Epilogue: What Could Be More Chinese Than Chinese Opera?

Abstract

From nineteenth-century San Francisco Chinatown workers to Chinese actors, from Manchu aristocrats to Westernized elites at the turn of the twentieth century, from local dramatists to rebels and revolutionaries, from the Cantonese opera performers of San Francisco to their paratheatrical counterparts, from Asian American playwrights to Chinese film directors, all the protagonists of “dramas” created in different contact zones effectively present and represent themselves in the medium of Chinese opera. Their sweat and blood, anxiety and desperation, dreams and ambitions are all expressed in their operatic performances of Chineseness. The definition of Chinese identity changes with time and location; the form and style of Chinese opera also vary in different regions and periods. However, in the public imagination, Chinese opera never fails to be figured as a single, uncomproraised lotus flower that resists all the temptations of hybridization and assimilation, symbolizing a perfect Chineseness, itself an imagined permanence. The constructed stability of Chinese identity is needed during times of crisis, as during the late Qing, on both sides of the Pacific, when “China” did not really exist. In modern times, this lotus-like Chineseness is useful for its high degree of recognizability, the stability of its imagery, and the sense of Chinese solidarity that it conveys.