Love, Betrayal, and Death: Reading East-West Crossings in Men’s Cross-Dressing Performances of Tragic Heroines

Introduction[1]

As Oscar Wilde once wrote, “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life” (33). Theater mediates imagination and reality, as actors and spectators wittingly or unwittingly turn fictionalized stories into real-life performances. Chinese director Chen Kaige’s (陳凱歌, b. 1952) 1993 film, Farewell My Concubine, and American playwright, David Henry Hwang’s (b. 1957), 1988 play, M. Butterfly, stage the intertwining and crossing of Eastern and Western theatrical traditions, cultures, and histories. Both works feature men’s cross-dressing performances of tragic female characters, manipulating the aesthetic traditions of Peking opera and 19th-century European romantic opera and reflecting thereby on their relationships to others in life. The layered entanglement of art and life, contextualized in the turbulence of 20th-century history, reveals situations of irony in the lives of ordinary people caught at the turning points of history.

Adapted from the 1988 novel by Li Bihua (李碧華, b. 1959), Chen’s Farewell narrates the life of two Chinese Peking opera artists, Cheng Dieyi (程蝶衣) and Duan Xiaolou (段小樓), from their boyhood in the 1920s to their old age in the 1970s. In accordance with the practice of only using male performers in the tradition of Peking opera until the early 1920s, Cheng was trained to play the female role of dan (旦) and Duan was trained in the male role of sheng (生). Known for their exquisite performance of the historical play, Farewell My Concubine (to avoid confusion I will hereafter refer to the play—as opposed to the modern film—by its Chinese title, Bawang bieji), Cheng performs the tragic role of the concubine Yu (Yu Ji 虞姬) while his partner Duan, acts as the King of Chu ( Chu bawang 楚霸王). [2] Although the workings of classical Chinese music drama emphasize that theater is “not to be confused with normal reality” because “what they enact and behold is consciously made” (Yan 67), Chen’s film complicates this tradition by displaying two artists’ lives filtered through and mediated by theatrical performances. Over decades, Cheng repeats aspects of the relationship between Yu and Chu onstage in his relationship to Duan offstage. Whereas Cheng, the infatuated aesthete, indulges in the theatrical illusion mingled with his clandestine affection for Duan, the latter is a realistic materialist whose decisions repetitively disappoint Cheng by conforming to the pressures of reality. The film plots these betrayals against the course of twentieth-century Chinese history, amplifying the significance of individual tensions as characters resist or yield to collective interests.

Entwined with Giacomo Puccini’s oriental-themed opera,Madama Butterfly, the American playwright, David Henry Hwang’s,M. Butterfly also embeds a play within a play. [3] Cio-Cio-San’s tragic suicide for love repeats a pattern in 19th-century European romantic opera, in which, according to a noted critic, “on the stage women perpetually sing their eternal undoing” and “from the moment these women leave their familiar and ornamental function, they end up punished—fallen, abandoned, or dead” (Clément 5-7). Hwang’s play, however, aims not to revive Puccini’s orientalist fantasy of Western men’s dominance over Asian women, but rather to explore the underestimated potential of the East to manipulate, deceive, and even destroy the West by telling the story of the French diplomat René Gallimard, who falls in love with a female Chinese opera singer, Song Liling, who turns out to be a male spy sent by the Chinese government. Song’s fraudulent performance as a powerless Chinese woman beguiles Gallimard, persuading him that she is his fragile, harmless “Butterfly,” though Song’s real purpose is to steal military intelligence on the Vietnam War. Song masterfully moves between different theatrical aesthetics and takes advantage of Western preconceptions regarding the East to disarm Gallimard, who naively underestimates the East. Shaken by the truth, Gallimard transforms into the tragic Butterfly by committing his own operatic suicide at the end of the play.

Chen and Hwang display cultural and historical crossings that reflect the tensions between their characters’ personal and national interests and recontextualize their cross-dressing performances. In resistance or conformity to collective pressures, these ordinary people resonate with operatic heroines and their tragedies in culturally and historically significant ways that reveal the irony of their lives brought about by their entanglement in historical events beyond their control. In Farewell, the plot traces regime changes from the Republic of China to the post-Mao era. Cheng, like Yu, refuses to conform to the “new king”—the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—with its ideological promotion of a patriotic, socialist-realist theater and its defamation of traditional Peking opera. He is therefore persecuted and assaulted during the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, whereas Duan, the “disgraced king,” yields to the Party at the expense of betraying Cheng and Peking opera. In M . Butterfly, the final twist of Gallimard’s transformation implies not merely a reversal of East-West power dynamic, but also how his misperception of the “Oriental” leads to his downfall. On the historical level allegorized by the play, Gallimard’s misreading of Song parallels the West’s underestimation of the East during the Vietnam War. Nonetheless, Song’s complex situation as a puppet of national politics also casts doubt on his seeming victory—isn’t he also a tragic victim depersonalized by governmental authority and therefore lacking agency in his own life?

Theatrical Crossings in Men’s Cross-dressing Performances of Tragic Heroines

In Farewell My Concubine, Cheng plays with the tragic role of the virtuous woman (lienü 烈女), embodied by Yu in the historical play of the same name. [4] In M. Butterfly, on the other hand, Song plays the European operatic heroine, rendered Asian in the form of Cio-Cio-San in Madama Butterfly, refracted through the practices of Peking opera. In both works, the twists of the male characters’ real-life relationships are entwined with Euro-American and Chinese operatic motifs as a cause but also as an effect of the crossing of theatrical traditions, revealing personal illusions that contradict reality. In the film, Cheng’s obsession with Yu’s figure and his unchanged loyalty to Peking opera allow him to cling to the illusion of Duan’s love, which remains absent from his real life. In Hwang’s play Song’s misleading yet successful performance of an inferior Asian Butterfly enables him to accomplish the goals assigned to him by his country. In both works, the crossdressing male actors manipulate theatrical female roles to mediate their relationships and achieve their goals.

The techniques, aesthetics, and modes of expression in Chinese and Euro-American theatrical traditions vary dramatically. Widely known for its highly stylized singing, dancing, and martial arts, the classical Chinese music theater also “privilege[s] stylized modes of expression over psychological realism,” thus having “little reference to individual subjective well-being or the inner emotive state” (Lee 2). Modern film or drama in the West “striv[es] for natural representation,” but Peking opera operates according to the “premodern presentational mode [in which] emotion is communicated sartorially, gesturally and vocally according to prescribed and shared codes” (4). Although the presentational and over-exaggerated performing style of Peking opera is not realist, Cheng and Hwang’s works manifest how it operates with “prescribed and shared codes” that obtain both on-stage and off-stage in men’s crossdressing performances to manipulate given realities. In light of this, Peking opera may still retain the power to shape actors’ and audiences’ behavior, communication, and even lives based on how they recognize, interpret, and register these codes. For instance, in terms of individuals’ relationships in imperial China, such older codes would refer to the Confucian five relationships (wulun 五伦), based on the core values of fidelity and patriarchy— relationships of ruler and subject, father and son, husband and wife, elder brother and younger brother, friend and friend. However, as China confronted modernization and reformation in the Republican period (1912-1949) and the PRC era (1949 onwards), these codes, once valued by Chinese culture and society, were discarded.

Set in a long historical timeline, the film Farewell takes the complex figure of Cheng and his Peking opera performances as a device to illumine the gap between imperial and modern China. Both Cheng’s life and art suffer from sociopolitical factors during the 20th-century modernization of China, which had as a goal the eradication of the prescribed and shared codes of traditional Chinese culture, theatrical aesthetics, and political ideology. During this process, Cheng becomes an ambiguous embodiment of conservatism and subversiveness. On the one hand, he manifests his conservatism by remaining loyal to Duan and Peking opera throughout his life, paying homage to Yu’s fidelity to King Chu in the play. On the other hand, he is a subversive figure who challenges and complicates the framework of the five traditional relationships by mingling three of them. Growing up together as “fellow apprentices (shi xiongdi 师兄弟),” Cheng is Duan’s younger apprentice-brother (shidi 師弟). When acting as the tragic heroine, Yu, on stage, he serves as the wife of King Chu as well as his subject. In reality, he is a close friend of Duan but also wishes to be his wife. This disordered intertwining of various relationships demonstrates his composite aching for Duan’s love, which is the source of his suffering. As Cheng preserves and articulates older shared and prescribed codes to resist sociocultural assaults and collective pressures, his figure embodies China in its transition to the modern era.

Lee argues that in contradistinction to Peking opera’s presentational performance, modern Western theater aims to produce performances “under the imperatives of realism and authenticity” (6), favoring more naturalized and realistic performances to genuinely reflect character’s psychological interiority. But the rising ascendancy of representational performance risks stunting the audience’s “ability to respond to the emotional suggestiveness of traditional theater,” which leads to the loss of a self-conscious sense of theatricality (8). Moreover, Lee follows Seligman et al.’s argument that the over-emphasis on sincerity “can dangerously undermine our capacity for imaginatively negotiating the inescapable boundaries of our social existence and leads us on a utopian quest for purity (...) whereby boundaries (and social differences) either harden so as to be impermeable or are willfully denied out of existence” (13). Therefore, a modern Western spectator’s expectation of realistic acting can be misleadingly fatal when encountering the exaggeration and abstractness of classical Chinese music drama. Peking opera’s acting depends on “how skillfully the actor animates [shared cultural] codes to reach the audience effectively” and is not the “exteriorization of the actor’s psychological or emotional state” (4). The quality of “suppositionality” is essential since both actors and audiences recognize “what they enact and behold is consciously made” and is “not to be confused with normal reality” (Yan 67). In M. Butterfly, Gallimard’s inability to recognize the Chinese cultural codes in Song’s cross-dressing performance, as refracted through Peking opera aesthetics, prefigures the Western audience’s similar failure. His ignorance thus ironically co-authors Song’s performance. These codes are “felt, imagined, and inhabited by both performers and audiences” for disparate ends—Song utilizes them to fabricate lies whereas Gallimard mistakes them as truths (86).

With men’s cross-dressing performances filtered and mediated by estranged operatic motifs, both Farewell and M. Butterfly, by complicating and intertwining different theatrical aesthetics, reveal how these male actor-characters take advantage of theater to reconfigure their positions in relationships vis-à-vis others and their given realities. Moving from on-stage to off-stage acting, from theatrical roles to real-life identities, the entanglement of theater and life produces a space for illusory love, self-indulgence, and deception to fulfill characters’ public duties and private needs. While both actors’ flexible acting intertwines theatrical traditions and aesthetics, certain formulations are de facto preserved by their audience’s reaction—either belief in or disillusion with operatic fantasies—which co-authors and completes the performances.

Farewell centers on depicting the characters’ various performances of theater and social relationships, while demonstrating their essential entanglement. On a personal level, Western realistic depiction of Cheng’s psychic space complements the lack of authenticity in stylistically exaggerated Peking opera performances. This hybridity becomes an embodiment of the East-West theatrical crossing. On a theatrical level, the film utilizes the theatrical tragedy of Concubine Yu and King Chu as a lens filtering the complex relationship of Cheng and Duan. However, Concubine Yu’s double roles—as concubine and subject to the King—enrich and differentiate her from a stereotypical, fragile female figure enclosed by the domestic sphere. Having participated in and witnessed warfare, she is capable of fighting in the battlefield and offering military advice to her master. Her final suicide aims to preserve her loyalty and fidelity to King Chu and complicates the play by moving it beyond the category of sheer tragic romance. Likewise, it is inadequate to generalize Cheng’s affection for Duan as homosexual love. Rather, his relationship with Duan mingles with three of the Confucian five relationships. Moreover, the play’s parallels to and mismatches with historical reality imbricate Cheng’s attachment to Duan with the twists and ironies of twentieth-century Chinese history.

For example, Duan’s engagement to the prostitute Ju Xian marks his betrayal of Cheng, creating a satirical mismatch to the original play and revealing the ethical lessons they learned from operatic librettos that shaped their values. Mackerras states that “Peking Opera[s] were a, or even the, major way that ordinary Chinese learned about the past of their own country” (21). Given that the fictionalized plots oftentimes highlight moral ideologies valued by traditional Chinese society, it is not surprising that theater has traditionally served to educate the illiterate public. The first lesson, according to their teacher, Master Guan (Guan shifu 關師傅), is that “Each person is responsible for his or her own fate” (30:10-30:15). The second is that Yu’s fidelity pays homage to the Chinese cultural value of remaining faithful to one’s spouse unto death. Whereas the infatuated Cheng upholds these beliefs by preserving his fidelity to Duan throughout his life, his partner never takes them seriously, as he admits to Cheng: “I’m a fake king, but you’re the real concubine” (1:07:16-1:07:21). His pragmatic take on Peking opera as a mere tool for making a living and his decision to marry Ju Xian—the phony concubine—dismantles the dramatic illusions in his bond to Cheng, foredooming the latter’s tragedy as the real Yu. Enraged and disappointed, Cheng nonetheless keeps a prior promise and visits Mr. Yuan, a declined aristocrat known for his expertise in Peking opera. Yuan intends to patronize Cheng after being moved by his exquisite performance. Accidentally, among the treasures in Yuan’s collection, Cheng finds a sword he and Duan once saw as adolescents in the Qing imperial eunuch Zhang’s mansion. The sword immediately reminds him of the childish promises they made to each other when encountering it for the first time:

Duan: King Chu would have won with this sword to kill Liu Bang. If I were the new emperor, you’d be the queen.
Cheng: Someday, I’ll definitely give it to you as a present.
The Proprietor of the Pear Garden: Be careful, my little lords. It is a real sword! (36:39-36:55)5 [5]
段： “霸王要是有這把劍，早就把劉邦給宰了，當上了皇上，你就是正宫娘娘了。”
程： “師弟，我準送你這把劍。”
戏园老板： “戲园老板：“哎喲，當心點，我的小爺儿，這可是把真傢伙。”

Their casual comments on the sword are, in fact, promises made to be shattered by the insurmountable gap between a theatrical paradise and a materialistic world. Whereas Duan playfully promises to make Cheng his queen if he obtains the sword, Cheng takes it as a prophetic truth and in return promises to give him the sword as a gift one day to actualize the promise. This actualization would guarantee a satisfying end for the theatrical couple by substituting a happy ending for their tragic deaths and also fulfill Cheng’s wish to make his bond with Duan eternal. Even in his early adolescence, the power of theater has already permeated Cheng’s life and mode of thinking. The proprietor’s emphasis on the sword’s reality reminds us of its substantiality and capacity to inflict real harm on people, emphasizing that this sword will never be a prop on stage and denying it entry into the theatrical world. Cheng, however, sees the sword only in its role as an emblem of Duan’s promise. He sees only its theatricality. His point of view, in contrast with that of the proprietor, reveals the discrepancy between theater and life and foreshadows the failure of Duan’s promise.

When Cheng re-encounters the sword in his adulthood, the promised future has already been destroyed by Duan’s marriage. Cheng performs Yu’s famous suicide scene in Yuan’s backyard. Dressed in ordinary clothing, he sings the aria casually: “Since the King has lost his spirit, why should his humble concubine value her life?” (1:10:19-1:11:00) No doubt, Yu’s rhetorical question echoes his current misery and mocks the King-Concubine analogy twisted by Duan’s marriage. In the play, when Chu is on the verge of total defeat by Liu’s forces, he commands Yu to leave, for he cherishes her too much to witness her dying, but Duan’s lack of King Chu’s dignity, responsibility, and noble demeanor highlights that he is only a “fake king” and leads to Cheng’s real tragedy.

When Cheng pulls out the sword to perform Yu’s suicide, Yuan’s considerate interruption—“Don’t! It’s a real sword!” (1:11:04-1:11:11)—once again reminds Cheng of the failure of Duan’s promise. Once the symbol of a promising future, the sword now penetrates Cheng’s theatrical fantasy and illusory hope—even with this sword, they cannot retrieve their past. Although the sword does not do substantial harm to Cheng, it does shatter the promise sustaining his life by revealing the truth that theater is not to be confused with reality. The moment Cheng drops the sword detaches him from the operatic illusion and sends him back to his real life. Just as King Chu vanished with Duan’s betrayal, so too the faithful concubine Yu dies when the split between reality and theater can no longer be denied.

Earlier in the film, Duan had wondered whether Cheng’s morbid obsession with theater would eventually ruin his life: “It is true that theatrical performance needs actors’ passionate devotion. But if we carry that over into our everyday life, how can we live as ordinary people?” (59:26-59:38). However, it is precisely because Cheng lives his theatrical role into his everyday life that his performance is uniquely exquisite. By inscribing personal tragedy into his theatrical performances, Cheng enriches not only his tragic female roles but also the depth of his own artistic life.

In M. Butterfly, as in Farewell, the crossing of theatrical traditions and of theater with reality, is demonstrated through a cross-dressing performance—in this case that of the female-impersonator Song—that blends Chinese and Euro-American theatrical aesthetics to delude and manipulate the French diplomat Gallimard. Song’s deceptive acting as a powerless Chinese woman fulfills Gallimard’s Orientalist fantasy and fabricates an illusion of his triumph over the East. Gallimard wishes to parallel Pinkerton in his “conquest” of Cio-Cio-San in Puccini’s opera, and Song’s deception could not have succeeded without Gallimard co-authoring it through his misreading of the Chinese theatrical aesthetics registered in Song’s acting. Unable to decipher Chinese cultural codes, Gallimard misinterprets Song’s over-exaggerated acting, especially her overly dramatized, unnatural reactions, as Orientalist truth. The Chinese actor makes strategic use of his French audience’s assumption of the realistic and naturalized acting used in modern European theater to deceive him with a Chinese counterfeit. In the process, the once underestimated Asian heroine is revived to prevail over her Western male rival and subvert the assumed power dynamics between East and West.

When Gallimard pays his first visit to Song’s apartment, the opera singer intentionally “reveals” her feminine, conservative interiority to convince him that she is—like the Western stereotype of a desirable Asian woman—shy, modest, and meek. To show a division between her audacious behavior (body) and conservative thought (mind), Song pretends to struggle with the irreconcilable tension between her Chinese interiority rooted in Chinese culture and ethics and the Western shell obtained from her operatic performance and exotic outfit. The self-contradiction revealed by the “accidental” display of her Chinese psyche is pre-planned to enhance her credibility.

Song begins by admitting her concern to Gallimard, saying, “I don’t even know why I invited you up (...) There is an element of danger to your presence” (Hwang 29). Her doubt demonstrates that her bold invitation conflicts with her conservative ideals. Inviting a white man to her house is courageous, but her uncertainty and fear regarding her Western guest still linger. Since Chinese society prohibits unmarried women from dating men alone, Song acts as if she were anxious with Gallimard—as if deep inside her still lives a “traditional” Chinese woman forever incompatible with a “modern” Westerner. When Gallimard excitedly presses Song to admit her love for him, saying, “We both know why I’m here,” she replies, “I am slightly afraid of scandal” (29). Song’s concern for the potential damage to her public reputation implies that her thinking is still fundamentally dominated by the restrictions placed on women that make her internally Chinese. When pouring tea for Gallimard, she comments that “France is a country living in the modern era” whereas “China is a nation whose soul is firmly rooted (...) in the past” (30). By contrasting the ancient, underdeveloped China with the modern, advanced France, she purposefully highlights the East’s inferiority, in parallel to her mismatched actions and thoughts.

Song’s notably unnatural performance overemphasizes the flaws of Asian women “sartorially, gesturally and vocally” by degrading herself to Gallimard to enact the West’s superiority over the East. Dating back to the first night when Gallimard watches Song performing Butterfly’s operatic suicide in the German ambassador’s house, he comments on her feeble voice: “here was a Butterfly with little or no voice (...) [but] I believe her suffering. I wanted to take her in my arms—so delicate, even I could protect her” (15-16). While Song’s voice is unqualified compared to a Western soprano, Gallimard values it as the manifestation of Asian femininity and delicacy that makes her a more authentic Butterfly compared to those “huge [Western] women in bad make-up” (16). By contrast, the sexually aggressive French girl Isabelle— Gallimard’s first sexual partner—used to take the masculine lead during their sexual intercourse. He recollects how, during sex, “she was on [him]” and “[his] arms were pinned to the dirt” (33). Song’s fragility enables the womanish Frenchman to regain his virile confidence by convincing him that “even [he] could protect her.”

Besides exposing her backward Chinese mentality to set off the West’s superiority, Song further develops her fraud as she compares herself in a Western dress to the prettier European women, reaffirming her own inferiority.

Song: Even my own heart, strapped inside this Western dress (...)
Gallimard: This is a beautiful dress.
Song: Don’t.
Gallimard: What?
Song: I don’t even know if it looks right on me.
Gallimard: Believe me—
Song: You are from France. You see so many beautiful women.
Gallimard: France? Since when are the European women—? (30)

What is “strapped inside this Western dress” is Song’s unchanged Chineseness. Her rhetorical question—“if it looks right on [her]”—reveals that to an Asian woman, wearing a Western dress would not necessarily Westernize her interiority, where there still lives a timid, modest Chinese woman. Feeling inadequate and diffident, Song denies Gallimard’s compliment and instead praises French women whose beauty undoubtedly exceeds hers. The Chinese actor’s parody reaches its climax, empowering Gallimard by simulating the tragic Asian heroine’s inescapable fate of being defeated by the superior West. At the same time, Song deliberately acknowledges the insurmountable gap between an Asian butterfly and a Western woman: “Hard as I try to be modern, to speak like a man, to hold a Western woman’s strong face up to my own (...) in the end, I fail (...) I’m a Chinese girl” (31). By confessing her failure—a parodic imitation of Western women—Song reassures Gallimard of the modern West’s triumph over the ancient East. Only through this fabricated victory can Gallimard reattain his masculinity and realize his illusory dominance over women, a dominance which differentiates Song from the undesirable Western females and encourages him to trust her more. When the empowered Frenchman refuses to leave her apartment, Song pretends to be irritated, exclaiming, “You are a cad” (31). But Gallimard’s spontaneous response—“What do you expect? I’m a foreign devil” (31)—effectively transforms him into the womanizing Pinkerton, capable of pinning his Butterfly down with his Oriental fantasy fulfilled by prevailing over the East. Now able to regard himself as a “foreign devil,” Gallimard is fully convinced by Song’s exquisite performance. Beguiled by the false belief that “she feels inferior to ‘Western women’—and to me,” (31) he fails to realize that the actual victory goes to the Chinese actor and his counterfeit Butterfly.

Cultural and Historical Crossings in Individuals’ Real-life and Theatrical Tragedies

In the context of both Chinese history and the history of East-West relations in the 20th century, the male actor-characters’ cross-dressing performances reveal how individuals, as puppets of domestic and international politics, empathize with operatic heroines and their tragedies in culturally and historically significant ways. By revealing ironies in individuals’ responses to personal and national politics, their stories of suspected betrayals and deaths involve cultural translation and embody historical allegories. The cultural critic Rey Chow argues in her book, Primitive Passions, that contemporary Chinese cinema is not just “a kind of postmodern self-writing or autoethnography” but “a form of intercultural translation in the postcolonial age” (11). It neither enacts the presentational authenticity of classical Chinese drama nor simply caters to Western taste through self-exoticization. Rather, it is “a culture-collecting” (26) during which female characters serve as “the brilliant arcade, through which ‘China’ travels across cultures to unfamiliar audiences” (202). Chow’s concept of “culture-collecting” is realized as cultural and historical crossings in Chen’s Chinese film and Hwang’s Western play. Such crossings are not applicable only to China—or “the East”—but also to France and America—“the West.” While ordinary individuals caught in the sweep of historical moments are used as puppets by national interests, they also try to resist such external forces. By performing distinct types of operatic heroines, individuals like Cheng and Gallimard preserve their subjective desires while confronting collective pressures within domestic and global politics. The cultural connotations of tragic female roles, allegorized by personal and national history, serve as a device to channel East and West, facilitating the cultural traffic evoked by the male actor-characters’ suspected betrayals and deaths.