Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [99]
When Ah-Fat’s father was alive, he had taken Ah-Fat and Ah-Sin to opera performances in all the small towns surrounding their village. In those days there were no female actors. When his father had told Ah-Fat that the women onstage making graceful “orchid” gestures with their fingers and coyly hiding their faces behind long white silk “water sleeves” were actually men, he was struck dumb with astonishment. Those men playing women were more feminine than women themselves. Months before he died, his father had taken him to Shun Tak to see the Cantonese opera Testing the Wife in the Mulberry Garden at New Year. It was the first time that Ah-Fat had seen male and female actors on the same stage. The roles of Chau Wu and his wife were played by actors who were actually husband and wife. Their amorous glances and uninhibited acting enraged an army officer in the audience. There were shouts of “Shameless! Shameless!” and soldiers leapt onto the stage, tied the actors up and carried them off. They heard afterwards that the pair were condemned for outraging public morals and beheaded the same night. The incident put a stop to mixed performances, and until now Ah-Fat had not seen women on the stage.
But tonight there was a mixed cast. And the gamblers, all single men, had only half their minds on the gambling table. They all waited for the strings to start playing to call them into the back room. The truth was that they were here to see the women rather than the play. You only had to look at the streets of Chinatown to see that they were packed with men—and only men. Every month or so, the steamship would bring a handful of Chinese women but if they were decent, they would marry and be kept at home, so they were never seen in public. If they were the sort who “sold smiles,” they would soon find themselves bundled into the back alleys behind the tea-shacks by madams. Theatrical performances offered another option. There were two female members of the opera troupe and the patrons of the gambling den would be able to ogle them to their hearts’ content. They waited in feverish excitement.
Ah-Fat went through into the temporary theatre. A decorative gas lamp glared from each corner of the stage, and a sheet of paper was stuck on the wall to the side of the stage, bearing the hastily scribbled words:
The Clear Spring Opera Troupe will this evening give a complete showing of The Fairy Wife Returns Her Son to Earth.
Gold Mountain Cloud—brilliant in the male role of Tung Wan
Gold Mountain Shadow—extraordinarily dainty as the Fairy Wife.
A tour in Gold Mountain increased an actor’s fame back home, so they added the tag “Gold Mountain” to their names as a reminder to their audiences. Ah-Fat was happy to see that Gold Mountain Cloud still had top billing. Ah-Fat had seen Cloud and Shadow on the first evening and felt they were not bad … perhaps not absolutely heart-stopping in their performances, but original in their way. He had decided to come again.
Ah-Fat had seen The Fairy Wife several times with his father. It was short play, about the Seventh Fairy who is forced by her father, the Jade Emperor, to return to the celestial palace, leaving her husband, Tung Wan, behind in the human world. The next year, she fulfils her promise to send her son back to Tung Wan. This opera was often used as a curtain raiser for performances. But this evening’s version followed the Anhui Opera tradition: it began with the Seventh Fairy dreaming of the earthly world and recounted how she married Tung Wan, and how the Jade Emperor forced