Today is New Brunswick Day, a provincial holiday when there are no open businesses and the university library is closed. I went to the university in the morning only to find that I had forgotten it was a holiday. I am always poor at remembering dates, an indication of poor sense of planning and a life philosophy of letting things come and go without ever thinking of taking advantage of them.

I read in the Department of Anthropology till 11 o’clock. I copied a passage from Lin Yutang’s Moment in Peking where he commented on missionaries. Then feeling extremely lonely I decided to go home. When I was riding out of campus, I looked down at the St. John River valley and the town and had a queer feeling that this was a ghost town in deep slumbering.

I called Old Bob because I remembered that he had some Chinese cassettes. I wanted to listen to some Chinese music and songs. He came in the afternoon, bringing me several cassettes. To my great joy I found a tape of selections of modern revolutionary Peking Opera.

After Bob left I lay down in my bed to enjoy the tape. All the recordings were from the original. I felt I was back in those Cultural Revolutionary days and was happy to hear the voice of those once famous actors and actresses. I sang with them, correcting myself according to the tape.

All the selections are very revolutionary. Indeed you can never pick out anything not revolutionary from those operas. But it is even difficult to pick out neutral songs. One might be Li Yuhe’s "A Child in Poverty Takes Up Early House Responsibility" (qiongren de haizi zao dang jia), which is one of my favorate. It is short and speaks of common sense:

But when I read those words of the songs selected I found that they had new meaning for me after so many years. For example in the song of Little Chang Bao, the hunter Old Chang’s daughter who was forced to dress up like a boy and fake a deaf and mute for fear of being harassed by bandits, in which she described the tragedy of her family to Yang Zirong, the communist army officer, that had happened eight years before, she said that after her grandma was killed by the bandits and her mother, being abducted by the bandits and presumably humiliated, threw herself down a high cliff, "she would often miss her mother while her father would miss his mother after a day’s hunting in the mountains". I remember reading somewhere a comment on this line: Why did not her father miss his wife?

Of course this is the philosophy of those revolutionary years: nothing related faintly to sex must be included in the eight Peking Operas that were hailed as the sole representatives of the achievement in art in revolutionary China. Thus we have in " A Legend of Red Lamp" a family consisting of a grandma without a husband, a father without a wife and a daughter without a lover. In "A Village Called Shajiabang", we have a single woman running the teahouse, with her husband seeking employment, as many of his folks in that area nowadays do, in other provinces. Of course the revolutionary Mama, Grandma Sha, must not have a husband. Not even the military officers of the reactionary troops. Commander-in-Chief Hu and his strategist Diao both must have left their wives and maybe concubines at home for the sake of fighting the New 4^th-route Army. Such a sex-neutral ideology was indicative of that period in Chinese history, when sex was regulated by various means. The only erotic thing is in "Red Cloud Hill" (hong yun gang), in which a peasant woman, in order to save the life of a wounded red army soldier, fed him with her own milk when she could not find water in the wilderness. The eroticism was diluted of course by her long and windy justification of the necessity of doing so: the sense of shyness and even shame should be sacrificed for the sake of revolution. Even though on the stage the unbuttoning and the acquisition of her milk was symbolically done behind the curtain, there was still a strong sense of erotica suggested by the unbuttoned color as she returned to the front stage when in those years women all buttoned their jacket up to the neck. When I was in high school, we went to the countryside to help with summer harvest regularly. I remember one day we had a gathering and a female student was wearing only a sports jacket without a maoist uniform. She purposely covered her top part with a basin she was carrying with her when she came close to us boys. In those years, sports wear can well highlight the contour of a female body.

Females, however, were much highlighted in the model Peking operas due to Mao’s wife’s ambition in politics. If China has a history of women liberation, this period should be included. So in "A Song of the River of Longjiang", we have a party leader Jiang Shuiying. In "The Harbor", we have a party leader Fan Haizhen and in "Dujuan Mountains" we have a guerrilla leader Ke Xiang. Also notice their names: Shuiying---water hero; Haizhen—sea treasure. Also Tiemei---iron plum blossom, Chang Bao---treasure, Ke Xiang---does not "xiang" has the connotation of the ancient beauties of the Xiang River? In all the three important fields, the agricultural, the industrial and the military, female protagonists occupied the center stage. Apart from the liberating message, however, these females’ presence on stage actually provided a channel for males’ not easily satisfied desire for female body in those days. What we could not get physically, we got spiritually by watching.

But revolution is still the main thing of the operas. They revolutionized the way Peking Opera was staged, from the motif to pronunciation to costume. The greatest significance is that they displaced emperors, kings, feudal generals, imperial ministers, Confucian scholars and well-to-do beauties and replaced them with workers, peasants and soldiers. Culturally, they made ordinary people feel that they were the masters of history, when in fact they were at the mercy of Mao’s whimsical idea of reforming China and the world. Mao’s intension might have been good: to give people their historical position, but he forgot that the dominating ideology before his 1949 revolution was not communism and people had strong nostalgia for things old and even feudal. There is not a Great Wall separating the pre-and-post-revolution years, as Lenin had stated. As time went by, these revolutionary operas all went into the historical museum.

This does not mean they were things past. Last year or the year before last, The Central Ballet Troupe of China staged its classic ballet "The Red Women Army" in New York. Revolutionary as it was, the ballet was a great success. The audience, both Chinese and American, were moved and excited, for different reasons maybe. For Chinese, especially those from the mainland, the ballet was a fondle reminder of their old days in China, when the value system of society was distorted in its own lovely ways. It must have provided the channel for them to feel at home again in this alian capitalist world where many of them are making material gains. For the Americans, it was both the performance and the message. They understood its revolutionary message, middle-class as they were, maybe because of their revolutionary tradition against colonialism and the negro slavery, or maybe ideologically they were not totally hegemonized by a social institution that favors most people with decent material satisfaction while concentrating most of the profits in the hands of a small number of super-capitalists.

This shows that revolution is not a horrible idea even though the practice may be bloody and violent. Where there is oppression, there is resistance, as Mao taught us. In North America, I have met young people devoted to Socialist ideas (not the current China type) and professors with Marxist inclination.

Now as I read the words of some of the selections of the tape cassette, I found they sound profound and touching to me. Imagine the story in "A Legend of Red Lamp". An old woman, in order for her adopted grand daughter to carry on the revolutionary tradition of the family, told her the tragic stories that had taken place seventeen years before, stories she had concealed from her for this many years for fear that the granddaughter was not strong enough to face them. Now it was time because she would soon be thrown into jail as her son had been and the grand daughter would be the sole person to finish a task assigned to her father by the guerrillas. The scene of "Telling Family History in Great Pain" is thus a heroic epic and the connection of family with the fate of the nation reminds people of historical precedents such as the Yang’s in Song Dynasty that helped the court to fight against foreign invaders while at the same time had to face the intrigues and plots designed by some court officials against them.

Thus revolution in the modern operas was never totally severed from the Chinese traditional concept of the union of family and nation/state. Without this historical link, a revolution in the form of Peking Opera would have been a total failure. This historical and cultural link may be the reason why even today they can still be enjoyed occasionally by the generation of Cui Jian, a pop music star often banned by the Chinese government, and Coca-Cola.

For they also embodies a message for the future. History is a flow of river that cannot be cut into disconnected segments. Does not the words such as "the landlord has connections with officials so that they covered the sky and oppress the poor" ring a bell from time to time as we read news about the high-handed measures taken by some rural cadres in today’s China when collecting taxes?