New Peking Opera: Innovation and controversy
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Peking Opera is almost synonymous with Chinese culture, but the ancient art form has been put to the test by the encroachment of modernity.
Peking Opera first emerged in the late 18th century and came to full flower in the mid-19th century. But it didn't reach its peak until the first half of the 20th century. It’s been widely performed around the world, most notably in Japan, Europe and the US.
But in the second half of the 20th century it witnessed a steady decline in popularity, mainly due to a drop in performance quality, and a disconnect between modern life and the conventions of the performance.
Peking Opera is almost synonymous with Chineseculture, but the ancient art form has been put
to the test by the encroachment of modernity.
Performers and artists have been doing everything they can to keep Peking Opera alive, launching various initiatives over the years. But one particular innovation has been a real stand-out ---new Peking Opera.
CCTV reporter Stanley Lee, Beijing, said, "Many believe that the new Peking Opera movement has injected new life into the ancient art form, but its inclusion of modern elements have also raised eyebrows and criticism. I'm here with Chu Lanlan, one of the leading figures of new Peking Opera. Miss Chu, what's your response to the critics?"
Chu Lanlan, Performing Artist, said, "I was brought up and trained by the most rigorous and traditional teachers, so all of my innovation are rooted in tradition. One example of my innovation is this (She sings), and you see I sped up the pace. Peking Opera must keep up with the pace and rhythm of modern life. People used to sit all afternoon just to enjoy the gestures and acrobatics back then, but that’s in the past."
But her critics are pointing to the past and expressing worries that Peking Opera may drift into obscurity if it seizes on every fashionable idea that comes along. Chu Lanlan disagrees, saying that, at its peak, Peking Opera was in fact one of the most colorful and trendy art forms of its time. So keeping up with the times isn't something to be avoided. But that doesn't mean throwing out all the old traditions.
Chu Lanlan also said, "Peking Opera tells a story rich in symbolism, unlike modern drama it is very abstract. For example,(She sings), this symbolizes that the character is weeping, so when we innovate we mustn't collapse into realism. If we bring a real horse on stage, the usual set gestures a character mounting on a horse would be useless. I am not shy about introducing modern technology on stage, but the abstract core of Peking Opera must be intact."
New Peking Opera usually looks nothing like its older cousin, and the initiative has received a mixed and uncertain response. But one thing is for certain, efforts to innovate and bring freshness to the ancient art form will continue.
Xu Dongdong: "No Peking Opera can work without talent like me ... I think."
Recently, the Chinese mainland actress Xu Dongdong(徐冬冬) was invited by the Hong Kong fashion magazine to shoot a group photo. In this group photo, Xudong Dong wearing sexy lingerie, bold scale to achieve a breakthrough.
Chasing China: A Daughter's Quest for Truth
Mia is beautiful, talented and has the world at her fingertips. But what makes her different than the average college student who juggles a heavy workload and a rat of a boyfriend? Many years ago she was born to an unknown family in China but soon discarded to fend for herself in a busy train station. Fate stepped in when Mia was taken to the local orphanage and adopted at the age of four by her American family. Life has been good for her, or at least as much as she has allowed it to be while pushing her deep feelings of abandonment to the back of her mind. Finally she has decided that in order to move forward, she must confront her past. Mia takes a journey to the mysterious land of her birth and embarks on a mission to find answers. As she follows the invisible red thread back through her motherland, she is enamored by the history and culture of her heritage--strengthening her resolve to get to the truth, even as Chinese officials struggle to keep it buried. With her unwavering spirit of determination, Mia battles the forces stacked against her and faces mystery, danger, a dash of romance, and finally a conclusion that will change her life. 91,000 words, 344 pages.
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Chop Suey : A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States
In 1784, passengers on the ship Empress of China became the first Americans to land in China, and the first to eat Chinese food. Today there are over 40,000 Chinese restaurants across the United States--by far the most plentiful among all our ethnic eateries. Now, in Chop Suey Andrew Coe provides the authoritative history of the American infatuation with Chinese food, telling its fascinating story for the first time.It's a tale that moves from curiosity to disgust and then desire. From China, Coe's story travels to the American West, where Chinese immigrants drawn by the 1848 Gold Rush struggled against racism and culinary prejudice but still established restaurants and farms and imported an array of Asian ingredients. He traces the Chinese migration to the East Coast, highlighting that crucial moment when New York "Bohemians" discovered Chinese cuisine--and for better or worse, chop suey. Along the way, Coe shows how the peasant food of an obscure part of China came to dominate Chinese-American restaurants; unravels the truth of chop suey's origins; reveals why American Jews fell in love with egg rolls and chow mein; shows how President Nixon's 1972 trip to China opened our palates to a new range of cuisine; and explains why we still can't get dishes like those served in Beijing or Shanghai. The book also explores how American tastes have been shaped by our relationship with the outside world, and how we've relentlessly changed foreign foods to adapt to them our own deep-down conservative culinary preferences.
Andrew Coe's Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States is a fascinating tour of America's centuries-long appetite for Chinese food. Always illuminating, often exploding long-held culinary myths, this book opens a new window into defining what is American cuisine.In 1784, passengers on the ship Empress of China became the first Americans to land in China, and the first to eat Chinese food. Today there are over 40,000 Chinese rest! aurants across the United States--by far the most plentiful among all our ethnic eateries. Now, in Chop Suey Andrew Coe provides the authoritative history of the American infatuation with Chinese food, telling its fascinating story for the first time.
It's a tale that moves from curiosity to disgust and then desire. From China, Coe's story travels to the American West, where Chinese immigrants drawn by the 1848 Gold Rush struggled against racism and culinary prejudice but still established restaurants and farms and imported an array of Asian ingredients. He traces the Chinese migration to the East Coast, highlighting that crucial moment when New York "Bohemians" discovered Chinese cuisine--and for better or worse, chop suey. Along the way, Coe shows how the peasant food of an obscure part of China came to dominate Chinese-American restaurants; unravels the truth of chop suey's origins; reveals why American Jews fell in love with egg rolls and chow mein; shows how President Nixon's 1972 trip to China opened our palates to a new range of cuisine; and explains why we still can't get dishes like those served in Beijing or Shanghai. The book also explores how American tastes have been shaped by our relationship with the outside world, and how we've relentlessly changed foreign foods to adapt to them our own deep-down conservative culinary preferences.
Andrew Coe's Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States is a fascinating tour of America's centuries-long appetite for Chinese food. Always illuminating, often exploding long-held culinary myths, this book opens a new window into defining what is American cuisine.
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The Chinese Fairy Book
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.Sources in Chinese History: Diverse Perspectives from 1644 to the Present
The format of Sources in Chinese History assumes the use of outside readings or a textbook, but for the more adventurous it could also be used as a standalone sourcebook. Each chapter begins with a short introductory essay that examines a key event, personage, or theme from the period covered by the chapter. In addition, the authors have selected perspectives that help to orient the student to the issues, trends and challenges of each particular period, and hope that the different viewpoints presented will lead students to rethink the way in which historical events are commonly understood.
Chinese Dreams (Kindle Single)
What does the next generation of Chinese want -- besides economic growth? A report from China on the country's search for meaning, by Anand Giridharadas, columnist for the International Herald Tribune and The New York Times online, and author of "India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation's Remaking."------------------
An excerpt:
The airplane fell into China through what seemed like a vat of sour milk: a thick, yellow-white haze of cloud and smog that gave a preview of all the frenetic world-changing activity below. As we taxied through Pudong's airport, on the outskirts of Shanghai, the stew of rain and smog was thick enough to obscure the identities painted on other planes' tails. They wove around the airport as strangers in daylight.
I had been to China twice before, both times only to Shanghai and briefly. Six years had passed, spent mostly in India, writing about that nation's own great turning. And, with India on my mind, what arrested me upon landing was the bodies. Every time I land in India, a jolt comes in seeing the bodies in the aerobridge and around the airport: the bodies of ballerinas, worn by grown men. They are bodies that were once—and perhaps still are—hungry. They sober the visitor at once; they remind one of the degradations that endure. Now, arriving in China, the seeming absence of such bodies struck me. The men in the airport—the laborers, the gate staff, the taxi coordinators—were full-bodied men. They had none of the Indian worker's meekness....
China's accomplishment in modern times is formidable: that much everyone knows. But it is also elusive. The Chinese scholar Steven N. S. Cheung has compared the nation to a clumsy, stumbling high jumper who, despite appearances, makes a world record jump. "The man must have done something right, more right than all jumpers before," Cheung wrote in a book published last year. "What is it? That, in a different context, is the China question."
I traveled! to Chin a last summer as an outsider, seeking answers to that question. My time in India had schooled me in the dangers of interpreting so vast and complicated a country through Western-built frameworks. I knew all about China's electronics sweatshops and factory suicides and cancer villages, its unaccountable death sentences and slow-oozing chemical spills and thick corruption, its prison abuse and censorship and treatment of minorities. What I didn't have a handle on was how Chinese themselves viewed these heady new times. I wondered how they were defining and going after their Chinese dreams.
In four different settings, I eavesdropped on a fascinating conversation among the younger generation about what China has become and is becoming....
I began these conversations open-endedly and followed them wherever they led. But a common thread presented itself before long. In ways as diverse as the country itself, my interlocutors were consumed and frustrated by the thought that China is lost, adrift. It was variously claimed that everything has moved too fast; that the capitalist present is burying the Maoist past as crudely and dangerously as the Maoists buried the past that they inherited; that anything resembling the future has been adopted without a thought to consequences...
There seemed among those I met to be a yearning to slow it all down, to chew on what China has done and will mean, to supplement growing with reflection. Again and again, I detected a feeling of wanting more than economic success—of wanting to invent, and not merely wake up in, a new China.
"When you make a certain amount of money, you ask, 'What's next?'" Victor Koo, the effervescent co-founder of Youku, a Chinese equivalent of YouTube, told me high above the earth in his company's headquarters in Beijing. "We're getting to a point where we've moved up a level, where the basic needs of many people are taken care of. And so the question of purpose now comes up."
American Born Chinese
Yang skillfully weaves these affecting, often humorous stories together to create a masterful commentary about race, identity, and self-acceptance that has ea! rned him a spot as a finalist for the National Book Award for Young People. The artwork, rendered in a chromatically cool palette, is crisp and clear, with clean white space around center panels that sharply focuses the reader's attention in on Yang's achingly familiar characters. There isn't an adolescent alive who won't be able to relate to Jin's wish to be someone other than who he is, and his gradual realization that there is no better feeling than being comfortable in your own skin.--Jennifer Hubert
China: A History
Informed by the latest research and enlivened by wit and anecdote, Keay's narrative spans 5,000 years, from the Three Dynasties (2000–220 BC) to Deng Xiaoping's opening of China and the past three decades of economic growth. Broadly chronological, the book presents a history of all the Chinas—including regions (Yunnan, Tibet, Xinjiang, Mongolia, Manchuria) that account for two-thirds of the People's Republic of China land mass but which barely feature in its conventional history.
Crisp, judicious, and engaging, China is destined to become the classic single-volume history for anyone seeking to understand the past, present, and future of this immensely powerful nation.
Photo Jigsaw Puzzle of China, Hong Kong, Kowloon from Jason Friend
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- © Jason Friend 2008 - All Rights Reserved
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