Shanghai Opera’s Departure From a Country in Chaos

The members of Shanghai Kunqu Opera had a problem on Monday: the 15-mile trip to the airport for their plane flight to America.

The mass transit system had been shut down for days. Angry student protesters, sympathetic to their bloodied and massacred colleagues in Beijing, had deflated the tires of public buses. Sabotaged vehicles blocked roadways. People, in a panic over the turmoil engulfing the city of more than 12 million, flooded the streets to buy food and supplies.

Problems due to civil strife already had delayed the departure of the Shanghai Kunqu Opera Troupe for three weeks. The group opens a U.S. tour with weekend shows in Pasadena, then goes to San Francisco and New York.

At 5 a.m., nine hours before the plane was scheduled to leave, the troupe’s director, Wang Ji Sheng, rode his bicycle around the neighborhood and concluded that his acclaimed performing group might have to cancel the tour.

But a few hours later, the 28-member group met. And Wang, 47, recounting the story after arriving in Los Angeles on Tuesday, said: “We all decided that we would go, even if we had to walk to the airport.”

The performers assembled a fleet of 30 bicycles. But these weren’t needed. Supporters provided them with four vehicles large enough to transport everyone and their elaborate costumes. Winding their way along side roads to avoid the turmoil on major highways, they made it to the airport. And after a 2 1/2-hour delay, reportedly caused by a strike among workers at the Beijing airport where the flight originated, the opera company left a country in chaos.

“This is the first time I have felt so caught between performing arts and politics,” said one of the company members, speaking through a translator.

Three members of the troupe weren’t allowed to make the trip because of their support for the students in Beijing, said the Los Angeles promoter, Wu Chao Nan.

“This is drama in real life,” said a performer, whose group stages a particular style of Chinese opera that was begun near Shanghai in the 16th Century. The troupe’s performances here have been tailored for a Western audience with music, acrobatics and mime.

Somberness and sadness enveloped the faces of the opera company members Tuesday as they talked, over tea and dumplings, first at a Monterey Park hotel and then at a nearby restaurant.

Fearing reprisals, the opera cast members wanted to remain anonymous in making their comments. Yet they very much wanted to explain how they felt.

When their flight arrived from Asia, they first stopped in San Francisco. They immediately felt discomfort. These operatic good-will ambassadors represented their country and because of what was happening in China, one company member said, “people view us with a critical eye.”

“We understand the feelings and the animosity that some may have for what happened in Beijing,” another performer said. “But please try to understand that is not our doing. We are not officially connected with that. We are just artistic performers and not members of the Communist Party.”

The promoter for the Los Angeles segment of the tour, Wu Chao Nan, 65, had his own dilemma.

A former professional opera clown in Taiwan, and a native of China who fled to Taiwan, he loves opera but not the Beijing government. He operates a beef products business in Montclair. Associates urged him to cancel the show, in protest of the martial law and subsequent deaths in China.

If he were to cancel the four-performance run scheduled for Friday, Saturday and Sunday at Pasadena City College’s Sexson Auditorium, Wu said, “either it would cost me money or cost me promises.”

Wu did not know until the last minute, even after he had advertised the shows, whether the group would make the trip. Regardless of politics or uncertainties, he decided to stick by his plans.

The troupe’s director says unabashedly his is not only Shanghai’s best operatic company but China’s also. Eight members of the troupe have earned the coveted Plum Blossom Award, the highest honor bestowed in China to performing artists. The awards are given to only 10 performers every three to four years.

The opera company in recent years has toured the world, with long runs in England, Japan and Sweden and is making its second U.S. appearance. But this tour has posed the greatest difficulty for the performers, they said. It was even more frustrating, some of them said, than the 10-year period when Chinese opera was banned during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, and artists and intellectuals from the city were banished to peasant labor in the countryside.

When the company arrived in San Francisco, they discovered they could find out more about events in China here in the news than from the Chinese media.

“We didn’t want to eat or sleep,” one member of the group said. “ ‘Eat first,’ our host told us. Instead, we devoured this information in the newspapers. Even though we had come from China, we did not know it was as cruel and bloody as these news pictures showed us.”

Then, as others in the group nodded in agreement, he said: “All this bloodshed is too much. Our most simple basic hope in this life is to avoid bloodshed and live peacefully. So I can devote my life to performing art.”

Then another said: “As a woman and as a mother we hate to see these things happening. But you can’t condemn the students for their patriotism.”

A woman sitting next to her, Wang Ju Jung, said, “History will prove that Chinese people have a lot of endurance and they will survive this.”

In the centuries-old tradition of Chinese opera, many stories tell of political overthrows of the palace emperors. The Shanghai troupe won’t be performing those on their tour. Even so, Hua Wen Ji, one of the performers said: “Maybe all of this experience will enrich our performance.”