Farewell My Concubine

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

There wasn’t even any refuge in virtue anymore.