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Chinese Opera in Turn-of-the Century Canada: Local History and Transnational Circulation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 December 2014

Nancy Yunhwa Rao
Nancy Yunhwa Rao*
Affiliation:
Rutgers University Email: ryh@rci.rutgers.edu
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Abstract

One of the most curious aspects about Canadian Chinese cultural history is the role of opera theatres. They served as the public face of the community, cultural ambassadors or even artistic curiosities, but at the same time provided Chinese audiences the intimate world of emotive musical drama. Because of their public role, they were often ambitious projects. Since first appearing in Victoria in the 1860s, Chinese theatres played an integral role in its community life. Featuring performance of Cantonese opera, the regional genre known to the majority of Chinese immigrants that came from the Pearl River Delta of southern China, these theatres provided crucial entertainment. Chinese theatres’ success in Victoria, and later in Vancouver, was not an isolated phenomenon, but rather closely connected to other cities along the Pacific coast. The opera business waxed and waned, in large part as a result of the Chinese exclusionist policy in Canada and United States. In the 1910s and 1920s, through joint ventures, Chinese in Canada and the United States succeeded in forming a network of opera performance and revived their fluidity of movement in the Pacific Northwest region. Because this network returned significant mobility to troupes and performers, Chinese theatres flourished again in North America. This article provides a preliminary overview of this body of troupes and performers in Canada, its impact and the national and transnational forces that shaped it. It addresses key issues related to this history: the effect of immigration control, the relevance of Chinese theatres to community life, and the transborder crossings.

Type
Research Article
Information
Nineteenth-Century Music Review , Volume 11 , Issue 2 , December 2014 , pp. 291 - 310
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

1 The Victoria Daily Colonist, 12 November 1884; 23 July 1885; 4 August 1885. Hereafter VDC.

2 Playbills can be found in the Chinese Opera Information Center, Music Department, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Heritage Museum and Special Collection, Hong Kong University. The company record can be found in Wing Hong Lin Theatre Records’, Sam Kee Papers, Add MSS 57r, 566-G-4, City of Vancouver Archives.

3 Sebryk, Karrie Marion, ‘A History of Chinese Theatre in Victoria’ (MA thesis, University of Victoria, 1993)Google Scholar; Johnson, Elizabeth, ‘Cantonese Opera in its Canadian Context: The Contemporary Vitality of an Old Tradition’, Theatre Research in Canada 17/ 1 (1996): 24–45 Google Scholar; and ‘Evidence of an Ephemeral Art: Cantonese Opera in Vancouver's Chinatown’’, British Columbia Studies 148 (2005–06): 55–91.

4 Yung, Bell, Cantonese Opera: Performance as Creative Process (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1989)Google Scholar. Although it shares many elements with other forms of Chinese opera, including the Beijing opera that is now the most familiar, the Cantonese opera discussed here differs from the Beijing variety in a variety of ways; among the most prominent musical differences are the use of improvisation and folk songs in Cantonese opera, which have led to its being considered less formal and more spirited.

5 For more information on the genre see Bell Yung, Cantonese Opera. For a discussion of the performance practice of the 1920s in the United States see Rao, Nancy Yunhwa, ‘Songs of the Exclusion Era: New York's Cantonese Opera Theaters in the 1920s’, American Music 20/4 (2002): 399–444 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 See Yu, Henry, ‘The Intermittent Rhythms of the Cantonese Pacific’, in Connecting Seas and Connected Ocean Rims, ed. Donna R. Gabaccía and Dirk Hoerde (Leiden: Brill, 2011): 393–414Google Scholar, here 394.

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10 To cut costs, Macdonald insisted on employing the Chinese. In Parliament in 1882, he put it pragmatically: ‘It is simply a question of alternatives: either you must have this labor or you can't have the railway’. Chan, Kwok Bun, Smoke and Fire: The Chinese in Montreal (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1991)Google Scholar: 17.

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12 Ng, ‘Chinatown Theatre as Transnational Business’, 54.

13 VDC, 9 August 1885.

14 VDC, 13 August 1885. A similar incidence is also reported later, VDC, 27 November 1908.

15 VDC, 10 January 1908.

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18 VDC, 2 October 1907.

19 The Chinese Times, 25 March 1916. Hereafter CT.

20 CT, 22 July 1916.

21 Daily Building Record, 30 September 1913.

22 CT, 12 October 1928.

23 CT, 20 January 1915.

24 CT, 16 February 1915.

25 Wing Chung Ng made a comprehensive study of the business papers at the City of Vancouver Archive, see Ng, ‘Chinatown Theatre’.

26 CT, 24 January 1917.

27 CT, 10 September 1917.

28 CT, 19 December 1917.

29 For the existence of the alliance and list of elected members, see CT, 11–18 February 1919.

30 CT, 21 January 1918.

31 CT, 21 January 1918; Shen Bao, 25 January 1921.

32 Sai-Shing Yung offers an insightful discussion of a similar phenomenon for another famous actress. See his From Opera Boat to Silver Screen: Visual and Sonic Culture of Cantonese Opera (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 2012). Similar practices can be found with prima donnas of nineteenth-century European opera; see Izzo, Francesco, ‘Divas and Sonnets: Poetry for Female Singers in Teatri Arti e Letteratura’, in The Arts of the Prima Donna in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Rachel Cowgill and Hilary Poriss (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012): 3–20 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Cf Izzo, ‘Divas and Sonnets’.

34 See a professional photographer's notice, warning of plagiarism. CT, 13, 15 April 1921.

35 CT, 11 June 1919.

36 CT, 9 March 1918.

37 CT, 11–18 February 1919.

38 CT, 30 May 1929.

39 See Rao, Nancy Yunhwa, ‘The Public Face of Chinatown: Actresses, Actors, Playwrights, and Audiences of Chinatown Theaters in San Francisco of the 1920s’, Journal of the Society for American Music 5/2 (2011): 235–270 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 CT, 11 January 1918.

41 CT, 24 September 1918; 11 April 1919.

42 CT, 10 December 1918.

43 See, for example, CT, 11–18 February 1925; 28 January 1928.

44 Yu, , ‘Intermittent Rhythms’, 401 Google Scholar.

45 Cheung, Helen Kwan Yee, ‘The Social Functions of Cantonese Opera in the Edmonton Chinese Community 1890–2009: From Sojourners to Settlers’ (MA Thesis, University of Alberta, 2013)Google Scholar.

46 The playbill noted the arrival of two renown actresses; CT, 19 April 1921.

47 CT, 9 December 1921.

48 CT, 6 October 1921.

49 For example, Li Xuemei features significantly during Thanksgiving of the year, see CT, 26 and 29 November 1921.

50 Letter from Li Xuemei, Chung Sai Yat Po (), 15 November 1922.

51 CT, 1 September 1921.

52 Chang, Kornel, ‘Enforcing Transnational White Solidarity: Asian Migration and the Formation of the U.S.–Canadian Boundary’, American Quarterly 60/3 (2008): 671–696 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 693.

53 Kue Hing is discussed by Wing Chung Ng, ‘Chinatown Theatre’.

54 Under Article 9 of the act, ‘Special circumstance’ was granted by the Minister of Immigration.

55 CT, 11 March 1927.

56 Correspondence on 15 October 1926, NARA, New York Branch. Box 255 56/53.3.