Chinese Opera : Centered in Monterey Park, Clubs of Devoted Immigrants Keep An Exotic Musical Form Alive

Music with an odd and ancient sound resonated in the suburban living room where 10 Chinese-Americans had gathered for their Monday morning ritual.

George Tsai, leader of the Chinese Opera Assn. of Senior Citizens, rhythmically bowed the horsehair strings of his ching-hu , a Chinese violin. In his stocking feet, as were the other visitors to his Monterey Park home, Tsai had draped a handkerchief over his knee to protect his pants from the rosin lubricating the instrument’s two bowstrings.

To the accompaniment of Tsai and three others playing Chinese lutes, C. C. Hsu of Monterey Park sang in a mournful, nasal, Mandarin dialect. They were rehearsing “The Third Wife Teaches the Child How to Behave.” Hsu was portraying the third wife of a physician who has gone on a business trip, leaving behind his three wives and only child, a son.

Now, Hsu’s character confided in song to her manservant, problems were developing. The son was disrespectful and not studying in school. More than that, the child had discovered that the second wife, not she, was his real mother. So the third wife wanted to whip him because the boy said he did not have to obey her.

“Forgive him,” pleaded the manservant, played by P. C. Wan of Temple City. “He’s young.”

As involved as any soap opera, romance novel or prime-time miniseries, the complicated tales of Chinese Opera enthrall hundreds of Chinese-Americans who have banded together to form at least seven clubs in Southern California dedicated to preserving and performing the music.

Most of the clubs, which were created during the last three decades of Chinese immigration, are centered in Monterey Park, where more than half of the population is of Asian ancestry.

“Chinese Opera, you can see once, twice, three times,” Tsai said. “It’s not like the movies here that you only want to see once. It’s like your ‘Gone With The Wind.’ You want to see again and again.”

Tsai, 72, who is retired from the import-export business, indeed enjoys the operas again and again. “I have a tape, a videotape. ‘Borrow the East Wind.’ When I have nothing to do, I see ‘Borrow the East Wind.’ ” He has plenty of other opportunities to perform or listen.

Besides Tsai’s group, which also meets on Fridays at Monterey Park’s Langley Senior Citizens Center, there is the Plum club, which meets twice a week; the Tung Ching club, which meets weekly at Monterey Park City Hall; the Southern California club; the China club, and the Dahan Tieng sen club.

An estimated 300 members, most of them 40 or older, belong to the clubs, and about half of the members actively rehearse, perform and gather around pots of hot Chinese tea on a regular basis.

Although the clubs, which have 25 to 50 members, tend to meet in Monterey Park, their members come from as far away as Orange County, Upland and Santa Monica. One man, said Beverly Hills beautician Elisa Sun, travels from Santa Barbara to attend Saturday sessions of her club, the Tung Ching.

Most club members consider themselves amateurs, even though some have performed professionally in China. Most of the clubs stage performances throughout the year, sometimes using lavish costumes and makeup. But because of the expenses involved, they don’t usually wear costumes.

The Chinese Opera Assn. of Senior Citizens, founded in Monterey Park two years ago, is rehearsing for its first show. Proceeds from the benefit Saturday will go toward expansion of the Langley Center. More than 800 tickets have already been sold, 400 more than the senior citizens center will accommodate. Some who bought the $2 tickets, including one elderly woman who gave $1,000, said they will forgo attending but want to support the club’s efforts.

“This club is for (Chinese) senior citizens that are lonely at home. They do not speak English very well,” Tsai said. “They (have been in) this country only a few years, and it’s very hard for them. But here they have a place for singing and talking, and they feel all very happy to join the group.”

A former major general in the Chinese air force, Tsai was born in mainland China, where he fought in the Sino-Japanese War. He moved to Taiwan during the 1940s and came to Monterey Park in 1980.

The first Chinese Opera club in Southern California was started in Los Angeles in 1960, according to Diana Lowe of Playa del Rey, who helped form the club with her husband, Dr. Frank Lowe.

“We are crazy about opera, and we’re trying to save this culture,” said Lowe, whose husband changed his last name from Liu when he moved to Los Angeles from Shanghai in 1947. “Chinese Opera is history. So we love to go back and study that.”

When her group, the Southern California Club, gets together in homes throughout the area, she said, they love to just “talk, sing, exchange opinions.”

The same was true centuries ago in China, when crowds would gather in teahouse theaters where socializing was as important as the opera music itself.

300 Regional Operas

There are as many as 300 varieties of Chinese regional operas, based on local dialects and cultural differences. The local clubs perform Chinese Opera, also referred to as Peking Opera, a style well-known both in China and in the United States and considered by critics to be the highest expression of the art form.

The style dates from the 18th Century and involves not only elaborate costumes but highly stylized movements that can include mime, acrobatics and swordplay. In the late 19th Century, Chinese Opera was the equivalent of today’s cinema. During the end of the reign of Mao Tse-tung, however, Chinese Opera was banned for a 10-year period ending in 1976.

The Chinese-American caretakers of the tradition acknowledge that it can often sound foreign and unappealing even to their native countrymen. Those who speak Mandarin often cannot understand that dialect when it is sung in Chinese Opera. To the unaccustomed Western ear, the traditional music might sound as strange as some people find bagpipes or the sitar.

“I’m a very lucky person because my husband also sings,” said 45-year-old Elisa Sun of Los Angeles, who belongs to the Tung Ching club. “There are times the wife doesn’t like it or the husband doesn’t like it. Then it’s very hard for them.”

Like Shakespeare

Her husband, George, 53, who operates an import-export business in Los Angeles, compares Chinese Opera to Shakespeare. Like the Bard’s plays and poetry, he said, Chinese Opera is not, nor does it need to be, accessible to everyone. And just as with performing Shakespeare, he said, it can take years to learn to sing, play or even properly understand Chinese Opera.

When Elisa Sun lived in Taiwan, her mother taught her to sing opera at age 15, much older than many Chinese youngsters who are selected and trained to be professionals. One of six children, she is the only one who likes opera.

“When people like it, some of us are like on drugs,” she said. “If you don’t have it, you can’t stand it.

“It’s not like drugs or alcohol in that it doesn’t hurt your body,” she explained. “Actually, in singing you’re using lot of your diaphragm muscles. It’s almost like exercising. It’s good for your body. If you’re not healthy, you can’t sing loud.”

Opera, Tsai said, rejuvenates him.

“I like to play with a good singer. I can play a long time and I don’t feel tired,” said Tsai, who has studied opera since he was a teen-ager on the east coast of mainland China. “The most I play is three hours (at one sitting). I don’t stop, and I feel very happy.”

Reviewing Program

On one recent occasion, Tsai and George Sun sat in Tsai’s Monterey Park living room, where a plastic flag of the Republic of China adorned the brick fireplace. They were reviewing their coming program for the senior center benefit.

Holding a large yellow ticket for the concert, Sun translated the program notes, written in Chinese characters. The more than two-hour performance would include excerpts from 12 operas.

In Chinese Opera, he said, the stories often draw from historical events and can be broken into four categories: the duties of government officials, the benefits of loving relationships among the extended family and friends, spousal love, and relationships among the immediate family, and friendships.

“Eighty percent is happiness,” Sun said of the content of Chinese Opera. “Only 20% is sadness.”

‘Bad Guy Is Dead’

As he spoke of stories from 2,000 years ago, he was sipping hot black tea from a Bugs Bunny tumbler. “By the end of the story the bad guy is dead, always dead. And he can’t just run away.”

Sun said one piece the group will perform, from “The Emperor’s Infant,” tells the story of a court usurper who wants to kill his young relative, who stands in the way of his becoming king.

Sun and Tsai became increasingly excited as they talked about the stories.

Another story, Sun said, centers on a man who has been away from home for 18 years and returns, sporting a long beard, to his wife, who no longer recognizes him. Then there is Tsai’s favorite, “Borrow the East Wind,” a tale of a civil war along the Yangtze River, where an army prays for an easterly wind needed to ignite fires on the enemy ships.

Generation Gap

The two men are not worried about the survival of the operatic tradition, even though they acknowledge that interest seems restricted to older Chinese-Americans and that the younger generation is more interested in Michael Jackson than in Mei Lan-fang, Chinese Opera star of the first half of this century.

“In the Chinese mainland and Taiwan,” Sun said. “Chinese Opera is hot, hot, hot. Not here.”

Still, he said, “there was only one Chinese Opera club in Southern California. Now there are seven.” And, he said, as more people move from China to America, they will carry the tradition with them.

“This is alive,” Sun said. “Two hundred years alive.”