Farewell My Concubine

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.