epiphany

The Taming of the Day

Today was supposed to be incredibly full and rather expensive. I was to go to an English bookstore with a friend this morning, to the Beijing Opera this afternoon and to The Return of the King tonight. Well, my schedule (and expenses) thinned out nicely.

I did go to the bookstore this morning. My friend had a student call wanting an English lesson, so he just showed me where the store was. He calls it "the Crypt" because the ceilings are incredibly low. I could probably have touched the fluorescent lighting with the top of my head had I stood on tiptoes. The shop (of sorts) is full of thousands of used American textbooks along with a sampling of fiction. Everything costs twelve yuan or less (eight yuan equal one American dollar). I picked up six books that would have cost somewhere around $15 each for a total of 50 yuan.

At noon I headed downtown with two friends to catch the Beijing Opera performance, which is only given twice a month. From what I'd seen of Beijing Opera on TV, I wasn't really looking forward to it, but I thought I should go because it would be a good cultural experience and a nice time with friends. How often do you get invited to an opera? Of course, this isn't quite like opera as we Westerners know it. The people are heavily made up and costumed. Most of the characters (and players) are men. And many of the men sing in screechy mock-castrato voices. Imagine a cat fight to someone scratching their fingers across a blackboard. Then make it loud. That was my TV experience of Beijing Opera.

The real thing, I'm glad to say, was quite enjoyable. The Chinese girl who invited us said that she thought today's show was geared toward a foreign audience, but it was still fun. Or maybe that's why it was fun. Anyway, we saw three plays, only one and a half of which had singing (which was about as bad as on television, only louder!). There was a good amount of talking, but all the characters are so broadly charactured that it wasn't too hard to follow what was going on. I actually understood some of what they were saying.

In the first play, a large man dressed in black with a black and white face and long beard apparently told a servant to go kill his young princely master. The servant (who was quite comical) went at night and broke into the guy's house. The lighting didn't change at all, but it wasn't hard to tell that it was night. The two characters groped around in the dark and had an elaborate sword and kung-fu fight, continually missing each other because they couldn't see. Only if a sword, fist or face came within inches of the other person's eyes could he see it. It was really cool. At the end the big black man joined in, so there were three people fighting although each person thought there was only one opponent. Everything got straightened out once the servant went for a candle. I'm not sure why they all seemed to be friends in the end.

The second play had a lot of singing and dialogue and was a love story. It was a little bit harder to follow (Lena, the Chinese girl, corrected us on several points afterward). The girl was tidying up her place and herding (?) chickens when the boy came to call. He started singing to her in the high screechy voice, and she answered in something of an extended squeal. He gave her a jade bracelet, which she tenderly and lovingly howled about. In the meanwhile, the village matchmaker (who we all thought was her mother and who was played by a man--at least I hope it was a man) was watching in the background. After the boy left the matchmaker came to visit the girl and tried to get the girl to show her the bracelet and tell her who it was from. Eventually she let on that she had seen the whole thing, and the girl was embarrassed but still coy. It was really funny. Especially the singing. I had to bite my hand to keep from guffawing.

The third play was an episode from the life of the Monkey King, the ultimate simean superhero of Chinese folklore. The Monkey King is very clever and magically powerful, so the other gods continually get jealous of him or angry with his hyjinks and try to put him in his place. The Monkey King almost always wins in the end, and today was no disappointment for him. He took on a variety of gods, sometimes four or more at a time, in a series of epic and acrobatic kung-fu battles. You really had to see it to believe all the tricks they pulled off on stage: sword fights, sword juggling among four people (one of whom, the Monkey King, was catching and tossing them using a staff instead of his hands), catching swords and spinning them in mid-air around the staff, tossing a sword into the air and catching it in its sheath, not to mention the actual fighting/ballet moves. It was breathtaking, a grand introduction to Beijing Opera. I'd gladly go again.

As for The Return of the King, when Tim went to the theater to buy the tickets this morning, they told him there wasn't any English showing today, even though on Thursday they had said that there would be (though they couldn't tell him the time of the Saturday showing when he called Thursday). While I wouldn't mind seeing the movie again on the big screen, I'm not exactly disappointed that the day isn't quite as full as it was supposed to be. My throat and ears are feeling a little sick, so it's probably good that I won't need to be out late.

So how was your day?

Posted by at March 27, 2004 6:46 PM