Journal of a Sabbatical

China Trip 2000

change faces, spit fire

Quote of the Day:

Though a tree writes no memorial, yet people understand -- Du Fu - Song of an Old Cypress

Today's Reading: The Story of the Stone (a.k.a. Dream of the Red Chamber) by Cao Xuequin

Some Du Fu Poems

Photos:

Du Fu's Cottage

Ticket to Du Fu's Cottage

Green Trees and Green River at Du Fu's Cottage

Writing Desk

Ticket from Shufengyayun Tea House

Change Faces Actor Showing His Real Face - from the poster the tea house manager gave us

Woman Juggler

Spit Fire

Rolling Light

Stick Puppet - from the poster

Stick Puppet 2 - my own photo

When they served lunch on the flight to Chengdu I had this bizarre moment wondering "how am I going to eat this without chopsticks?" It took me several seconds to realize "oh wait, here's a fork." Clearly I have been in China too long.

Somehow, the whole time we were discussing the itinerary for this Tibet trip and hearing we were going to visit "the thatched cottage" on our stopover in Chengdu it never dawned on me that it was Du Fu's thatched cottage. As our tour guide, Mona, who met us at the airport was telling us the story of the cottage we were about to visit, light dawned on marble head and I got way more excited about this little diversion.

 

Du Fu was probably China's greatest poet. He's certainly the one most Westerners have heard of - along with his friend and correspondent Li Po. Born in Henan in 712, Du Fu left home when he was 20. He served as some kind of government official for awhile (like 10 years) but fled to Chengdu after being captured by rebels during an uprising. He built himself a humble cottage by the Brocade River. I suspect the original cottage was far less grand than this re-creation. This shrine to poetry is full of gorgeous bamboo and all kinds of greenery. And birds. I heard so much bird song in the trees by the river that I was convinced it must be a tape. Nope. Real birds. Just like in the poems.

I somehow doubt this is Du Fu's actual writing desk, probably a facsimile. I can picture him sitting here writing one of his 10,000 poems (about 200 or so of his 10,000 poems were written here at the cottage). It was getting dark when we were touring the cottage - wall clock time here bears no relation to the position of the sun as the entire country is one time zone - and we found ourselves rushing a little bit to see everything. Plus, Mona's English is not very good so I'm hard pressed to understand what she's telling us. There's a gnarled old cypress stump on the porch of one of the cottage buildings and I think Mona was telling us this is the remains of the actual cypress tree from Song of an Old Cypress, but I'm not sure. Maybe like the desk it's a reconstruction or a replacement. It is really gnarly and old though and I get that tingling feeling of being in contact with a historic specimen so maybe it is the Old Cypress.

I could easily have spent an entire day at the cottage. I wanted to take the experience with me. The souvenir bug that bit me this morning at the Temple of the Azure Clouds in Xiangshan bites me again in Chengdu and I end up with a scroll painting of the cottage surrounded by dense vegetation. I have to have it, despite the fact that I have no place to hang it at home and I'll have to carry it around Tibet with me.

 

 

If I'd known what on earth Mona meant by changing faces and spitting fire I might have gotten more excited about that too. After a delicious dinner featuring ma po tofu and much more food than any of us can eat, we're off to see change faces and spit fire. Our driver doesn't seem to know exactly how to get there and he and Mona get into a fierce argument. I remember passing the same storage area for carnival rides several times. That reminds me, strangely enough, of home - the carnival ride and fried dough storage lot on Bridge Road near the cat shelter. What a strange thing to evoke home! We do finally get to the tea house, having missed the first show. Fortunately, there are several shows tonight.

The Shufengyayun Tea House is near the Du Fu Cottage. It's a big barn-like space furnished with high-backed bamboo chairs and small tables set with covered tea cups and plates of peanuts. They serve the tea from an eagle tea can and the hot water from a copper kettle with a very long spout for reaching to the middle of the aisles. It's quite crowded with people packed in everywhere. I see maybe three other non-Chinese faces besides ours. The back of the ticket says the building has the style of Old West Shu and is supposed to make the people "feel the folk customs and folkway of the Old West Shu". I can't vouch for that because I am ignorant of the folkways of Old West Shu.

The program for the evening includes drum and gong music, a juggling act, stick puppets, and Sichuan Opera. I'd never heard of Sichuan opera before and assumed it was pretty much like Peking Opera. Not so. Sichuan opera features a series of stunts including: change faces, spit fire, and rolling light. We're told these stunts are unique to Sichuan opera and we definitely won't see them anywhere else.

The drum and gong group also features a guy playing the erhu, a stringed instrument I've only ever heard on recordings before. I'm told Sichuan opera usually just has perscussion, so I wasn't expecting the erhu. It's a treat to hear it live.

Between acts a guy dressed in black silk pants and jacket with black cap, runs across the stage with a placard in Chinese and English telling you what's next.

The juggler keeps everything from clay pots to round pieces of cloth in the air using both hands and feet. I don't know if that's a Sichuan specialty too, but it's impressive to watch.

Changing faces (bian lian in Chinese) is a performance art technique of high-speed changing of face masks. Instead of using painted on face makeup, Sichuan opera performers change their "makeup" suddenly on the stage. Well, it's not really makeup, it's masks. They change their masks so quickly that the audience barely notices it. I kept trying to catch the moment of the change but never did. With all the leaping around and mask changing, it seems like there's a cast of thousands on the stage instead of a couple of players doing multiple roles.

Spit fire is pretty obvious. The performers spit fire. There's no other way to describe it. They don't eat fire like American carnival acts, they spit it like dragons. It's startling even when you know it's coming. In the picture I took, it looks like the performer's head is on fire and you can't see his head for the flames. The other picture is from a souvenir poster and taken from a different angle so you can see the guy's head. When he's standing on the edge of the stage and the flames are coming right at you, it's hard to hold onto your tea cup, never mind take a picture!

The MC reminds us constantly in Chinese and English of the uniqueness of Sichuan opera - between every act. I start to wonder what parts of China all these people in the audience are from. Are they as amazed and impressed as the handfull of foreigners? She tells us that "rolling light" is another skill unique to Sichuan. These actors must like playing with fire. Besides spitting it, they do amazing stunts with it.

Rolling light involves doing complex physical comedy while balancing a flaming bowl on one's head. The scene we saw involved a husband and wife arguing over the husband's gambling. The wife kept giving the husband progressively weirder and more dangerous stunts to perform. Without understanding a word of dialogue, I found this screamingly funny. The rolling light guy could move his body in a few thousand ways I've never seen before and yet not knock that flaming bowl off his head. He looked like he was made of rubber.

At Shufengyayun Tea House stick puppets change faces and spit fire too. According to the announcer woman who introduces each act, we won't see puppets doing this anywhere else. She's probably right. The puppets did not do rolling light or play drums and gongs but they were very expressive.

While we're watching the show, our tea cups are refilled constantly. Basically if you take a sip, someone tops up your cup. Also while we're engrossed in the show, Mona disappears and returns a few times. We think nothing of it. Then it's time to leave and get a few hours sleep before the early (really early) flight to Lhasa.

That's when we discover that our driver has dumped all our luggage in the tea house's office and taken off. He apparently had yet more words with Mona. So we sit in the office while Mona tries to find us a cab or another driver or something. The manager of the tea house comes in and gives us each a poster (from which some of the pictures in this entry were scanned.) Finally, we get a cab to our hotel.

Only then do we find out Mona is going to wake us up at 4:00 AM to get to the airport. Four o'clock in the morning! Yikes.