Given New York’s disdain for Chinese opera in Chinatown, why did elite audiences clamor to see it uptown? How did Mei “so overwhelmingly attract” audiences that “had little understanding of, and often no interest in his music and language?”
Unsurprisingly, elite New Yorkers enjoyed Mei’s show because it aligned with other cultural stereotypes. When reviewers compared Mei’s poise and performance to pottery or “old paintings on silk,” they evoked the colonialist craze for owning Chinese objects as status symbols.
“It is thus not surprising that Mei Lan-fang’s staging of Chinese opera… became such a popular commodity,” Rao writes. “Framed as the ancient and refined, Mei was objectified.”
In fact, Rao argues that the inability to understand him “did not hinder appreciation, but rather satisfied the notion of ‘Oriental ineffability.’” She also suggests that “the persistent Western ‘desire’ to feminize the Orient as the Other” may have shaped responses to his rendition of female roles.
Far from passively accepting Western stereotypes, Mei astutely capitalized on racial expectations. Rao points out that his team spent a decade preparing for the international stage, making creative decisions with an American audience in mind.
For instance, plots and singing were simplified, aesthetic choreography was emphasized, and operatic arias were even transcribed into Western notation and printed in advance.
While Chinatown troupes did not enjoy the same cultural cachet and social status as Mei, they used a similar tactic, playing to stereotypes to remain commercially viable.
Noting that the Chinese theater was “a complex space” that served both local residents and outsiders, Rao describes how troupes presented non-Chinese tourists with “a formulaic performance” of rowdy, circus-like battle scenes—and charged them thrice the going rate.
She acknowledges that white audiences’ divergent responses to Peking opera in midtown Manhattan and Cantonese opera in Chinatown might initially appear contradictory, with the former seen as refined and sophisticated, and the latter dismissed as lower-class and unpleasant.
Still, Rao suggests that these impressions were two sides of the same coin: “Chinese opera has been viewed as not only linked to but actually constituting the foreign and the exotic”—a perspective that ignores the art form’s long and vibrant history on the American stage.