Jin Jiang's study on the history of Yue opera is as thoughtful in its elucidation of social and political contexts as it is sympathetic in its intimate portraits of its protagonists, the actresses who created Yue opera. Far and away Shanghai's most popular dramatic genre in “island” Shanghai and well into the People's Republic of China era (the late 1930s through the 1960s), Yue opera was a vibrant cultural force and a key social and public arena of popular expression, romantic imagination, and women's culture. Jiang's monograph makes a fine contribution to the English-language literatures on Chinese drama, Shanghai, and women's histories.
Though Yue opera's history culminates in the mid-twentieth century with its flourishing as a glamorous and nationally renowned all-female performance genre, it begins as a much cruder male-performed entertainment in the countryside of Shengxian, Zhejiang Province, in the early 1900s. Jiang provides a sketch of the genre's emergence, traceable to a cold winter day in 1906 when several touring Shengxian story-singers by chance converged at the home of a patron and decided to perform the Pearl Pagoda together, a move that entailed not just story-singing but also improvised play-acting. The performance was a hit, and soon Shengxian opera troupes began forming, touring the local countryside, Zhejiang towns, and eventually Shanghai, where a large population of Zhejiang immigrants made up the core audience. Over the 1910s to the 1930s, “little Shengxian” opera changed dramatically, from a rowdy male-dominated form to the increasingly melodious and romantic all-female Yue opera.
This transformation was grounded in several larger historical trends, and Jiang, as she does throughout the book, deftly weaves together numerous strands of social and cultural history to explain them. An example is her handling of the role of rural-to-urban migration. Jiang does not merely generalize about push and pull factors but describes specific ways in which Shengxian's local conditions directly shaped Yue opera's history, tracing the sudden proliferation of girls’ acting training schools in Shengxian in the early 1930s to the precipitous decline in regional silk production that forced families to seek new avenues by which girls could earn income. The influence of local silk production reappears later, as Yue opera actresses, taking advantage of their home county specialty, were the first to introduce gorgeous silk costumes to the Shanghai stage in the 1930s. These details highlight Jiang's more fundamental assertion that the Zhejiang migrant experience was integral to the aesthetics and dedicated artistry that enlivened Yue opera, not only during its first flourishing in the 1930s and 1940s, but also in the current, though much smaller-scale, revival over the last decade.
Most of Jiang's history focuses on the 1930s to the 1960s, delving into issues of gender representation, female agency, and (after 1947) the role of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in influencing Yue drama, and these are the areas of her greatest insights and research contributions. Jiang shows that Yue opera was, above all, a complex expression of women's newly emerging social and creative agency amid a difficult and often repressive environment. Woven into her analysis are portraits of several great actresses: Ma Zhanghua and Xiao Dangui (whose suicides galvanized two key waves of theater reform and public action by Yue opera actresses), Yin Guifang and Zhu Shuizhao (“stage sisters” who performed as romantic lovers on the stage), and, most prominently, the idealistic Yuan Xuefen, who repeatedly took a leadership role in the Yue opera world.
In the early 1940s, Yuan promoted reforms that increased actresses’ autonomy by forbidding backstage visits from men and giving actresses (rather than exploitive male theater owners) control over performances. These reforms were instrumental in reducing the performance of salacious scenes, crystallizing Yue opera's identity as an ideally romantic genre and aiding actresses in their struggle to present a public image as “pure and clean” (qingbai, a key concept in Jiang's analysis). In 1947, Yuan performed the title role in the opera Sister Xianglin (based on Lu Xun's “The New Year's Sacrifice”), a landmark performance that proved Yue opera—a genre typically disdained by elite progressives and CCP cultural theorists as petty romantic escapism for middle class women—was potentially a powerful popular vehicle for progressive political messages. Yuan eventually became a symbolic figure of the CCP cultural policy, standing atop Tiananmen Gate on the date of the People's Republic's founding and later becoming a party member. But, as Jiang ably demonstrates, “The relationship between Yue opera actresses and the CCP was mutually beneficial and required continual negotiation after 1949. In any case, it was hardly a relationship between a liberator on one side and those waiting to be liberated on the other” (p. 193).
More than just a fine introduction to the history of Yue opera, the work provides an important addition to our understanding of the transformations of gender ideology and gendered praxis and performance in twentieth-century China. What is more, her history fully bridges—indeed, incorporates—the chasm that 1949 typically represents for historians of modern Chinese culture. Jiang rightly asserts that the trends of institutionalization, professionalization, and citizenry building that emerge in the realm of popular entertainment in the 1920s clearly continue well into the PRC period. Indeed, Jiang meets the great challenge of presenting a balanced evaluation of the interplay between the PRC propaganda state and the world of popular culture and entertainment, a topic that is typically mired in hyperbole.
