Farewell My Concubine

The stage is populated by brilliant young scholars and beautiful ladies whose exalted passions are more vivid than the drab colors of our workaday existence. Compared to their stories, everyday life is like the plain and pale face of an actor stripped of his makeup.

As the children started to crawl quietly out of bed, Master Guan was seized by cold terror when he thought of Xiao Laizi’s suicide and all the beatings he had given him. He recalled as well as the many beatings he had received as a child, innocent of any wrongdoing but still held accountable, judged. His teachers had treated him and his classmates even more harshly than he treated his own students—it was to toughen them up for their demanding careers.

His once deformed hand became the embodiment of feminine beauty as his wrists circled elegantly, the posed fingers of his “orchid hands” weaving through the air. […] Putting one hand under his chin in a pensive attitude, he gazed out, his eyes resting on some indistinct point neither near nor far. He was in another world.

That day at the Spring Blossom Teahouse they were Lu Bu, Diao Chan, and a group of “heroes.” But outside the theater, they were “ninth-class” citizens. As performers, opera singers, and actors, they stood on one of the bottom rungs of the social ladder in the China of the 1920s and 1930s. The time they spent in the limelight, dressed in elaborate costumes, was a brief respite from otherwise hard lives. For a few hours they embodied the dreams of their people, and then they went back to being objects of contempt.

The people they saw were all richly dressed in old-fashioned clothes. Young or old, man or woman, they were all still loyal to the vanquished Qing dynasty. Some were holdovers who longed for the good old days. Others were spiritual refugees who had no memory of those times but still wished for their return. None of them wore a braid, the old symbol of loyalty to the Qing, but there was an invisible queue winding around the bodies of the assembled guests. They were trapped in the past, with no desire to slip their bonds. They had nowhere else to go but here, nothing else left to do in life but sit cracking melon seeds, watching operas, and smoking opium.

Educated people had always looked down on theater people and their gypsy existence, while actors, filled with self-loathing, avenged themselves by disparaging educated people. Xiaolou felt disgust for the students. Who cared about family or country, indeed! If those little baby bookworms wanted to go save the nation, let them. Did they think they mattered?

Yuan Siye’s gaze did not wander from the lady for the rest of the show.

A performance lets the actor be someone important, while those in the audience have bought a piece of that extraordinary life. That actors bask in the admiration of hundreds of strangers, who are transported out of their small lives by the deep emotions enacted before them. But the encounter only lasts for several hours of an evening. By the next day, all of the participants have returned to their quotidian existences, strangers again.

Yuan Siye was not a great general or leader. He had been born in the wrong age. But he wielded the power of a general in the imaginary world of the theater, holding sway within the narrow confines of a realm that had been frozen in time for almost two centuries.

Times had changed, but the characters were still the same.

There were men who depended on the Japanese, or the government, for their power and prestige. They ruled like despots in their own spheres.

Once stripped bare, his fine-featured face stared tiredly from the mirror. He felt dead inside, his heart as cold and gray as ashes. He knew how it felt to be an abandoned woman and remembered an old saying: A woman without a man is a vine with no stakes to support her.

“One must pay meticulous attention to every aspect of one’s artistry. Only then can one hope for that sublime merging of players and play into one. There is a saying that if the actor is not himself deeply moved by his performance, then the audience won’t be touched either.”

Perhaps he was already dead. Maybe his mother had killed him when he was ten, and the man he was today was only a ghost. Or maybe he was that abandoned baby girl. Suddenly, he didn’t know who or where he was.

Remembering why he had come, he bowed his head deferentially. He was still nothing but the evening’s “entertainment,” an actor joining his host for a brief meal.

The century-old lyrics still had meaning. They told of the rise and fall of a dynasty, and yet they could have been describing the fortunes of the Nationalist government. China was locked in a civil war.

Then [Xiao Si] spotted the sword hanging on the wall. Following his gaze, the others saw it, too. It ought to be worth something. Juxian and Dieyi both looked at Xiaolou.

“We can’t sell that!” Xiaolou said emphatically.

Dieyi sighed with relief, but Juxian’s eyes flashed angrily. She wanted nothing more than to cast that old relic into the depths of hell.

“‘Loyalty’ means an unwavering devotion to a person or a cause. Loyalty cannot be distracted by any hardship, no matter how extreme.”

“Our company performs revolutionary operas, not old-fashioned operas. We must use different methods from those used in the Old Society. The old ways spread superstitions that poisoned people’s lives; and the old style encouraged actors to be self-aggrandizing.”

The characters were wrong, and the confessions were lies. Everything was wrong. They seemed to have walked into the wrong play.

He had failed where his heroine Yu Ji had succeeded. Life in the opera was more fulfilling, indeed. All one had to do was sing, up to the glorious finale; and the curtain always fells, right on cue. Onstage, Yu Ji was able to tell her lover that just as a virtuous minister does not serve two princes, so a virtuous woman cannot marry twice.; then she asks for her sword so that she can ender her life in his presence. This was her way of demonstrating her love for him., and her acceptance of his boundless love for her. But in real life, Dieyi’s love was unrequited.

Dieyi and Xiaolou had given up their places at center stage to a new cast of monsters. Today’s victim was a playwright. […]

After this group had been criticized and struggled against, a new group would be hauled in.

Red Guards no longer ran everything, and these children had obviously run away from a “reeducation camp” somewhere in the countryside.

He had fled to Hong Kong by sea from Fujian. Unlike General Xiang Yu, he had chosen to live. His life was not a play.

Dieyi returned to his senses. The glittering tragedy was over. It had all been fake. He would not die for love.

There wasn’t even any refuge in virtue anymore.