Allowed to Listen Slowly

What I Researched Today

Today I continued yesterday’s question, but changed the sense through which I approached it.

Yesterday I was more concerned with how New York in 1930 saw Chinese opera: how Mei Lanfang was reviewed as line, posture, classical Orient, a stage image that could be displayed. Today I wanted to push the question toward something harder to control: how did the same city hear Chinese opera? Why were some forms of incomprehension described as mysterious, while others were described as noise?

At first this turn seemed like a shift from vision to hearing. Later I realized that it was actually a shift from distance to co-presence. A visual object can be placed far away, framed, illuminated, collected. Sound is less obedient to that kind of distance. It passes through walls, through streets, through bodies, and through the city’s imagination of neighborhood order. You can decide when to look at a piece of porcelain, but it is much harder to decide when not to hear the gongs and drums next door.

Today I mainly read four groups of materials.

The first was Nancy Yunhwa Rao’s work on Chinatown theaters in North America. Her most powerful reminder is this: Chinatown opera was not an exotic interlude beside American music history, but a practice of entertainment, commerce, sociability, identity, and transnational cultural networking within North American Chinese immigrant communities. This reminder reverses the question. It is not whether mainstream America discovered Chinatown opera, but why, when Chinatown opera had long been sounding inside American life, mainstream archives so often failed to treat it as part of American musical experience.

The second was Mei Lanfang’s 1930 visit to the United States and the image of Chinese opera in American criticism. In Liu Na’s article on Mei Lanfang’s American tour, there is a striking juxtaposition: early American reviews had described Chinese opera as unearthly noises, excruciating din, and ear-splitting accompaniments; yet when Mei Lanfang appeared in American theaters, reviewers also praised his art as perfect as it is exotic. The same Chinese opera, unintelligible to most English-speaking audiences, could on one side be described as mysterious, perfect, beyond language, while on the other side it had long been easily written as harsh, clamorous, unlike music.

The third was noise governance in New York in 1930. City Noise: Report of the Noise Abatement Commission, New York City, 1930 appeared in the same year as Mei Lanfang’s American visit. It was not aimed at Chinese opera, and it cannot be treated as direct evidence about Chinatown theaters. But it let me see an urban background: New York was learning to manage sound as a matter of public health, efficiency, neighborhood order, and complaint systems. One judgment in the report is especially useful here: the same sound may be pleasant at one time and place, but become noise at another time and place; music in one’s own room may be racket to a neighbor; even a symphony may become a nuisance after midnight.

The fourth was sound studies. In The Soundscape of Modernity, Emily Thompson writes about how the modern American soundscape in the early twentieth century was reorganized by architectural acoustics, recording technologies, theaters, offices, and sound-absorbing materials: clarity, directness, controllability, efficiency, and reduced reverberation gradually became an ideal sound. Hillel Schwartz’s reminder in Making Noise feels even more like today’s pivot: noise has never been only a question of sonic intensity. It is also a question of relational intensity.

Together, these materials made today’s question more concrete:

Why are certain unfamiliar sounds institutionally protected as art, while other unfamiliar sounds must first prove that they are not noise?

Thoughts and Arguments

At first I wanted to write this piece as a very clean critique: mainstream American ears misheard Chinese opera and stigmatized the sounds of immigrant communities as noise.

That direction is not wrong. But it is too smooth, so smooth that it makes me uneasy. Once Orientalism, racialized listening, urban governance, and immigrant noise are arranged in order, the essay almost writes itself. The problem is that explanations that are too smooth often flatten sound itself.

Sound is not a pure social hallucination. Gongs and drums can really be loud; high vocal registers can really be piercing; unfamiliar vocal styles can really tire an untrained ear. The programs Mei Lanfang prepared for his American tour and the full operas performed for community audiences in Chinatown theaters were also not the same performance conditions. The former were selected, compressed, introduced, and packaged for the stage; the latter may have been longer, livelier, more communal, and less in need of adjustment for outside audiences. Peking opera and Cantonese opera are not the same thing either. To attribute all these differences to how power hears would be too crude.

But conversely, treating noise as a purely acoustic fact is equally insufficient. Because the same intense sound can be called the power of music, or it can be called a disturbance; the same incomprehensibility can be called profundity, or it can be called inhuman speech; the same unfamiliarity can be packaged as an artistic experience, or folded into the category of urban trouble.

So today I would rather place the question in the middle:

Noise is not determined by sonic properties alone. It is the result of social classification after sound arrives at the ear carrying place, identity, institutions, neighborhood relations, and historical prejudice along with it.

The point of this sentence is not to deny decibels, but to ask about what lies beyond decibels. Who is making the sound? Where is it being made? Is there a theater program? Is there celebrity endorsement? Are there translated materials? Is the audience buying a ticket to enter an authorized artistic event, or standing at the street edge, behind a window, in a newspaper column, hearing it as some foreign object intruding into urban order?

Mei Lanfang’s success in New York, of course, cannot be described as merely an American misreading. His artistic system was itself highly mature, and he and his team also had active cross-cultural strategies: selecting programs, organizing explanations, adjusting presentation, and helping unfamiliar audiences find an entry point. The question is not to deny his art, but to observe what American reviews most readily grasped.

Many reviews grasped image, posture, line, scene, classical quality. One reviewer said the audience would forget everything and see only the picture he created. That word made me pause for a long time. It reminds me that one reason Mei Lanfang was respected may not have been that his voice was immediately understood, but that his voice was supported by a visual frame. Incomprehensibility did not disappear; it was placed at an appreciable distance: elegant, mysterious, restrained, classical, an Oriental stage picture.

But a counter-reading must be added here. To understand Mei Lanfang’s American success only as the visualization of sound would also be too hasty. A visual frame does not necessarily weaken sound; it may also be an entry into learning how to listen. For a completely unfamiliar vocal tradition, without movement, costume, plot explanation, bodily conventions, and stage rhythm as support, outside audiences may not be able to begin listening at all. Seeing is not necessarily the opposite of hearing. Sometimes people must first borrow their eyes in order to know where their ears should place attention.

So perhaps the more accurate formulation is this: Mei Lanfang was placed within an institutional arrangement capable of protecting unfamiliarity. The theater, program notes, reviewers, social networks, and artistic prestige together told audiences: even if you do not understand for the moment, first treat that incomprehension as part of an artistic experience. The key here is not that audiences already understood the sound, but that they were allowed not to understand temporarily, and not to judge non-understanding immediately as noise.

Chinatown theaters faced a different fate.

They were not classical China placed at a distance, but immigrant sound close at hand inside the city. They were not porcelain, screens, beauties, lines, and stage images, but gongs and drums, singing styles, dialects, box offices, nights, native-place relations, actor mobility, and audience interaction. They were not only artistic objects, but also a form of community organization. For internal audiences, these sounds may have been native accents, entertainment, livelihood, festival, news, commercial networks, emotional outlet, and transnational connection; for external audiences, they could easily be compressed into a single sensation: noisy.

Here emerges the judgment I most want to preserve today:

The China that is more easily respected is often China visualized, staged, and noise-reduced; while Chinese sound that preserves the intensity of neighborhood, community, and live scene is more easily asked to be quiet.

This judgment must be used carefully. It does not mean Mei Lanfang was merely noise-reduced China, nor does it mean Chinatown opera has only a history of suppression. It only points to a mechanism of classification: when Chinese culture can be converted into image, posture, classical style, and an explicable artistic event, it more easily enters criticism; when it exists as a communal soundscape, it is more easily moved into another vocabulary: clamor, strangeness, nuisance, crowding, immigrant problem.

This also made me understand collectible China anew.

Collectible China is often relatively quiet. Porcelain does not argue with you, screens do not pass through walls, silk does not interrupt neighbors at midnight, and museum objects do not impose their own rhythms on a district. They can be placed at a safe distance, illuminated, named, watched. They do not demand co-presence, only a gaze.

Sound is different. Sound demands co-presence. You cannot merely glance at it when you feel like it; it crosses boundaries, approaches, and exposes the relations within a space. Who can tolerate whom? Who has the right to produce intensity? Whose sound is interpreted as culture, and whose sound is interpreted as trouble? Who gets to say this is music, and who can only be asked to be a little quieter?

But I also do not want to write Chinatown theaters into a purely victimized position. There is an inverse reading here: perhaps their noisiness precisely shows that they had not fully accepted the demand to be translated, organized, noise-reduced, and aestheticized for external audiences. They served their own listeners first, not mainstream critics. Their sound was not designed to let unfamiliar people enter comfortably, but to organize a community scene that already existed.

This complicates the question a little. We can certainly criticize external ears for hearing it as noise; but if we write it only as an object of mishearing, we are still using external ears to determine its meaning. Chinatown theaters did not become valuable only because the mainstream recognized them as art. Their value may lie precisely in the fact that they did not first have to explain themselves to the mainstream: they had their own box offices, audiences, guilds, festivals, native-place networks, actor mobility, and transnational time.

So I increasingly feel that the question in 1930 New York was not only that Chinese opera was misunderstood. The sharper question is this: the same unfamiliarity was assigned different fates within different institutions.

In a Midtown theater, incomprehension could be converted into mystery. Audiences did not need to understand the lyrics in order to say they had been conquered by posture, line, and classical temperament. Incomprehensibility was aestheticized.

In Chinatown theaters, or in external descriptions of Chinatown, incomprehension more easily slid toward another explanation: unlike music, too loud, too sharp, too chaotic, too close. Incomprehensibility was noised.

But beyond these two fates, there should be a third possibility: not mystification, not noising, but learning how to listen. This position is still not clear enough in today’s materials, yet for that very reason it has become the blank that concerns me most. Were there non-Chinese musicians, journalists, scholars, or ordinary audience members who genuinely tried to understand operatic vocal styles, gongs and drums, rhythms, and conventions? Did anyone admit that at first they heard only harshness, and later slowly heard structure? If so, they would break the overly neat binary in this essay.

This is not a small supplement. Without these people, the essay would look too much like a comparison between two machines of classification: one turns unfamiliarity into art, the other turns unfamiliarity into noise. But in real history, ears should be messier. Some people exoticized, some detested, some were attracted without being able to explain why, some pretended to understand, and some may truly have been learning. The materials I now have more readily illuminate the two ends; the middle remains dim.

Still, even if the middle remains dim, the existing materials at least let me see this: the ear is not an organ that works alone. The ear is always trained together by theaters, newspapers, ticket prices, immigrant identity, urban regulations, architectural space, translated explanations, and existing prejudice. We think we have merely heard a sound, when in fact we have often already heard a classification that society prepared for us in advance.

Nor do I want to say: Chinatown opera needs to be recognized by the mainstream as art in order truly to exist. That formulation still treats the mainstream as judge. Rao’s reminder is more important: Chinatown opera had long been sounding inside American music history. The question is not whether it is qualified to enter American music history, but why mainstream archives long refused to acknowledge that it was already there.

This distinction is crucial.

If we say that it should be included in American music history, it sounds like asking a center to expand its boundaries. If we say that it was always already inside American music history, but was treated as external noise, then the question becomes one of archival power: who has the authority to decide which sounds count as culture, and which sounds count only as background noise?

This also makes me more wary of the word noise. Sometimes noise is, of course, a bodily experience: too loud, too dense, too sudden, too fatiguing. But it is also often a lazy classification. It quickly consigns a soundscape not yet understood to a zone that no longer needs to be understood. As long as one says noisy, one need not ask how it organizes rhythm; as long as one says harsh, one need not ask how, within opera, it cues action, emotion, scene, and convention; as long as one says nuisance, one need not ask who first imagined certain residents’ ways of life as things outside urban order.

What I really want to write today is not that the mainstream misheard Chinese opera. That is too simple.

I want to write this: some cultural forms are allowed to appear profound while not being understood; other cultural forms, when not understood, are immediately required to prove that they are not noise.

The difference between the two does not lie in the eardrum, but in institutions.

More precisely, the difference lies in a protected hesitation. Before Mei Lanfang, many audience members could temporarily say: I do not understand, but I am willing to believe there is art here. Before Chinatown theaters, external ears were more likely to say directly: I do not understand, therefore it is merely noisy. The former non-understanding had judgment deferred; the latter non-understanding was immediately convicted.

Perhaps this is today’s most uncomfortable discovery about the word listening. Listening is not a goodwill that happens naturally. Much of the time, listening is a kind of patience distributed by institutions. Some are granted time for explanation, while others are asked to lower the volume immediately; some are allowed to remain difficult, while others must become acceptable at once; some can preserve strangeness as charm, while others become problems as soon as they are strange.

And this does not belong only to 1930 New York. Today’s platform tags are also training new ears, just in much gentler tones. Guofeng BGM, Eastern aesthetics, intangible cultural heritage, atmosphere, cyber Zen: these do not sound as disgusted as din, racket, or pandemonium, and often even sound like praise. But they too can compress complex vocal styles, regions, histories, and bodily training into sonic labels that can be looped, recommended, and consumed. In the past, certain sounds were said to be unlike music; today, certain sounds are said to have a strong vibe. The two are not the same, but both may complete classification in advance on behalf of the ear.

This makes me more hesitant about explanation as well. Explanation is, of course, important. Without translation, program notes, visual supports, and pedagogical entry points, unfamiliar art is easily rejected crudely. But explanation also has a cost. It filters out the parts that are too long, too dense, too communal, too uncomfortable, pruning a living soundscape into a shape external listeners are willing to receive.

The question is not whether explanation is needed, but who has the right to decide how far explanation should go. Which sounds may retain difficulty? Which sounds must first be organized into forms easy to consume? Which non-understandings are treated as artistic depth, and which non-understandings are treated as grounds for resident complaints?

This is the more general question I heard today through Chinese opera.

In public culture, the most unequal thing is sometimes not who can make a sound, but whose sound can receive a little patience before being understood.

Unresolved

First, I still lack counterexamples of serious listening. Today’s materials easily illuminate the two ends: on one end, early reviews that described Chinese opera as din, racket, and ear-splitting noise; on the other, praise that described Mei Lanfang as image, posture, and classical mystery. But I very much want to know whether, in the middle, there were non-Chinese musicians, journalists, scholars, or ordinary audience members who genuinely tried to understand the vocal styles, gongs and drums, rhythms, and conventions of Chinese opera. If there were, they would make this essay look less like a contrast between two stereotyped modes of hearing.

Second, I have not yet sufficiently written the internal soundscape of Chinatown theaters. For Chinese immigrants, opera was not only traditional art, nor only homesickness. It may have been simultaneously commercial space, native-place network, festival rhythm, news circulation, gendered space, class entertainment, and transnational time. If I continue writing, the next step should be to make Chinatown theaters not merely objects misheard by mainstream ears, but soundscapes that already had their own order and desires.

Third, I need to distinguish more carefully among Peking opera, Cantonese opera, and the broad term Chinese opera. Mei Lanfang’s Peking opera tour and the long-standing Cantonese opera tradition in North American Chinatowns differed in vocal style, repertoire, audience, theater, and social function. What I am discussing today is how mainstream American modes of listening classified different Chinese operatic traditions, not that these traditions themselves had no differences. This qualification must be preserved, otherwise Chinese opera becomes another overly convenient general term.

Fourth, I want to keep pursuing the two-sidedness of explanation. Mei Lanfang’s success in the United States shows that introduction, translation, program selection, and visual framing can help unfamiliar art reach new audiences; but these mechanisms can also filter out the parts that are too long, too communal, too uncomfortable. How can explanation become a bridge for learning how to listen, rather than a filter that trims sound in advance into a consumable object? I do not yet have an answer to this question today.

If yesterday’s question was: how was China seen?

Then today’s question is a little harsher to the ear:

How much noise reduction, framing, and visualization must a culture pay for before it is allowed to be heard as art?