Wednesday was my introduction to Chinese opera. One of the guys I work with Miao, bought tickets for him, me and Hua. The opera we were going to see was from a town south of Shanghai that is supposed to be where Chinese opera originated from. It was also the Chinese equivalent of the ring cycle. This version was only three nights long at about 3 hours a performance. Normally the entire performance takes about a week. They cut out all the gratuitous sex scenes to make it shorter. I was a surprised as you, opera and gratuitous sex don’t usually spring into my mind together but I guess this older school of opera was written with man’s baser desires in mind.


We saw the middle performance which was a love story between a ghost and her lover that caused her death in a dream before she met him. I really enjoyed the performance. I had prepared myself for “a cultural experience” after having been told by lots of people that Chinese opera was like cats yowling with lots of subtleties that would be lost on me. I am sure that I missed a lot of the small things but this performance had English subtitles written by the director (a literature professor at UC-Santa Barbara so the subtitles were not of the normal Babelfish variety) and I was able to keep up with the story pretty well. Hua and Miao actually ended up using the English subtitles at points because the Chinese was an older dialect that was not very easy to understand.




The music was amazing, the singing was very good except for the male lead which I did not find that enjoyable, and the story was great. I actually want to see the other two parts of the cycle because the story was so engaging. I am really glad I went to this performance as opposed to some of the more kitschy ones. I feel like they would not have been half as much fun. One thing that really made this one enjoyable was the lack of seriousness at some points. It was not afraid to inject a little humor in the performance.

It was at Beijing University which is a beautiful campus. We were able to walk around the campus some before the opera. It was built on an old imperial garden and was a very famous lake with no name and some temples. Edwin Snow is also buried here for those of you up on your communist sympathizers of the 50’s.