The Moon Opera (2 page)

Li Xuefen clasped her hands to her chest, and from there to her head. “What did I forget?” she asked anxiously.

Xiao Yanqiu took her time to reply. “A pair of straw sandals and a pistol,” she said at last.

At first everyone was lost, but they, as well as Li Xuefen, soon realized what was happening. This time the upstart had gone too far. Just because she saw the world immodestly was no reason to speak that way. Still smiling, she gazed at Xuefen, watching her passion slowly cool.

“What about you? What kind of Chang’e are you? A bad luck woman, a seductress, a nymphomaniac! Imprisoned on the moon and unable to sell her goods!” Xuefen rose up on her toes, the heat of passion returning.

Now it was Xiao Yanqiu’s turn to cool off. A north wind blew from her nostrils, and snowflakes swirled in her eyes, as if she had been struck by something. A stagehand walked up with a mug of hot water for Li Xuefen to warm her hands. Xiao Yanqiu reached out, took the mug from him, and flung the water in Li Xuefen’s face.

Backstage was suddenly a hornets’ nest. Xiao Yanqiu stood watching with a dazed look as figures darted back and forth, her ears assailed by the chaotic clatter of footsteps. Feet pounded the floor, running from backstage to the hallway, and from there to somewhere outside, where footfalls were replaced by the starting of a car engine. Then she was alone, the abandoned hallway a road to the moon, it seemed. After standing there bewildered for a long moment, she walked down the lonely hallway to her dressing room, where she stood in front of the mirror and, with a startled look, stared at her reflection. Only now did she comprehend what she had done. Gazing absently at her hands, she sat down on the dressing room stool.

Just how hot the water had been no longer mattered. As always, the nature of the act determined the degree of its severity. Xiao Yanqiu’s stalwart supporter, the old troupe leader, was so angry his head looked like it might explode. Wagging two fingers a scant few inches from Xiao Yanqiu’s nose, he sputtered, “You, you, you, you you you you you, why you little!” Words failed him, and he was forced to revert to lines from the operatic repertoire: “You must not forsake your conscience. If fame and fortune cloud your heart, jealousy will bring you to grief.”

“That’s not what it was,” Xiao Yanqiu said.

“Then what was it?”

“Not that,” she said through her tears.

The old troupe leader pounded the table. “Then what was it?”

“I mean it. That’s not what it was.”

Xiao Yanqiu left the stage.

The principal portrayer of Chang’e was demoted to the position of a teacher in the drama academy; her understudy lay in a hospital ward.
The Moon Opera
closed for the second time. “Buds appear and die in a frost, plum blossoms fall before hailstones.”

Fortune did not favor
The Moon Opera
.

W
ho could have predicted that
The Moon Opera
would find a patron, its own
bodhisattva
?

The costume money finally arrived.

Qiao Bingzhang had been weighted down with worries, waiting for days. Without the tobacco factory money,
The Moon Opera
would be nothing more than the moon in the water. Truth is, he had only been waiting eleven days, but to him it seemed like an eternity. As he was waiting, he discovered that while the amount of money was important, so too was how long it took to get there. These days that thing called money was getting stranger all the time.

At the preliminary troupe meeting Bingzhang was surprised by the extent of opposition to Xiao Yanqiu returning to the stage; they had reached an impasse, unable to move beyond this single issue. He spun his ballpoint pen as he listened to the people around the table. Finally, he flipped the pen onto the table, leaned back in his chair, and, with a smile, said, “Ease off a bit, can’t we? The man asked for her by name. There’s nothing shameful in letting money call the shots these days.” A heavy silence settled over the conference room. No one spoke, and while that could have been interpreted as a sign of opposition, at least it left room for compromise. Li Xuefen had left the troupe to open a hotel, which was fortunate, as her singing style was something Bingzhang could not have borne. The others held their tongue; they didn’t say yes, they didn’t say no. Sometimes, of course, silence means consent, so Bingzhang decided to test the waters: “I guess that’s settled then,” he mumbled vaguely.

But then the problematic issue of who would be the understudy surfaced. Being an understudy to a star was never considered desirable, but especially if that star was Xiao Yanqiu. It was left to old Gao to come up with a workable solution, which was to let Xiao Yanqiu choose her understudy from among her own students. No matter how jealous, how fixated she was on fame and fortune, she surely wouldn’t fight over a role with her own students. On this point there was agreement. But what old Gao said next threw Bingzhang into a state of anxiety. “I think we’re wasting our breath,” he said. “It’s been twenty years, and Yanqiu is a forty-year-old woman. Could she still have the voice it takes? I, for one, doubt it.”

Why didn’t I think of that? Bingzhang reproached himself silently. Twenty years, that is how long it had been. Twenty years, and in that time even the best steel will rust through. Bingzhang muffled a sigh. The meeting had been going on for nearly two hours, all tied up with Xiao Yanqiu, and nothing had been resolved. A preparatory meeting. Anything but! More like a look back at the past. When they didn’t have the money, money was all they thought about. Now that the money had arrived, no one knew how to spend it. There was more to this money than the length of time it had taken to get there, for it was inextricably linked to the past. Indeed, that thing called money was getting very strange.

Bingzhang needed to hear Xiao Yanqiu sing; otherwise, he might as well use the factory money to make firecrackers and at least get a few loud bangs out of it.

She came to the conference room at the appointed time and sat down, and he immediately realized he’d made a miscalculation; with just the two of them in an otherwise empty conference room, him at one end of a long, oval table and her at the other, it felt much too formal. She had put on weight, but was as frosty and aloof as ever, emitting coldness like an air conditioner. He’d intended to talk first about
The Moon Opera
, which for her, he belatedly recalled, was and always had been an open wound; now he had no idea what to say.

To some degree, Bingzhang was afraid of Xiao Yanqiu, although in point of fact he was a generation older than she. But her temper was justifiably famous. She could seem as formless as water, giving the impression that she would meekly submit to oppression and abuse. But if you were careless enough to actually come up against her, she would turn frosty in the proverbial blink of an eye, and was capable of bringing things to a shattering conclusion through sudden and reckless actions. That is why the dining hall workers at the drama school all said, “We chefs use salad oil whenever we cook, and we avoid Xiao Yanqiu by hook or by crook.”

Not knowing how to broach the subject at hand, Bingzhang beat around the bush, one moment asking how things were going for her and the next asking about her teaching and students. He even brought up the weather. All of it meaningless chatter. After a few minutes, she spoke up. “What exactly did you want to talk to me about?”

Her bluntness so unnerved Bingzhang that he replied without thinking: “Let’s hear a line or two.”

Yanqiu gazed at him and rested her arms on the table to form a half-circle, giving no hint of what was going through her mind at that moment. Then, with a stare devoid of expression, she asked him: “What do you want to hear? The
Xipi
tune of ‘Flying to Heaven’ or the
Erhuang
aria ‘The Vast Cold Palace’?”

By offering the two most famous pieces in
The Moon Opera
, which had brought her two decades of misery, Yanqiu was being openly provocative, slamming a bullet into the chamber. Instinctively, Bingzhang straightened up and prepared for the verbal assault that was sure to come. Yet he wasn’t too concerned. He also had a card to play. “Sing a bit of the
Erhuang
.”

Yanqiu stood up, moved away from her chair, tugged at the front of her jacket and smoothed the back; then she turned to look out the window, taking a moment to compose herself before her hands and eyes began to move and she drifted into the role. Her singing had the same depth of roots and breadth of canopy as ever, and Bingzhang was deprived of even a moment to be surprised, as unexpected joy flooded his heart and a greedy yet remorseful Chang’e materialized before him. With his eyes shut, he thrust his right hand into his pants pocket and curled his fingers to drum the beat: hard soft-soft-soft, hard soft-soft-soft.

Yanqiu sang straight through for fifteen minutes. When she finished, Bingzhang opened his eyes and squinted to size up the woman before him. The
Erhuang
piece she’d just sung had gone from slow and meandering to a lyrical rhythm, and then to a strong beat, leading to a crescendo, a complex and demanding melody that required a broad vocal range. She had been away from the stage for twenty years, yet sang it beautifully, without missing a note; clearly, she had never stopped practicing. Bingzhang sat sprawled in his chair, not moving yet deeply moved. Twenty years, he sighed to himself, it’s been twenty years. A tangle of emotions filled his heart. “How did you manage to keep at it?”

“Keep at what?” she asked him. “What is it I’m supposed to have kept at?”

“It’s been twenty years. It couldn’t have been easy.”

“I didn’t
keep
at anything.” Finally grasping what he was getting at, she looked up and said, “I
am
Chang’e.”

Xiao Yanqiu emerged from Qiao Bingzhang’s office in a daze. It was October, a windy but sunny day more like spring than autumn. The sunshine and the wind were bright and breezy, alluring and undulating, but it felt unreal, almost dreamlike, as they lingered by her side. She roamed the streets aimlessly, stepping on her own shadow. But then she stopped, looked around, distracted, and glanced down absent-mindedly at her shadow, short and squat in the early afternoon sun, almost dwarf-like. It was virtually shapeless, like a puddle of water. She couldn’t take her eyes off it. When she stepped forward, her shadow crawled ahead like a giant toad. Suddenly focused and clear-headed, Xiao Yanqiu was convinced that the shadow on the ground was her true self, while the upright body was merely an appendage to it. And so it is: people often achieve true awareness of who they really are in the midst of one lonely moment. Her eyes glazed over again; sorrow and despair had turned into an October wind coming at her from one indefinite location before drifting off to yet another.

She decided to go on a diet, starting now.

When fate unexpectedly smiles on her, a woman will often begin a new phase in her life by dieting. Xiao Yanqiu hailed a cab and went straight to People’s Hospital, a place that still held heartbreaking memories for her. In all those years, she’d refused to see a doctor there even when her kidneys were causing her discomfort. People’s Hospital had been the scene of a life-changing event; it was where her heart had been broken. On the second day of Li Xuefen’s hospitalization, Xiao Yanqiu had been forced by the old troupe leader to go to the hospital, where Xuefen had made it clear that she would
consider
letting Xiao Yanqiu off the hook only if she was satisfied with her rival’s attitude during her self-criticism. Everyone in the troupe knew that the old leader would do whatever was necessary to protect Xiao Yanqiu. He personally wrote a self-criticism for her to read at the hospital, telling her in no uncertain terms that she must perform well in front of Li Xuefen before anything else could be said or done. Yanqiu folded up the self-criticism after reading it, anxiety clouding her judgment. “I wasn’t jealous,” she defended herself, “and I never intended to ruin her looks.” The old troupe leader felt like slapping her, as his eyes turned red from anger at her obstinacy, especially at a moment like this. But he could not bring himself to hit this childish woman. With a sweep of his arm, he said, raising his voice, “I spent seven years in prison, and I have no desire to visit you there.” As she stared at his receding back, she saw that a terrible future lay waiting for her somewhere up ahead.

In the end, she did go to People’s Hospital, where Li Xuefen lay in a hospital bed, her face swathed in gauze. All the troupe’s important people, including the creator of
The Moon Opera
, had crowded into the room. With her hands clasped low in front, Xiao Yanqiu walked up to Li Xuefen’s bed, eyes downcast. Staring at her feet, she began by swearing, cursing everyone in her family, back some eight generations, reviling them as worse than shit. The room was deathly quiet when she’d finished; no one spoke a word or made a sound, except for Li Xuefen, who coughed dryly behind the gauze. The air in the room turned oppressive. What could anyone say? Xiao Yanqiu had to consider herself lucky that Li Xuefen had not filed a complaint at the Public Security station.

Unable to bear the stifling atmosphere, Yanqiu looked around with tear-filled eyes for someone to come to her aid. The old troupe leader stood in the doorway, glaring at her. Knowing she had no way out, she slowly removed the self-criticism from her pocket, unfolded it, one sheet at a time, and began to read. Like a typewriter key hitting the paper, she spat out one word after another. When she was done, everyone breathed a sigh of relief, for the contents of the self-criticism confirmed the offender’s positive attitude. Li Xuefen pulled the gauze away from her face, exposing reddish-purple splotches of skin shining under a coat of greasy ointment. She accepted the self-criticism and reached for Xiao Yanqiu’s hands. “Yanqiu,” she said with a smile, “you’re still young, you must try to be more broad-minded. You have to change.” Yanqiu managed to get a glimpse of her expression before Xuefen rewrapped her face. That smile was a glass filled with hot but not quite scalding water that splashed onto her heart; with a sizzle, it doused an inner flame.