Years ago in North China, I was taken, reluctantly, by my grandmother to my first opera. It was a regional performance of a revolutionary opera whose name I forget. A teenager, I was bored almost as soon as I grasped the not very inspiring plot.
My particular grind, uninspiring plot aside, was the lengthy process the hero took to die. Of course I didn’t want him to die, but once his fate was sealed, I just wanted it over and done with. But he sang aria after aria, and finally.
.. I fell asleep.
On the way back home, my grandmother agreed that the storyline was ridiculously formulaic—there was a reason they were called Revolutionary Model Plays. “But I miss seeing live performances.” She sighed: “That’s why I had to come to this.
If I close my eyes and listen only to the tunes, I can pretend it was one of the old ones...
.” I was lucky that my introduction to Chinese opera was with my grandmother Tian Jingyu, the best storyteller in the world. Through her, I learned traditional stories often suppressed at the time, and of course I got to listen to a lot of operas—on my father’s gramophone record, since no traditional operas were allowed to be performed when I grew up.
We are Northerners and our regional opera are the , the most famous of which is the tragedy of Qin Xianglian, the Wronged Woman, who pursued revenge and justice on her cruel and faithless husband, Chen Shimei. Not content with abandoning Qin when he caught the eyes of the emperor’s daughter, Che.