Overview:
The White-Haired Girl,a modern ChineseCommunist opera written by Ho Ching-chih and Ting Yi and first performed in April of 1945, dramatizes the oppression of a poor farmer Yang and his daughter Xi’er by a greedy landlord. The original play depicts the debtor father’s forced sale of his daughter and his consequent suicide, followed by the daughter’s rape and impregnation by the landlord and her escape into a cave, where her hair turns white from lack of light and nutrition. Scavenging food from a nearby temple, Xi’eris mistaken for a white-haired goddess for several years, until Communist cadres arrive and expose this illusion, restoring Xi’er to society and bringing the landlord to justice. Drawn from anoral folk tale circulating in Hopei Province during the early 1940s, and put into dramatic formthroughthe adaptation of the popular Chinese peasant dance of the “yangko” or “rice-sprout song”, this modern opera stands out in Communist Chinese history as one of the most successful utilizations of long-beloved folk art to spread revolutionary ideas to the people.
The play was written and produced by students of Lu Hsun College in Ya’nan, in direct response to the call sounded by Communist leader Mao Zedongfor the reformation of Chinese literature and art into forms and themes that would serve the interests of the common people. Wildly popular from its first opening, thirtyperformances were given in Ya’nan alone. Following its Ya’nan premier, the playwas revised, adapted, andperformed by the classically trained Peking Opera. During the Cultural Revolution era, it was transformed into a ballet, at which point it was honored as one of the eight most exemplary revolutionary artworks.TheWhite-Haired Girl eventually became a film and a television stage drama, making it accessible to Western audiences as well.
Historical and Literary Context:
Mao began advocating the use of Chinese folk literature and art in the 1930s. His most famous speech on the topic occurred at the Ya’nan Forum on Literature and Art in 1942, just three years before The White-Haired Girl was first penned. Mao believed that writers should live among the common people, drawing artistic material from folk culture rather than from the Classical Chinese or the modern foreign art forms that comprised China’s primary theater offerings prior to Mao’s intervention. The authors of The White-Haired Girl conformed to Mao’s prescription, seizing on the wildly popular yangko dance and song of the peasant farmers to ensure their opera’s popular appeal.
This exhilarating dance, originally a somewhat comic, even sexual, fertility rite celebrating the arrival of spring, was transformed into modern opera through several changes in theme and elaborations in form. As early as 1937, Communist groups were utilizing the rice sprout dance for propagandist purposes, developing the dance intodramatic narratives that depicted therevolutionary struggles of the poor against the rich, and against theJapanese invading China during that period. The propagandists’ primary goals were to create support for the changes in policy being put forward by the New Democracy and to provide amodel forproletarian unity and courage (Wilkinson 165).
While The White-Haired Girl is not the first yangko opera – the first being Brother and Sister Pioneers (1943), also created at Lu Hsun College – it is definitely the most successful, followed closely in popularity only by a later model revolutionary ballet called The Red Detachment of Women (964). Consistent withthe Chinese theater practice of constantly perfecting its major hits, The White-Haired Girl was adapted tirelessly for decades, for both political and aesthetic reasons. One of the first major adaptations came in 1949, when the People’s Liberation Army reached Peking and declared itself the official government of China. Cultural reform accelerated rapidly from this point on. Classical operas were banned or altered drastically, requiring the formally trained Peking Opera performers to adapt their traditional acting style to achieve a more “natural” and “realistic” effect in their performances of The White-Haired Girl (Wilkinson 171).
The next major innovation followed the Cultural Revolution of 1966, when the opera was made into a ballet, and the plot was modified to make it more consistently “revolutionary.” It was at this point that the Communist Party named it as one of the yangbanxi, or “The Eight Models of Modern Revolutionary Art”, in hopes that the Chinese proletariat would emulate the virtues of Yang, Xi’er, and her fiancé Dachun, now considered idealized models of revolutionary heroism (Wilkinson 173). Although China is not the only country to provide official models of behavior to influence social practices, it does have an especially long and successful history of establishing moral authority through these means, a fact whichdoubtless helped in ensuring the success of The White-Haired Girl as aninfluential piece of propaganda (Clark 57).
Themes and Style:
The sharp contrast between feudal and modern societies and the meaning of proletariat liberation constitute the central thematic axes of the opera. In line with Mao’s artistic precepts, the play resists cultural imperialism by drawing deliberately from Chinese folk traditions rather than from the modern Western dramas that had begun to influence Chinese theater before the revolution. The White-Haired Girl also undercuts the superstitious beliefs found in those older Chinese folk tales; paper gods, hung by the door of the family house, are supposed to “keep out all devils, great and small”, but they give Xi’er and her father no protection against a systemic evil. Furthermore, the white goddess of the play’s title is exposed by the Communist cadres to be merely another human girl victimized by wealthy men (39). The play constantly foregrounds the corruption, heartlessness, and greed of the feudal class, characterized by the landlord Huang and his mother, who exploit their peasants and torture their house servants. Huang admits to not caring about the poor, offering the conventional assumptions held in a hierarchical society as justification:that “the only way to get rich is at the expense of the poor” and that “the poor, of course, must go cold and hungry, because that’s their destiny, fixed by fate” (Ebon 67). Perhaps the most disturbingfact of this “fate” is that the feudal system, at least as portrayed in the play, allows no avenue of appeal for the wronged peasants, for there can be no justice when the magistrate and district head are “hand in glove with the rich” (58).
In the eyes of the Communist party, the central priority of the play was to show Chinese audiences that, with courage and unity, it is possible to break out of this helpless position. Perhaps the most effective tactic employed by the writers was the grafting of new meanings onto already familiar and beloved literary themes and forms. The original play, of sixteen scenes and five acts, is composed of sung sections alternated with spoken dialogue, a structure already common to Chinese theater, and several themes werefamiliar as well.
While the play begins with simple words and gestures of affection between family members, the language and delivery of the lines grows increasingly anthemic as the play progresses, coalescing, with the arrival of the Eighth Route Army and the day of reckoning, into a collective voice, listing the landlord’s many crimes against the poor: “so much rent you squeezed, so much money too, there’s not counting the tragedies caused by you!” (Ebon 110). This joint voice also celebrates the new future opening up before them: “A new life starts today! Age old feudal bonds today are cut away! We will be our own masters from now on!” (Ebon 117).
Critical Discussion:
Hailed as an immediate success by Chinese audiences, The White-Haired Girl has also been praised by critics for its innovative combination of old and new cultural elements. Communist party representatives, consideringThe White-Haired Girl primarily in terms of its propagandistic effectiveness,initially approved of the play; however, severalresidualcultural elements of old China – such as the helpless suicide of Xi’er’s father and the rape of Xi’er – disturbed some critics, including Comrade Jiang Qing, wife of Mao and a leader figure in the cultural reformation of art and literature. When the play was later revised, many of these “counterrevolutionary” elements were altered to make the characters even more model examples of revolutionary heroism. Meanwhile, in the West, few academic critics had access to The White-Haired Girl for its first thirty years, as is evident from the introduction-style scholarship that did emerge in the early 1970s, such as J. Norman Wilkinson’s “ ‘The White-Haired Girl’: From ‘Yangko’ to Revolutionary Modern Ballet.” Like Wilkinson, many 1970s scholars focused on tracing out the relationship between the modern opera/ballet form and the older cultural themes and forms. Francis K. Hsu, writing in 1977, objects to American art critics’ derision of Chinese theater generally, arguing that their low opinion is largely due to their misunderstanding of Chinese culture (202).
For most critics, the greatest significance of The White-Haired Girl lies in its illustration of what critic Xiaomei Chen calls the “intimate and ironic relationship between theater and politics” (81). Chen’s significant Acting the Right Part: Political Theater and Popular Drama in Contemporary China examines the phenomenon of The White-Haired Girl’s reception history to emphasize the theatricality of public life in China. Chinese critic Meng Yue has demonstrated how the text exemplifies the process by which a new political regime and culture shores up authority by weaving itself into the values and forms of the existing culture. Meng emphasizes The White-Haired Girl as “a multilayered text” that combines both “foreign and indigenous, urban and rural” elements (Chen 82).
The reception history of The White-Haired Girl, and the history of its many permutations over the years, has also prompted much scholarship declaring the opera one of the richest sites for understanding the processes of modernization in China. Recent scholarship pushes back against the popular notion that Communism was the sole arbiter of 20th Century Chinese aesthetics. Paul Clark, examining the Cultural Revolution through the lens of the arts, focuses heavily on formal innovations made by artists during the period, claiming that Chinese model operas played a major role in establishing a new revolutionary culture, rather than merely the inverse. Clark admires the way The White-Haired Girl combines Western dance forms like the ballet with Chinese folk forms, producing a modern, distinctively Chinese performance style.
Sidebar:
Revenge: An Old Plot in New China
Although The White-Haired Girl is characteristic of the innovation and modernization going on in Chinese culture since the 1940s, it owes much of its success to its sourcing of an already popular plot in Chinese folktales: the punishment of the corrupt and wealthyand the avenging of the poor by an intervening force. Before the revolution, this force generally took the shape of a good king, a just official, a supernatural power, or a Robin Hood-type figure. In The White-Haired Girl, the Eighth Route Army arrives in just this way,yet this Communist army empowers the people to rise up and toavenge themselves.
The revolutionary goddess figure also appears frequently in Chinese legend. Martin Ebon points out how, as The White-Haired Girl was adapted over the years in response to political pressures, the characters grow progressively more and more idealized and heroic, so that Hsi’erh eventually becomes more and more like a mythic goddess of folklore - a “Red goddess with white hair” (Ebon 35). Even in the earliest version, she has a fearless quality by the play’s end; despite all she has been through, she has never given up, crying out defiantly, “I’m a fire you’ll never put out! I’m a tree you’ll never uproot!” (Ebon 106).
Works Cited:
Ebon, Martin. Five Chinese Communist Plays. New York, NY: The John Day Company,1975.
Chen, Xiaomei. Acting the Right Part: Political Theater and Popular Drama in Contemporary China. Honolulu: U of Hawaii P, 2002. Print.
Clark, Paul. The Chinese Cultural Revolution: A History. Cambridge, UK: CambridgeUP, 2008.
Wilkinson, J. Norman. “‘The White-Haired Girl’: From ‘Yangko’ to RevolutionaryModern Ballet.”Educational Theatre Journal, Vol. 26, No. 2 (May, 1974).164-174.Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Article Stable URL: JSTOR
Hsu, Francis L.K. “Intercultural Understanding: Genuine and Spurious Author(s).”Anthropology & Education Quarterly, Vol. 8, No. 4 (Nov., 1977). 202-209 Published by: Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the American Anthropological Association Stable URL: 15/08/2012 21:21
Further Reading:
Du, Mingxin. The Red Detachment of Women. Ed. Martin Ebon.Five ChineseCommunist Plays. New York, NY: The John Day Company, 1975.
Grasso, June, Jay Corrin, and Michael Kort. Modernization and Revolution in China.Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1991.
Marchetti, Gina. “Two Stage Sisters: The Blossoming of a Revolutionary Aesthetic.”Jump Cut, no. 34, March, 1989. 95-106
Roberts, Rosemary A. (2009). “Maoist Women Warriors: Historical Continuities and Cultural Transgressions.” In Tao Dongfeng, Yang Xiaobin, Roberts, Rosemary A.and Yang Ling (Ed.), Chinese Revolution and Chinese Literature (pp. 139-162)Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009.
Sun-Childers, Jaia, and Douglas Childers. The White Haired Girl. New York, NY:Picador USA/St. Martin's Press,1996.
Tillman Durdin, "Popular Ballet is Reminiscent of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'," The New York Times Report from Red China (New York, 1971), p. 325.