Customer Reviews

The Moon Opera

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When The Moon Opera by Bi Feiyu opens Xiao Yanqiu, elegant star of the troupe, disfigures her understudy by throwing a cup of boiling water into her face. This action shuts down the production of the opera and for a second time The Moon Opera is stopped from being performed. Xiao Yanqui is disgraced and retires to teaching and marriage to an average working man. Twenty years later, a tobacco factory manager wants to sponsor a production of The Moon Opera and insists that he wants his idol, Xiao Yanqui, to play the lead role of Chang'e, the moon goddess, or he will withdraw his financial support for the production. Will the third attempt actually result in getting this opera in front of an audience? Will Xiao at forty, and being away from the stage for twenty years, be able to perform the intricate songs and most importantly, how will Xiao react to her understudy?

While the reader is engaged in following Xiao as she becomes the immortal moon goddess, both on and off the stage, this novel takes you behind the scenes into the world of the Peking opera and the interconnection of art and commerce in the Chinese culture. The glossary at the back of the book helps the reader understand the terms and roles of a Chinese opera troupe.

This is an engaging story that can easily be enjoyed in one reading. The language while spare is descriptive. As I read this book it was like watching a Chinese movie unfold, and my emotions ranged from being curious to sympathetic to pity for Xiao. I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in learning more about Chinese opera or any reader that would like to escape into a world that is not well known.

Reviewed by Beverly
APOOO BookClub
March 2, 2009

During a performance of the "The Moon Opera," jealous performer Xiao Yanqiu throws boiling water into the face of her understudy, disfiguring her castmate and ruining her own promising career. Twenty years later, Xiao Yanqiu is given a chance to return to the opera stage and portray lead role of Chang'e in a revival of "The Moon Opera." Xiao Yanqiu becomes completely consumed with the idea of reclaiming her place in the spotlight, and even selects one of her own students as her understudy in an attempt to control her surroundings. However, history begins to repeat itself when Xiao Yanqiu's student shows signs of much promise. There can only be one Chang'e at a time, and the question remains ...does Xiao Yanqiu still have what it takes to stay at the top?

This is a very small novel and a very quick read. The book starts out being narrated from the perspective of the drama troupe leader and then switches to Xiao Yanqiu's point of view, which is a bit confusing and disrupts the otherwise smooth flow of the story. However, once Xiao Yanqiu takes over the narration, everything is golden. "The Moon Opera" is a simple story that revolves around a very complicated woman. It was a very enjoyable read, and I recommend it.

Twenty years after her shameful exit from the stage and the closing of the opera, Xiao Yanqiu is given a fresh chance to play the lead role in The Moon Opera. She is incredibly talented, but her late journey back to stardom will be fraught with difficulty and doubt. As short and delicate and the protragonist's life is wild and long, The Moon Opera can be difficult to connect to but still offers a deep story and a fascinating protragonist. I recommend it.

The novel begins with a rocky start: it opens in the troupe leader's point of the view, but the rest of the book takes place from Yanqiu's point of view, and the changes between the two makes it difficult to connect to the protagonist from the start. The storytelling too makes it difficult to connect: the language is sparse and the timeline jumps between events from Yanqiu's past and the progression of the opera, highlighting her mercurial mood and nature along with the key moments of her life. And the book is short, nearly short enough to read in one sitting--and so as soon as it begins, it ends, and the reader has little time to connect to the character or contemplate the story as a whole.

But if he does--if he pauses in his readings, or thinks back upon the book--there's a lot to be had. As changeable as water, flowing, freezing, crashing; with such great skill that she carries the potential of the whole opera within her, Yanqiu is an incredible protagonist. She is faulted, and wild, and incredibly real even as she is magical, and so her journey towards becoming Chang'e--the opera's protagonist--is full of wonder and fear. The sparse language is atmospheric; the jumping timeline allows for perfect detail in each event it features. The book still feels too short, but the brief journey is still wonderful. And best of all, the ending is the book's strongest moment, and so the reader finishes awed and satisfied. This is not the best book I've ever read, but it was a pleasure and I'm glad I had the chance to read it. At only 100 pages, there's no reason not to take a chance on The Moon Opera--I recommend this book.

This mesmerizing little gem of a novel brings us into the mysterious world of the Beijing Opera where artistic traditions thousands of years old unfold. Xiao Yangiu, a star of this heady operatic world, throws her career away in one moment of violence. Afterwards she sinks into obscurity as a teacher of the operatic arts.

Twenty years later Xiao Yangiu is once again given a change to star in her most famous role in The Moon Opera. How the artist will sacrifice everything for the sake of her art is the essence of this exquisitely and evocatively written tale.

Although an apparently well-established writer in China, Bi Feiyu has only now been introduced to an American reading audience thanks to Howard Goldblatt's and Sylvia Li-Chun Lin's translation of MOON OPERA. His is a welcomed addition to the growing array of mainland Chinese authorial voices available in English translation, including Yu Hua, Mo Yan, Su Tong, Hong Ying, Wang Anyi, Dai Sijie, Gao Xingjian, Yan Geling, Xiaolu Guo, and Ma Jian.

MOON OPERA is really more a novella that places the classic relationship of performer and understudy in the context of Chinese opera. The central character is Xiao Yanqiu, a female singer of enormous talent. In 1958, the opera Chang'e Flies to the Moon was slated for a Beijing performance and then canceled due to political objections. Twenty years later, in 1979, the Moon Opera as it was known was recommissioned with nineteen-year-old diva Xiao Yanqiu initially slated as understudy to the more experienced Li Xuefen. In rehearsals, the understudy surpassed the more experienced Li and landed the part and the two switched roles until one evening when Li performed at a military barracks. Li performance won such acclaim that backstage after its conclusion, the two women argued until Xiao Yanqiu effectively destroyed both women's careers in an act of jealousy; the Moon Opera is no longer performed.

The stage is set some twenty years later again when the boss of a State cigarette factory asks for the leader of Xiao Yanqiu's former theater troupe for her return in a performance of Moon Opera. By now, Xiao is an opera teacher, resignedly married to an uncultured traffic policeman named Miangua, and they have a school-aged daughter. Xiao Yanqiu proves through a brief audition that she can still sing the part, and thus begins the troupe's efforts to stage the opera with Xiao as Chang'e. Naturally, she has an understudy for the part, one of her own students by the name of Chunlai. The major portion of this short novel concerns Xiao Yanqiu's preparations to reclaim her renowned role. Can she lose enough weight? Will her voice and body hold up to the demands of the part? Will history repeat itself with lead singer and understudy? What affect will regaining her diva status have on her staid, settled home life with Miangua? Unexpected complications arise that are obstructive of Xiao Yanqiu's efforts as well as being symbolic of the artistic process in a literary sense.

MOON OPERA demonstrates Bi Feiyu's strong story-telling skills built around a distinctive, memorable central character. The secondary characters, particularly Miangua, Chunlai, and troupe leader Qiao Bingzhang are given sufficiently shorter shrift that their presence suffers for it; they are not as strong or well-developed as they could have been. Nevertheless, Bi Feiyu relates a dramatic tale that edges at times into the brutally frank while successfully bringing the reader into the arcane world of Beijing opera. In fact, the contrasts between performer and understudy, between the aging star and the young, upcoming talent nicely mirror the contrasts between the mundane world of marriage and parenthood and the exotic, costumed, ethereal realm of classical Beijing opera. An equally nice literary touch is found in the mythological story of Chang'e herself, "who stole the elixer of immortality and flew to the moon." Xiao Yanqiu playing Chang'e raises allusions both to her own mortality as a performer as well as her use of medicines in the novella.

One can only hope that MOON OPERA's translation into English is a signal that more of Bi Feiyu's work may soon become available to Western readers.

I just finished the grim but exquisitely written novel, The Moon Opera, by Bi Feiyu. The novel tells the story of Xiao Yanqui, a singer in the Peking Opera, who throws her career away with one angry gesture but more than twenty years later is given back her chance to once again soar as the heroine of The Moon Opera.

Imagery of snow and ice figure throughout the novel, as both the weather surrounding the performances of The Moon Opera, and as representing Yanqui. The snow and ice are in sharp contrast to sudden and strong images of heat and melting and raging fever. In the end, heat vanquishes cold and Yanqui is the victim. Passion and heat are her downfall, even as she dances in the snow and ice, seeking to preserve herself as the ice princess, but losing out to the reality of her womanhood.

This is very much a novel about being a woman. Yanqui has a projected image, both as the character, Chang'e, she plays in the opera who is powerful yet wanton, and as her own persona of icy hauteur and disdain. She has one more image, the one she projects to herself, that she is strong and beautiful. But when the images fall away, she is left vulnerable and weak, and she is treated with disgust or, even worse, disinterest. Adulation or rejection, the fate of woman? Yanqui says at one point, "Men fight other men, but women spend their whole lives fighting themselves." This is such a tragic sentence, a condemnation to a life sentence of trying to be what she is idolized as, singer and beauty, but never loved for what she is, human.

In many ways, Yanqui reminded me of April Wheeler in Revolutionary Road, not only in their fates but in their own visions of their destiny, skewed by others' desires, bound by imposed images, and founded not in their own true strengths but in dreams of what could be, or what should be, but what is not, and what never will be.

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