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.

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.

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.

“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 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.

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.