Mao Weitao and Yue Opera

March 14, 2010

Mao Weitao is considered a living treasure in China. She imitates men in the opera roles she plays—a reversal from Imperial China when women were not allowed on stage so men played female roles.

Mao Weitao is on the left

I was introduced to Yue Opera in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province about a decade ago. Mao Weitao and her husband have their own theater company near the shores of the famous Westlake. My wife translated while I watched the live-opera performance in fascination.

The costumes were lavish and the acting and opera was dramatic with a backdrop of classical Chinese music.

The challenge today is to keep this form of Chinese opera alive. The audience for opera is shrinking dramatically in China while remaining popular with the older generation. Television, movies and the Internet are claiming the shorter attention spans of the younger people.

Mao Weitao, considered an innovative genius on stage, adapts and works to keep the art form alive. According to her husband, no two performances are exactly alike.

Discover The Orphan’s Life

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

His latest novel is the multiple-award winning Running with the Enemy.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Pearl of China

March 12, 2010

“From the bestselling author of Red Azalea and Empress Orchid comes the powerful story of the friendship of a lifetime, based on the life of Pearl S. Buck.”

“In this ambitious new novel (Pearl of China), Anchee Min brings to life a courageous and passionate woman who is now hailed in China as a modern heroine. Like nothing before it, Pearl of China tells the story of one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers, from the perspective of the people she loved and of the land she called home.” Source Bookbrowse

At Bookbrowse, thirty-five early, reader reviews rated Pearl of China an average 4.5/5 stars.

In the southern town of Chin-kiang, in the last days of the nineteenth century, two girls bump heads and become thick as thieves. Willow is the only child of a destitute local family. Pearl, the headstrong daughter of zealous Christian missionaries, will become Pearl S. Buck, Nobel Prize-winning writer and activist. Their friendship will be tested during decades of great tumult, by imprisonment and exile, bloody civil war and Mao’s repressive Communist regime.

Pearl S. Buck won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932, the Howells Medal in 1935, and the Nobel Prize for literature in 1938.

Read International Women’s Day where Anchee Min was a guest speaker http://wp.me/pN4pY-ft

 

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl

March 11, 2010

The Sent Down Girl was filmed in China and directed by Joan Chen. It is a Mandarin language film with English subtitles and was filmed on the hauntingly beautiful Tibetan high plains.

During the Cultural Revolution, millions of teens were sent from the cities to the country or camps to learn humility and a simpler, peasant life.

This movie stars Lu Lu as Xiu Xiu, a teenage girl and Lopsang as Lao Jin, a castrated Tibetan nomad who is assigned to teach the innocent teen how to handle and train horses.

Xiu Xiu

Lao Jin falls in love with his young charge but he is a eunuch. Then there is a local low ranking Communist official and others, who introduce Xiu Xiu to a brutal world of sex for favors. This movie was not a condemnation of Communist China. This example of sexual harassment can happen anywhere.

The movie was based on an award-winning novella banned in China because of political and sexual content.  This was the first film Joan Chen directed. She is best known for her role in The Last Emperor as one of the emperor’s wives.

Discover Farewell My Concubine

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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Every Kind of Beauty Under Heaven

March 7, 2010

When emperors ruled China, those men often wanted to be seen as benevolent—embracing every kind of beauty under heaven. To do this, the emperors encouraged minorities to stay where they had lived for centuries if not millennia. Even in Tibet, China has not driven out or slaughtered in mass (http://wp.me/pN4pY-6S) the minorities as Europeans did to North American natives, who lived off that land for more than ten thousand years.

 

History shows that the Chinese emperors did not force minorities from their land with false promises followed by broken treaties. In China, if a minority king proposed a marriage alliance with the Emperor, the Emperor adopted a Chinese beauty as his daughter and sent her to the minority king. This is portrayed in The Dream of Red Mansions, a Chinese classic written in the 18th century.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Raise the Red Lantern

March 4, 2010

This film was directed in China by Zhang Yimou in 1991, and it offers a view of life within a closed, dictatorial culture that starts in the home. The film focuses on the ever-shifting balance of power between the various concubines while the husband ignores much of what is going on—taking his pleasures when he feels like it.

The central government in China did not approve this film since it parallels a return to a concubine society where men with new wealth stash women (the concubines) in different apartments. The more things appear to change, they don’t.

When my wife and I lived in Southern California, we visited a small restaurant near our home. The owner was a former concubine of a wealthy Chinese man, who paid her off and sent her packing when she got too old. He used his influence and wealth to help her reach the United States while he went in search of a young beauty to replace her. She used the money to start a business. She was lucky. Many modern-age concubines are just abandoned and have to find another master to support them and beauty does fade.

Discover more Chinese movies–Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the lusty love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

IMAGE with Blurbs and Awards to use on Twitter

Where to Buy

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China’s Holistic Historical Timeline

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

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