The Shandong Highwayman: Mechanisms of Inclusion and Resistance and the Predication of Cantonese Identity through Cantonese Opera

Abstract

In March 1987, during the course of extensive interviewing among members of the Cantonese opera community in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhoū,2 I listened with considerable amazement while Chahn Keihyahn, the director of the Guangdōng Cantonese Opera Institute, recounted an experience he had while staging a local Cantonese opera version of one of the “model operas” of the Cultural Revolution period. My fascination was only secondarily with the details of the story itself; of greater significance was what transpired on a linguistic, and even physical, level as this man related his story.