small number of fans and art professionals in more recent decades. If each era has its own popular culture, and if China’s reform era has adopted a globalized popular culture of rock and roll and gongfu movies, then women’s opera represents a popular-culture phenomenon of a past era. Although the opera has retained its artistic identity and will continue to be performed into the conceivable future, the social, political, and cultural significance it bore in previous periods is rapidly being replaced by a new set of contemporary meanings. The actresses and audiences who made Yue opera a popular phenomenon were aging as I began my research in the mid-1990s, and many have since passed away. It is urgent to preserve the voices of the women of Yue opera, speaking directly about their relationship with the opera and what the opera has meant to them. Moreover, while some earlier performances have been preserved on audio- and videotapes, the historical context and human relationships that shaped these productions must be rescued, or they will be lost. I arrived on the scene in time to carry out some of the rescue work, conducting the first round of interviews in 1995–96 and following up with more interviews and conversations. The most important of these were interviews with actresses in the first and second generations of Yue opera, who personi fied the opera’s success. Born during the 1920s into rural and peasant families in the poor countryside of Zhejiang, these women, who were mostly illiterate, joined opera schools in their early teens in order to make a living ; they drifted to Shanghai with the flow of Zhejiang immigrants in the 1930s and 1940s and, with their performances both in the theater and in society, established Yue opera as the most popular theater in the city during the ensuing decades. The stories they told about their lives and careers not only testify to the genre’s history but also reveal the ways in which these women allowed various rhetorics to mediate their narratives of this history and their own experiences. The audience members I interviewed were mostly from middle- or upperclass families with education levels ranging from primary school to college . They are representative of the most important part of the audience, those who helped shape the opera with their financial, social, and emotional support. Their stories, combined with the actresses’ recollections of female patrons and fans, provide access to the social and imaginary worlds of middle-class housewives and daughters. These women, the Yue opera actresses and audience members, represented a large segment of the female population in Shanghai in the middle decades of the twentieth century. This segment of the city’s population and Yue opera as a major popularculture production of this group have so far been overlooked in studies of modern Chinese history. The negligence has much to do with the modern Chinese political and intellectual leadership, which, for most of the twentieth century, was not interested in popular culture but focused on rescuing China from imperialism and building it into a modern nation and state. The Nationalist government (1928–49) and the People’s Republic of China (PRC [1949–present]) each made efforts to mobilize the population for its version of nation building, and both attempted to use popular arts as means of mass education and mobilization. In the eyes of this leadership, marketoriented popular arts that focused on the private, mundane concerns of individual citizens were unnecessary, selfish, and trivial, to say the least, and harmful and dangerous, at worst, as they encouraged people to indulge their personal feelings and kept them from devoting themselves to the nation. Thus, both left-wing and Nationalist intellectuals criticized popular literature...

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