A very auspicious Year of the Wood Dragon from my family to yours! In lieu of the usual briefing, and also because I’m in a state of perpetual food coma until Tuesday, you get a few photos and some interesting media to carry you through the week.
Variety is the spice of life
One thing we South-east Asians of Chinese descent don’t really get during this time of year is an encompassing sense of Chinese-ness in media.
gives folks like me a good idea of what’s going on in the mainland, including handy links to the official broadcasts.I am more entranced, however, by a couple of Yue opera actresses I’ve been following on Weibo and Xiao Hong Shu for a while, 陈丽君Chen Li Jun and 李云霄Li Yun Xiao, often cast opposite each other as romantic interests. Yes, you read that correctly. Chinese people don’t seem to have an issue with cross dressing gender bending roles as long as they are on stage. In fact, over Chinese New Year gatherings yesterday, my elders waxed lyrical about Yam Kim-fai and her dashing, charming roles.
Not that I didn’t know my own culture has always been remarkably lax about such things especially in literature and stage, and not that I’m ignorant about exactly how natalist it is about the filial duty of reproduction, but I really do wonder how much of my western-informed lens I’m projecting on them.
So, Chen was cast in a male role opposite 鞠婧祎Ju Jingyi in《游山恋》Our Love on Han Mountain, a love ballad about parting and longing, and sang in Soochow (happy to be corrected, but I’m fairly certain it’s a Wu dialect) whilst Ju sang in standard Mandarin. This was broadcast on Shanghai regional TV as part of the spring variety shows.
Meanwhile, on Henan regional TV, Chen and Li appeared in an even more explicitly non-coded short, in which they both played non-operatic female roles that were very much romantically entangled – just look at the eye contact! (04:43 onwards)
Maybe culture does change, just not at the pace we might want.