| I just finished the grim but exquisitely written novel, The Moon Opera, by Bi Feiyu. The novel tells the story of Xiao Yanqiu, a singer in the Peking Opera, who throws her career away with one angry gesture but more than twenty years later is given back her chance to once again soar as the heroine of The Moon Opera.
Imagery of snow and ice figure throughout the novel, as both the weather surrounding the performances of The Moon Opera, and as representing Yanqiu. The snow and ice are in sharp contrast to sudden and strong images of heat and melting and raging fever. In the end, heat vanquishes cold and Yanqiu is the victim. Passion and heat are her downfall, even as she dances in the snow and ice, seeking to preserve herself as the ice princess, but losing out to the reality of her womanhood. This is very much a novel about being a woman. Yanqiu has a projected image, both as the character, Chang’e, she plays in the opera who is powerful yet wanton, and as her own persona of icy hauteur and disdain. She has one more image, the one she projects to herself, that she is strong and beautiful. But when the images fall away, she is left vulnerable and weak, and she is treated with disgust or, even worse, disinterest. Adulation or rejection, the fate of woman? Yanqiu says at one point, “Men fight other men, but women spend their whole lives fighting themselves.” This is such a tragic sentence, a condemnation to a life sentence of trying to be what she is idolized as, singer and beauty, but never loved for what she is, human. In many ways, Yanqiu reminded me of April Wheeler in Revolutionary Road, not only in their fates but in their own visions of their destiny, skewed by others’ desires, bound by imposed images, and founded not in their own true strengths but in dreams of what could be, or what should be, but what is not, and what never will be. |
