Abstract
The Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) in China marked a period fraught with ideological tensions and violent social reforms that had long-lasting impacts on the traditional performing arts. If, in the decades before, the nandan art, or female impersonation in Beijing opera (jingju), was embodied in the figure of Mei Lanfang—leader of the Four Great Dan (si da ming dan), who played charming feminine characters onstage and fulfilled the role of morally conscious citizens offstage—then the art was banned, stigmatized, and re-gendered during the Revolution. Picking up from when China’s institutional support had allowed jingju actresses to play dan roles previously performed by males, this article historicizes the grassroots phenomenon of Li Yugang’s genre-defying female-impersonating aesthetic and problematizes the very use of current terminologies (e.g., fanchuan, female impersonation, cross-dressing, transvestism, etc.) and Western critical theory to discuss a culturally specific mode of performing whose discursive assumptions need making transparent. Further, the article examines Li’s relationship with the Mei school of acting to theorize the multidirectional strategies with which postmodern female impersonation disentangles itself from its precursor’s ideological commitment: conjuring up simulacra of idealized feminine subjectivities by vying for ever-heightening gratification of the aural and the visual; embracing contradiction and ambiguity; and generating its own self-mutilation and eventual deconstruction. Sketching these female-impersonating strategies will explain how Li Yugang’s aesthetic facilitates assimilating postmodern technology and thematics to promote the Chinese traditional culture, helps address old problems of the artist’s social and cultural legitimacy, and naturalizes the mass audiences’ reception of the androgynous body.
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Notes
Born into a family of long artistic pedigree in 1894, Mei Lanfang was well-versed in singing techniques, verse recitation, non-verbal gestures, and stage acrobatics—the four most fundamental aspects of jingju performing. Li Yuru, established female dan, sums up the difference in socio-economic backgrounds between Mei Lanfang and Cheng Yanqiu [Cheng Yanqiu, second most famous of the four great dan, was often held to be vocally superior to them (Goldstein 1999, p. 396)]:
Their styles are so different and, I think, they are associated with the masters’ family backgrounds and personalities. Mr. Mei’s family was once rich, deeply rooted in the Pear Garden through his grandfather and generations of martial connections. Although the family’s fortune declined when Mei was a child, he was well looked after since he was the only male heir. He was thus much controlled by a strong family and theatrical tradition. He was gentle, easy-going and generous. People often use “stately” and “graceful” to describe his voice. Mr. Cheng was different. After all, he was from a poor bannerman family. (quoted in Li 2010, pp. 99–100)
Concubine Yang’s aria (“Haidao binglun chu zhuan teng”), steeped in classical literary metaphors and in pace with the melody of the huqin and the dan pi gu in siping mode, goes thus:
The icy-wheel, just rising over the island,
sees the Jade-Hare, which also ascends the eastern sky.
O, that the crystal moon has left the island!
I am like the Lady in the Moon leaving her Lunar Palace!
Heaven and earth brightly illuminated—
The dangling, effulgent, moon in mid-sky
is even more like the Lady in the Moon leaving her Lunar Palace;
I am like the Lady in the Moon leaving her Lunar Palace!
It is clear, from a letter interview with Li Yugang conducted by the author on February 17, 2018, that Li shifted the lens of his artistic philosophy from one of division to one of inclusion. When asked how pursuing an art that defies any rigid genre classification could help promote the Chinese culture in the global setting, Li said:
To me, the most remarkable characteristic of the Chinese culture is its inclusiveness. As one of the four ancient world’s civilizations, China has accumulated a great many arts treasures, one of which is traditional drama.... However, as time passes and society advances, Chinese traditional drama culture—due to neglect—often appears reserved and high-brow, suitable for only a limited group of spectators.... Therefore, if we want to rekindle young people’s hearts to accept and think consciously about the traditional culture, we must adopt a form that they like to hear and see—combining the fashionable and the traditional, preserving the essence of culture and giving it fresh vitality, so that more young people can see their lives reflected in my work.
This constitutive difference lies in the ways in which the masculine and the feminine, the male voice and the falsetto, the image and the sound, are deployed to create different perception-affects in different combinations. I will discuss this in more detail in the next section of my article.
And sexuality as understood by Butler is shown to be produced by and subsumed within overwhelming power-relations, which render impossible any conception of a normative sexuality as transcending itself. Ironically, her proposed scheme of subversion-via-repetition—in other words, using the very terms of power against itself—runs a double theoretical risk: it would reinstate power as some totalizing structure that now comes to cast its hegemony even on the subversive critiques generated within its own body; simultaneously, if power-relations are to modify and expand their contours by a retroactive absorption of those various local subversive ruses, how then can one ascertain any such “displacement of the law” (1999, pp. 39–40) is not yet another reflex of power?
The length of the ribbon has been acknowledged to be the longest ever used in traditional dance. Unlike the regular fifteen-meter ribbon used in jingju, longer ones require more muscle support to maneuver, but would add extra elegance once the difficulty is overcome.
According to history, Emperor Tang Xuanzong later became infatuated with Yang’s beauty to the extent of neglecting his kingly duty, which resulted in the An Lushan rebellion. Even the army refused to fight for the Emperor unless he killed his favorite concubine, whose ravishing beauty people believed had caused national misfortunes in the first place. Although Yang committed suicide so that the Emperor could keep his throne, the dynasty still came to its eventual demise, regardless of the presence or absence of the state-overturning (qingguo qingcheng) beauty.
For example, when Xi Shi—whose ravishing beauty causes the fish to forget to swim—is playing with personified reeds on the riverbank and washing her silk sash, King Goujian’s soldiers come and take her away, using her as part of a political plot to undermine the State of Wu. In contrast, Diao Chan flirts with and provokes both General Lü Bu and the imperial tutor (the latter a plotting tyrant himself) into fighting each other. At the end of “Plot Within Plot” (“Xi zhong xi”), the two perish in a duel.
As was typical of Li’s song selection for his U.S show the year before, Canada Tour opens with Li singing rock lyrics of “Guose tianxiang” (“National Grace, Divine Fragrance”) in raspy, buzzing male voice—to quickening martial drumbeats. This then leads into the classic feminine refrain in “The New Drunken Concubine” and other bi-vocal folk-themed songs, such as “Painting of Pure Brightness Festival by the River” (“Qingming shanghe tu”), "Chasing Dream” (“Zhu meng ling”), “Li” (“Li”), “Hometown” (“Guxiang”), and "Ode to Pear Blossoms” (“Lihua song”). Perhaps for practical reasons similar to those Mei had faced when putting together an introductory show for a Western audience (Goldstein 1999), Canada Tour tends to emphasize Li’s male visage as much as it does his falsetto in this first part. A possible argument one can make of such selective representation of cultural essences is that—when the feminine voice equals distillations of the historical Chinese nation and its landscapes, when it towers over the murmuring pop male vocals in the absence of cross-dressing—the assimilating force of the aesthetic continuum problematizes and almost annuls any attempt to visualize gendered conceptions of “nation,” “culture,” or “tradition.”
A roughly equivalent notion to this kind of inclusivity may be Derrida’s (1976) supplementarity (see of Grammatology pp. 141–164); the supplement can be thought of as coming from outside of that to which it adds, or it can be viewed as always already contained in what it is adding/added to—for that which needs such a supplement cannot be itself unless it is understood as not being its supplement (or Not-Itself). Suzuki (1956) would call such constitutive condition “thusness” or “suchness.”
This four-line poem (a form known in Vedic and Buddhist traditions as the gatha) is taken from the final chapter of one of Mahayana Buddhism’s most important texts, the Diamond Sutra (Jin Gang Jing), in which the Buddha sums up what he has taught his disciple, Subhuti, about non-attachment to the reified nature of language; the illusion of an ontological existence, or self-nature, of all dependently arising dharmas; and the emptiness of ultimate reality.
For a comprehensive comparison of the different forms of emptiness in Mahayana Buddhism, see Burton’s (2016) analysis.
A line borrowed from a poem by the famous poet Li Yu (937–978), also emperor of the late Tang Dynasty during the Five Dynasties period. The poem, written in “tune” (ci) form, is named “Xiangjian huan” (“Joy at Meeting”). The original lines that contain the imagery are “Parasol-trees lonesome and drear / Lock in the courtyard autumn clear” (trans. Li 2013).
An expression of self-mockery that indicates how helpless the scholar feels.
I translated feng liu as “romance,” deeming the term most capable of encompassing the complexity of the scholar’s relationship with the famous courtesan, or huakui. The concept of feng liu, as Feng (1948) explains in A Short History of Chinese Philosophy, has many connotations besides its literal meaning of “wind and stream”; its roots in Taoism and Neo-Taoism give it a transcendental quality in the sense that, in crossing the boundary between subject and object, oneself and nature, the artist-philosopher lives according to his own impulse and in a romantic spirit (somewhat in the order of Western Romanticism), which is extremely sensitive to emotions, sensations, beauty, aestheticized sex, and the vicissitudes of the universe (pp. 231–40). Because of its focus on human inner subjectivity and eroticism as opposed to rituals and conventions, the popular association of feng liu with debauchery and promiscuity seems an understandable outgrowth of the original usage.
Literally, “my soles ran fast as if rubbed with oil.”
The famous woman poet of the Southern Song Dynasty, Li Qingzhao (1084–1155), wrote a poem titled “Zui hua yin” (“Drunk in the Shade of Flowers”). Xu Liang’s parody version changes only one word in the last line of the original poem (“I am frailer than the chrysanthemums” (trans. Wang 1989, p. 17)), from “flower” (hua) to “melon” (gua).
A metaphor from “Ru meng ling” (“Like a Dream”), another poem by Li Qingzhao.
As Goldstein (2007, pp. 264–289) notes, in the early 1930s, although Cheng Yanqiu won both governmental sanction and a one-hundred-thousand-yuan funding for his study trip in Europe while Mei had to seek private donations for his American tour, it was the latter’s vast media and social network that secured Mei’s exclusive fame as a national icon.
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Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Mses. Suthini Jumsai and Lee Shui Lin Carmen; Drs. Susan Spencer, John P. Springer, Barbara Streets, and Steve Garrison; and Chen Shuxian and Hu Wenchuan for their penetrating insights, immense help with Chinese translations and technical terminologies, and endless support during the researching process of this article. An earlier version of it was presented at the 24th National Conference of the Asian Studies Development Program (ASDP) in Washington D.C, March 2018. Any mistakes in the article are my own.
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Huynh, T. From Mei Lanfang to Li Yugang: theorizing female-impersonating aesthetics in post-1976 China. Int. Commun. Chin. Cult 7, 259–291 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40636-020-00176-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40636-020-00176-z