The production and consumption of Chinese theatre in nineteenth-century California

Theatre Research International

Volumn 28, Issue 3, 2003, Pages 289-302

  Lei, Daphne ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61449209074     PISSN: 03078833     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0307883303001147     Document Type: Review

References (64)

1. Gam Saam (Jinshan, gold mountain) is the Chinese nickname for San Francisco, the destination for most early Chinese settlers. Used in a broader sense, it is a synonym for America, the land of opportunity
2. Alta California, 20 October 1852, p. 3
3. Alta California, 18 October 1852, p. 3
4. Alta California, 16 October 1852, p. 3. The first two pieces are traditional 'opening' dramatic pieces in the Cantonese opera repertoire. In the first, a celebratory piece, the Eight Genii congratulate Yuk Hwang (Yuhuang, the Jade Emperor) on his birthday. In the second, 'Too Tsin' should probably be 'Soo Tsin' (Su Qin), a famous politician of the Warring States period (c. 479-221 BC). The third piece is from the well-known novel The Story of Three Kingdoms, with the famous historical characters Kwan Wanchang (Guan Yunchang) and Tsow Tsow (Cao Cao). The last piece, Defeated Revenge, cannot be identified without further information. It is necessary to point out that romanization of Chinese terms or names in the US in early times was carried out in a rather non-systematic way and was full of errors and confusion. It should also be noted that the words were romanized according to Cantonese (a southern dialect) pronunciation. When necessary for purposes of clarity, I transcribe terms in pinyin, at present the conventional romanization system for Mandarin Chinese
5. There are a number of book-length studies of early Chinese immigrant theatre in the United States: Lois Foster, Peter Chu et al., Chinese Theatres in America (1936, unpublished)
6. Donald Riddle, Flying Dragons Flowing Streams: Music in the Life of San Francisco's Chinese (Westport, CT & London: Greenwood Press, 1983)
7. and Annette Ke-Kee Chan, 'A Performance History of Cantonese Opera in San Francisco from Gold Rush to the Earthquake' (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Davis, 1993)
8. Foster and Chu's manuscript was a product of the Federal Theatre Project in San Francisco (1935) and is the basic reference material for later scholarship on this subject. In 1943, Foster rewrote the manuscript and submitted it to several publishers, but did not have any success. In 1944, she published 'The Chinese Theatre in California, 1849-1869' in California Historical Society Quarterly (23: 2), under the name Lois Rodecape. Both the 1936 and the 1943 manuscripts are now included in the Lois Rather Collection, also named for this scholar, at the San Francisco Performing Arts Library and Museum (PALM). The original manuscript, as described by Lois Rather in a hand-written and signed note in the archives at PALM 'is probably molding in some government file in Washington - it was not published'. In this article, I distinguish the three texts by citing them under Lois Foster's successive surnames: the original as written by Lois Foster et al., the 1943 manuscript by Lois Rather, and the 1944 article by Lois Rodecape. Contemporary studies on early Chinese theatre in the US consisted mainly of newspaper and magazine articles
9. There are a number of important articles: Henry Burden McDowell's 'The Chinese Theater' in Century Magazine, 29 (1884)
10. George Fitch's 'In a Chinese Theater' in Century Magazine, 24 (1882)
11. and 'An Evening in the Chinese Quarter of San Francisco' in Frank Leslie Illustrated Newspaper (24 August 1878). However, newspaper reviews often provide the most direct and valuable information
12. The San Francisco Daily Herald, 8 October 1852, p. 2
13. Lula May Garrett, 'San Francisco in 1851 as Described by Eyewitnesses', California Historical Society Quarterly, 22 (1943), pp. 266, 270
14. Alta California, 20 October 1852, p. 2
15. The original Chinese play The Orphan of Zhao or The Orphan of Chao (Zhaoshi gu'er), by Ji Junxiang (late thirteenth century), was translated into many western languages. Voltaire's French version L'Orphelin de la Chine appeared on stage in 1755. Arthur Murphy's adaptation is based on Voltaire's rendition, rather than on the Chinese play
16. An English translation of the Chinese play entitled The Orphan of Chao is available in Liu Jungen's Six Yuan Plays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972)
17. James Moy, Marginal Sights: Staging the Chinese in America (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993), pp. 9-13
18. The second piece, Song Kong, is based on The Water Margin, a famous novel about bandit heroes who have their base in the Laong Hills (Liangshan, Liang Hills). The Haunted Man cannot be identified without further information
19. J. D. Borthwick, Three Years in California (1851-54) (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood, 1857), pp. 76-7
20. San Francisco Chronicle, 24 April 1856
21. cited in Riddle, Flying Dragons, p. 21
22. Rodecape, 'Chinese Theatre', p. 105
23. Evening Bulletin, 7 October 1856, p. 3
24. Frank Soulé et al., The Annals of San Francisco (Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Hills Books, 1999), p. 382
25. Borthwick, Three Years, p. 75
26. Roy Wagner, The Invention of Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 4
27. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), pp. 1-2
28. Frederick Jackson Turner, 'The Significance of the Frontier in American History' (1893), in History, Frontier, and Section: Three Essays by Frederick Jackson Turner (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993). pp. 59-91
29. I have in mind the title of Ronald Takaki's important book Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Boston: Little Brown, 1998)
30. The Page Law was designed to regulate prostitution, but affected the immigration of Chinese women in general. Chinese women who wanted to immigrate were treated as potential prostitutes in the absence of evidence to the contrary. One way to prove oneself a moral woman was to have bound feet. See Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), p. 24
31. I have written more extensively about Chinese women and Cantonese opera in a separate article, 'Can You Hear Me? Female Voice and Cantonese Opera in the San Francisco Bay Area', in The Scholar & Feminist Online (Barnard Center for Research on Women, Vol. 2, No. 1, Summer 2003)
32. The Chinese Exclusion Act prohibited the entry of Chinese labourers. It was the first and only immigration law in American history to target a specific nationality. It was issued in 1882, renewed in 1892 and 1902. The Chinese Exclusion Act was finally repealed in 1943, for the sake of establishing an alliance between China and the US during World War II
33. Trinh T. Minh-ha, Introduction to 'Difference: A Special Third World Women Issue', Discourse, 8 (Fall-Winter, 86-87), p. 3
34. Frank Chin, Bulletproof Buddhists and Other Essays (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998), p. 73
35. Dave Williams, The Chinese Other (1850-1925): An Anthology of Plays (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, Inc., 1997), pp. 45-6
36. Lois Rather thinks this is the first serious play about Chinese in the US because the author had spent some time in the Chinese quarter studying Chinese people (Rather's 1943 manuscript, p. 105). The article in The Call (11 July 1897) claims 'Kim Poon, product of local public schools, was billed as "the first Chinese child to appear on the English-speaking stage"'
37. It is not clear whether 'Kim Poon' is the name of the boy actor or of the character. The Kim Poon character, a boy who often accompanies 'the first born' Chan Toy, does not have any significant lines, except for some 'laughter and Chinese exclamations' like "Hi la, hi la". (Williams, Chinese Other, p. 158). It is ironic that the first Chinese actor on the English-speaking stage was a non-speaking character
38. Wang Wenquan et al., eds., Yueju chunqiu [The annals of Cantonese opera] (Guangzhou: Guangdong Renmin, 1990), p. 7
39. According to a Sacramento Theatre playbill (23 May 1855?), the Chinese Dramatic Company performed two plays: The Mountain Wizard and The Great Rebellion. See Peter J. Blodgett, Land of Golden Dreams: California in the God Rush Decade, 1848-1858 (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1999), p. 121. The playbill is in the Huntington Library
40. In traditional Chinese theatre, except on very special occasions, characters wear a general Han Chinese costume that does not belong to any particular dynasty, but reflects a general ethnic tradition. In the Qing dynasty, since the government forced an overall adoption of Manchu clothing styles, theatre became the only place where one could see traditional Han Chinese costume
41. Female characters generally were played by male actors in Cantonese opera in the nineteenth century. According to Lois Rather, the 'first woman player' ever seen in San Francisco's Chinese theatres appeared in 1881 (Rather's 1943 manuscript, pp. 84-85). Yong Chen, however, cites an earlier (1879) eyewitness account of women players in a Chinese theatre in San Francisco. See Yong Chen, Chinese San Francisco: 1850-1943 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 91
42. In 1850, there were seven women and 4018 men. Five years later, women made up less than two percent of the whole Chinese population (Yung, Unbound Feet, p. 18)
43. Henry Burden McDowell, 'The Chinese Theater', Century Magazine, 29 (1884), pp. 30-31
44. Rather's 1943 manuscript, p. 20
45. Two simple analogies are often used in studies of Asian theatre in colleges in the US, namely between ancient Greek and Japanese Noh theatres, and between traditional Chinese opera and Elizabethan theatre. The use of mask, chorus and a rather bare stage are held up as characteristics shared by both Greek and Noh, while Elizabethan theatre is often mentioned when traditional Chinese theatre is introduced. Although such a comparison has a certain value, we have to realize the implications of temporal differences between the theatres of the east and the west. Ancient Greek and Elizabethan theatre belong to the past, while traditional Chinese theatre and Noh are still being practised but perceived as theatre from the past
46. David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 337
47. Johannes Fabian defines 'denial of coevalness' as 'a persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse'. See Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 31
48. George Rupert MacMinn, The Theater of the Golden Era in California (Caldwell, ID: The Caxton Printers, Ltd, 1941), p. 507
49. Alta California, 28 January 1868, p. 1
50. Alta California, 24 January 1868, p. 2
51. 'An Evening in the Chinese Quarter of San Francisco', Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper (24 August 1878), p. 422
52. Sarah Bernhardt visited Chinese theatres in San Francisco twice (1887 and 1891). She enjoyed the performance, visited backstage, and had a long conversation with the Chinese actor Ah Sing. Later she performed with Ah Sing on the Chinese stage (Rather's 1943 manuscript, pp. 95-9)
53. McDowell, 'Chinese Theater', p. 44
54. Some remains of early San Francisco Chinese newspapers are kept in the Bancroft Library, at the University of California, Berkeley. The first known Chinese newspaper, The Golden Hills News, was issued in 1854. Ah Quin (1848-1914), whose diary covers twenty-five years of his life in California (1877-1902), also offers some information on Chinese theatre in San Francisco (Chen, Chinese San Francisco, p. 91)
55. The Seattle Times, 8 February 1990, p. G1
56. This is Sun Fen's (fl. 1371) account of a performance in Canton. See Lai Bojiang and Huang Jingming, Yueju shi (The history of Cantonese opera) (Beijing: Zhonghua Xiju, 1988), p. 4. Ironically, Sun was a government official originally from Guangdong. Here he is 'writing' his own local culture from a normative northern Chinese perspective
57. A general historical conception of the Guangdong region is that it is inhabited by Nanman, southern barbarians. One myth states that the southern barbarians are the descendants of an ancient princess and a dog hero. See Ban Gu, Houhanshu [The history of the later Han dynasty] (Beijing: Zhonghua, 1991), vol. 10, p. 2829
58. Lois Rodecape points out that, depending on the whims of San Francisco newspapers, the company's name was spelled differently (Rodecape, 'Chinese theatre', p. 114). She cites the first six spellings, and I have discovered a few more. 'Hong Took Tong', according to Riddle, is 'Associated Theatrical Benefit Society' (Riddle, Flying Dragons, p. 18)
59. Liu Boji, on the other hand, thinks the correct company name should be 'Hong Fook Tong', and he supplies the corresponding Chinese characters (Hongfu tang, Grand Fortune Company). Liu Boji, Meiguo huaqiao shi [The history of American Chinese overseas] (Taipei: Xingzhengyuan qiaowu weiyuanhui, 1976), p. 616. Later Chinese writings often follow Liu in giving Hong Fook Tong as the company name
60. Alta California, 16 October 1852, p. 3
61. Gertrude Atherton, My San Francisco: A Wayward Biography (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1946), p. 55
62. Alta California, 14 December 1856, p. 2
63. Turner, 'The Significance of the Frontier', p. 75
64. Cantonese opera is still being performed regularly in many places in the US. The San Francisco Bay Area probably has the most active Cantonese opera culture, although most participants are amateurs