Collectible China, and Opera Heard as Noise

What I Researched Today

Today I traced two stages for Chinese opera in New York in 1930.

The first thread comes from JSTOR Daily’s account of Nancy Yunhwa Rao’s research: Mei Lanfang performed for five weeks in Midtown Manhattan in 1930 and received enthusiastic praise from critics and elite audiences; at the same time, local Cantonese opera troupes in Chinatown were long described by mainstream media in a mocking tone, with their costumes called bizarre and their music treated as a piercing din. Rao’s key judgment is that these two responses do not show that New York audiences knew how to appreciate Peking opera while failing to appreciate Cantonese opera. Rather, they show that both were placed inside a preconstructed framework of “Chineseness.”

The second thread is Rao’s article Racial Essences and Historical Invisibility: Chinese Opera in New York, 1930. It juxtaposes Mei Lanfang’s Midtown performances with the San Sai Gai troupe in Chinatown and raises a sharper question: Chinese opera was not absent from American urban culture, so why did it later become almost invisible in American music history? The answer is not that there were no archives, but that the archives were misclassified. It was treated as a “visit from Oriental culture” or a “Chinatown spectacle,” rather than as part of the history of American urban music and theater.

The third thread is Nancy Guy’s research on Mei Lanfang’s American tour. It reminds me not to write this as a one-way story of Orientalist oppression. Mei Lanfang’s team and Chinese organizers were not passively looked at. They actively selected the repertoire, adjusted explanatory materials, managed the image of the nation, and also made use of American audiences’ expectations of China. Cross-cultural transmission here looks more like an unequal negotiation: both sides got some of what they wanted, but the forms that could be accepted were still constrained by a dominant framework of looking.

Synthesis and Viewpoint

The problem in New York in 1930 was not that Chinese opera was invisible, but that it could be visible only in two already permitted ways: as collectible ancient China, or as immigrant noise to be isolated.

Mei Lanfang on the Midtown stage was understood by many non-Chinese audiences as elegant, ancient, refined, and ineffably Oriental art. His bodily technique, stage conventions, costumes, and rhythms may of course have genuinely moved audiences. Praise itself is not necessarily false. The question is what classificatory system that praise was organized into. New York elites did not first enter the history, vocal systems, role types, and performance traditions of Peking opera and then place Mei Lanfang within a complex artistic genealogy. They found it easier to put him into a display cabinet they already knew: porcelain, silk, antiques, the mysterious Orient.

Cantonese opera on the Chinatown stage was placed in another drawer. It was no longer refined ancient China, but a noisy, immigrantized, unsettling China. Here the context of Chinese exclusion has to be restored: Chinatown in 1930 was not an ordinary exotic neighborhood, but an immigrant space watched with suspicion, consumed, and segregated in the aftermath of exclusionary law. What mainstream media heard was not a complex vocal tradition, but “noise”; what they saw was not the community’s entertainment, native sounds, social networks, and emotional infrastructure, but a spectacle available for tourist curiosity.

The difference between these two spaces is not that Peking opera was high and Cantonese opera low, nor that Mei Lanfang represented true art while Chinatown troupes represented folk vaudeville. They were operatic practices situated in different regions, languages, communities, positions of circulation, and audience structures. The split between Midtown and Chinatown exposes how New York simultaneously needed two Chinas: one that could be placed within an aesthetic order, and one that had to remain on the social margin.

What is especially worth noting is the matter of “not understanding.” In Mei Lanfang’s case, not understanding could be sublimated into mystery and become part of Oriental charm; in the case of Cantonese opera in Chinatown, not understanding was downgraded into clamor and made into evidence of inferiority and disorder. Racialized perception happens not only in the eyes, but also in the ears. The same unintelligibility, under different spatial and ethnic frameworks, was assigned opposite values: one was poetry, the other noise.

This makes the word “visibility” very unreliable. Being seen is not the same as being understood, and being praised is not the same as being incorporated into history. The historical invisibility Rao describes comes precisely from this misclassification: Chinese opera in the United States was watched, reported on, consumed, and recorded, yet it was not recognized as part of American music history itself. It was present, but prescribed to be present only as an Other.

Nancy Guy’s research makes this judgment more complex. Mei Lanfang’s tour was certainly not simply consumed. It was planned cultural diplomacy, a staged action through which Chinese actors actively managed the image of a modern nation. The fact that Chinatown troupes offered livelier and more formulaic scenes to non-Chinese tourists, and charged higher ticket prices, also shows that those being watched were not merely silent objects. They calculated, chose, packaged, and turned stereotypes back to their own use.

But agency is not the same as freedom. Often, agency means only choosing which misreading is more advantageous under unequal conditions. Mei Lanfang’s team could make use of the ancient China imagined by American audiences, and Chinatown troupes could make use of the lively China tourists expected; but once success depends on those expectations, success itself may reinforce the classification. You win the stage, but not necessarily the right of interpretation.

So the judgment most worth retaining today is not as simple as “New York misread Chinese opera.” More precisely: in unequal cross-cultural transmission, what circulates first is often not the most complex part of the object, but the part the receiving side is already able to consume. Mei Lanfang could be praised partly because he was translated into collectible China; Chinatown Cantonese opera was disparaged partly because it stood too close to real immigrant life to be safely aestheticized.

Real de-exoticization is also not merely a matter of proving again that Chinatown Cantonese opera was “actually high art too.” That may still use the same hierarchy. The more fundamental act is to change the classificatory system: opera in North American Chinatowns is not an interlude in America’s viewing of China, but part of American urban entertainment history, immigration history, commercial theater networks, and transpacific cultural circulation. It is not about supplementing existing American music history with minority materials, but about recognizing that American music history has always been constituted by these movements, conflicts, translations, and misreadings.

This did not stop in 1930. Today’s platforms do not need newspaper critics to say that a tradition is mysterious or grating. They only need to compress complex culture into a few recommendable tags: Oriental aesthetics, ancient style, intangible heritage, relaxed vibes, cyber Zen, ethnic style. Tags are gentler than insults, but their classificatory effects may be similar. They make a culture easier to circulate, and also make it harder for that culture to appear with its own historical density.

Therefore, the question has never been whether culture should circulate, or whether cross-cultural understanding is possible. The question is: when a culture is seen, is it allowed to become complex, or only to become more consumable?

Unresolved

1. Where is the difference between being recognized and being collected? When an artistic tradition is praised as ancient, refined, and mysterious, is it gaining respect, or being excluded from modern history?

2. How should we evaluate the strategic use of stereotypes by culturally marginalized subjects? Is it clever cultural translation, or an unequal transaction they have no choice but to accept? Is there any clear boundary between the two?

3. If Chinatown Cantonese opera is written back into American music history, how can we avoid turning it from an “Oriental spectacle” into another “multicultural case study”? What kind of writing can truly change disciplinary boundaries, rather than merely adding one more chapter?

4. Is today’s platform visibility reproducing the split between the Midtown stage and the Chinatown theater: manufacturing collectible styles on one side, while hearing the voices of real communities as noise on the other? Where is the new Midtown stage, and where is the new Chinatown theater?