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Sonny Ling and Sissy George are in Beijing. He's a hotshot
pianist teaching at the Central Conservatory of Music. She's a gutsy
nightclub singer. It's the political spring of 1989 but behind the walls of
the Conservatory Madame Zhou rules. While their friends struggle to keep
their humanity, Sonny and Sissy give the performances of their lives in a
Chinese drama played out to the accompaniment of Bizet's Carmen.
Critics Comments
"An American goes to his
ancestral land, China, and confronts the strangenesses there. What
life after revolution? After many revolutions? Alex Kuo helps us hear
the music that strangers play to strangers, and a free individual
plays to society."
Maxine Hong
Kingston
"When I hear music these
days, I think of Alex Kuo's Chinese Opera, a passionate novel about
the silent spaces between chords and the silent spaces between people,
and our mad rush to fill those spaces with love, hope, sex, and
dreams. There are passages of this book so beautiful, humorous, and
confident that it makes me jealous. This is a book I wished I'd
written."
Sherman
Alexis
"Chinese Opera strikes the
heart, what good fiction should do."
Luisa
Valenzuela
"Alex Kuo has done it
again, a novel by one of America's best writers."
Ishmael Reed
"This is an intriguing, brief novel set in Beijing
just before and during the Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989. At 131
pages (really only about 100 pages of text), it is more of a novella
than a full-blown novel and, as such, warrants the careful attention
one would employ in reading a long poem. Kuo, a lifelong poet and
precise craftsman, not only pays attention to details, he relies on
them.
"The story presents two American performing artists
who find themselves in a society that is hungry for genuine artistic
expression, but which is governed by a caste that is suspicious of
democracy in general and unfettered creativity in particular. The
dramatic question that Chinese Opera poses is not a new one: How do
artists functioning under threatening and potentially fatal restraints
remain true to their art and to themselves? The answer s that they
must continue to exercise artistic freedom but on a subtle, almost
arcane intellectual level that will gratify the Chinese intelligentsia
while confounding the totalitarian regime. Hence the need for the
reader to pay attention.
"The novel opens with Sissy George, an
American-Indian jazz singer (you can't get much more American than
that) on her way to Beijing to spend a holiday with her
Chinese-American lover, Sonny Ling, who's teaching classical piano at
the conservatory there. Early on in a flashback, we are told of
Sissy's search for her father and of their almost mystical
unification. After we are introduced to Sonny, there is a temptation
to assume that this is another "roots" book and that Sonny has gone to
China to discover his ancestors and, in turn, himself, paralleling
Sissy and her father. Not so. Though Sonny is curious about China,
another character correctly concludes that he is in China only 'to get
a feel for the country of his parents'.
"What Sonny and Sissy get is an education on how the
artist in China or in any repressive setting must learn to make do.
And they learn this lesson from two strong Chinese women, Zheng
Xiaomei, the internationally known director of the opera, and Madame
Zhou, chair of the Music Department at the conservatory. Zhou informs
Sonny that "We Chinese have learned to do with what we have, not
bemoan what we have lost or what we don't have." Sonny learns this
quickly because, I think, a solo classical musician is already hemmed
in by classical form. If classical artists are to rise above the
ordinary, they must do so by singular performances or interpretation
of the existing music and by the selection of particular music to
perform.
"Director Xiaomei persuades Sissy to sing the lead
in Bizet's Carmen, and she accepts in part because this music affords
her some of the freedom of the jazz singer she is. The crowning
highlight of Sonny's stint at the conservatory is his piano recital.
He projects freedom by means of his singular playing but also by the
three uninterrupted pieces he chooses to perform -- successes of
restrained freedom over censorship, of artists over the system, and of
non-European Americans over cliché and stereotypes.
"There are a number of
other characters of note, some of whom are (pardon the pun) red
herrings. However, two Chinese men are inspired by the two Americans'
musical performances to rebel in their own separate ways and thus
contribute to the events at Tiananmen Square. Chinese Opera
successfully dramatizes how artists can, with intelligence and
resolve, turn a little artistic freedom into meaningful measures
against a minatory regime. Alex Kuo's attenuated novel, like the
musical performances it contains, instructs, entertains, and
inspires."
James
Grinnell
The Bloomsbury Review
November/December 1999
"Kuo gave himself an ambitious task, setting his
story of an American-Chinese exploring his cultural roots against one
of the most vivid historical backdrops of the century. Over several
months, he and his girlfriend build up to their grand performances of
Western classical music and opera. Added to this are the stories of
the reporter who can only tell the truth through fiction, local
artists, and the professor returned from self-imposed exile in
Australia.
"The story tries to show
its characters' complex feelings about their exile from the
motherland. Sony's identity crisis is interestingly contrasted to
Sissy's, who finally meets the native American who fathered her in the
back of a pick-up truck 39 years ago. through their gentle encounter,
she finds a more stable peace denied to Sonny."
Katherine
Forestier
South China Morning Post
"In one of several stories woven into Alex Kuo's
intricately orchestrated Chinese Opera, we hear of a woman on the
brink of suicide, clinging by her fingertips to a 13th-floor ledge of
the Bank of China.
"Approaching the scene, a psychiatrist is told that
one spectator, `a tall dark-skinned woman with a music case,' thinks
the woman on the ledge has been there `four thousand years' -- for all
of Chinese history. Trying to talk her out of suicide, the
psychiatrist offers her the story of women throughout the world who
for centuries have protested against oppression, looking after our
promises. When asked to consider these promises as well as her own to
herself, the woman on the brink asks the psychiatrist to consider
changing places with her. We aren't given his response.
"Kuo's novel as a whole asks us to hear the story of
those who have survived through the story, to imagine ourselves in
their precarious place. The forces of history threaten survival;
official history and official news can't be trusted. And not only in
China.
"Though set in Beijing in the winter and spring of
1989, the Year of the Snake and of the Tien'anmen Square massacre, the
novel comes as close to home as the Wanapum Dam, which obliterated the
place by the Columbia River where Sissy George, one of the central
characters, was conceived. George has successfully recovered her
tribe's stories from her father and so is equipped to help others
escape obliteration and preserve their stories and their lives as the
massacre that reminds her of Wounded Knee unfolds. Resembling the
tall, dark-skinned woman with the music case noted in the first
paragraph, Sissy George knows her history.
"George, a jazz musician, is in Beijing to visit her
lover, Sonny Ling, a pianist and music teacher. Ling came to Chine in
part to recover portions of his story and identity lost when his
parents fled China for the United States in 1946 as the Communist
Party was gaining control. While he fails to learn much about his
past, he succeeds in expressing himself in a concert that is also an
encouragement to the Chinese to assert their talent and individuality.
Not that the Chinese are portrayed here as passive and in need of
lessons in artistic courage from Americans. Sonny finds a father
figure in the woman who heads the music conservatory, while Sissy
finds a sister figure in a famous woman conductor. Both these Chinese
women are masters in the art of surviving and in effecting the
survival of art and others through hostile times.
"Those who know Kuo, a Washington State University
professor and Pullman resident, may find an autobiographical strand in
this tale of art and survival. Those familiar with Kuo's earlier work
may be surprised at the immediate accessibility of Chinese Opera.
"At first, it seems like it
might have the too-easily understood linear plot of the popular
fiction critiqued at one point in the novel. But as intricacies
increase, stories fold within stories, and dreams arise as prose
poems, we know we are hearing rich opera from an artist who plays
without compromise."
Walter
Hesford
Pullman-Moscow Daily News, Idaho
Readers Comments
Extract
Copyright © Alex Kuo
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