The Chinois Phantom of the Opera

‘Tell me honestly, what do you like about my performance?’

The delicate diva, Xiao Yu (Little Jade), tilts her head flirtatiously at her admirer. Every tonal character rings with crystal bell clarity. It’s difficult to gauge her age even without her thick theatrical paint. Every pore of hers exudes eternal spring.

‘Yes, my darling. Every movement of yours slays a heart. Every silence, a sentence of death,’ the gruff and grizzled Warlord Wu Jiang Long (River Dragon) utters, like a replay from a crusty tape-recorder.

‘Really? Don’t you think I’m too old for the role of *Yang Gui Fei?’ she mocks his mocking response, from habitual pseudo-insecurity. She’s a petite but mesmerizing actress that looms larger than the stage. Or has the stage enlarged her mesmerizingly?

‘You live life like life is your stage,’ whispers the hoarse-throated General Wu, deftly massaging and messaging her limpidly limp wrist with surprisingly gentle rotary motions.

She gives a barely perceptible electric shudder at his contact. Ensconced in the deep plush gold-cushioned faux Louis XIV settee, the opulence of the General’s suite of European decadence oppresses and yet becomes the supine XiaoYu, in resplendent garb and gems.

‘You will too, if you’re nothing but a plaything for people to fantasize at. And ravish,’ she sighs mellifluously like a flute floating on a wisp of vapour. She doesn’t seem to live on human’s smoke and water.

She possesses a melon-shaped face and mouth, with slanting doe eyes black as midnight, luxuriant raven hair cascading down a curvaceous slope of ivory neck. Her delicate body could hardly resist a puff of wind; her porcelain beauty humiliates the moon and shrivels the blossoms, causes the fish to sink to the bottom in dismay, and shames the ascent of the wild goose into a swift descent.

‘That’s something unearthly about you,’ gushes the paunchy and bulb-beaked General, lustily ruddy as if a permanent coat of rouge had laminated his flared-nosed Mandarin orange face.

‘And there’s something earthy and salty about you,’ comes the rejoinder, with just the correct enigmatic flash of the eyes and a languishing flip of the silk fan.

The General licks his lips in a sleek little leery grin, savouring the allusion to his legendary appetite.

‘It’s impossible to breathe in the same room as you.’

‘Because I drink in all of the precious air?’ teases the consummate coquette.

‘No. I’m suffocating with anticipation…’

‘Of my final act?’

‘Of the eternal ecstatic death of pleasure.’

‘But you always live another day,’ the actress dissembles exquisite incredulity.

‘Because your final act still lacks bite,’ comes the unsubtle insinuation of the predator.

' Give me some some face, darling won't you?' coaxed the fawning General.

The General loves and lives for this tautly titillating verbal foreplay.

He times the foreplay to an immaculately right duration and distance and it’s now time for the coup de grace. He’s all quivering with tension like a painfully tightly compressed spring.

‘Tonight I'll grant you the bite of your life ’ smiles the lithe little actress, eyes meeting his with a promise divine.

Their embrace provokes an animal howl from the besotted General. Half of his face is chomped off into a bloody mass of shredded flesh, veins and tissues.

There is no actress on the settee. Just the horrendously gashed and mutilated skeletal remains of Xiao Yu (real name Yang Jin), on a dust-coated couch in a dark dilapidated master bedroom of a gutted villa. Yang was a young village boy who was conscripted and forced to train as a Beijing opera actress, in the era where boys took on female roles as in Shakespeare’s time. General Wu took a fancy to him and kept him as his sixteenth concubine. After Yang found fame, he fell in love with a female fan. That incurred the murderous wrath of the General.

Yang's ultimate grievous fault was to publicly spurn the powerful Warlord's attention. He was the latest of numerous brutally silenced victims of the General who was an ardent collector Beijing opera 'hua dan'*.

This story is widely and deliciously going the rounds among the glitterati, literati, military and the common folks. But is his loss of face really an act of revenge by an unappeased spirit of a wronged artiste? Or the result of military rivalry? Or the handiwork of one of his refrigerated and jealous concubines? Or an accident? The tale of revenge is by far the most favoured for its fluffy flavours of operatic drama. And lustily entertained by all and sundry because face matters immensely in Chinese society. And for a powerful man to lose face....everyone tries to keep a straight face talking about him while sipping tea.

The General nevertheless survives without an eye and his trademark bulbous nose. His mouth is still intact and hence his appetite is still insatiable . But he has to wear a mask for the rest of his life. Just like Gaston Leroux' or Andrew Webber’s Phantom of the Opera.

*Yang Gui Fei: Emperor Tang Ming Huang's favourite concubine, in the Sheng (Long) Tang Dynasty
*hua dan: soprano roles sung by young males in Beijing operas in China.

Author's Commentary
This oriental Gothic tale, set in Shanghai in the early 1900s, takes place in the turbulent period during the Civil War in China between the Communists and the Nationalists. It playfully imitates or translates, not parodies, the lovely florid literary diction and phrasing of Chinese classics in some parts of the tale. The General's fate echoes cannibal Hannibal Lecter's gruesome gustatory habit. (See Thomas Harris' The Silence of the Lambs).

The tale attempts to evoke the effete and decadent era of a bygone China of the notoriously brutal, violent and decadent warlords who patronized Beijing opera performances and hua dan (soprano actresses). These aficionados or otherwise kept the hua dan as prized possessions. The hua dan were young men who excelled as female impersonators. The most famous one in China is the late Mei Lan Fang, who created the iconic inimitable portrayal of the inebriated Yang Gui Fei.

The prose is cheekily pseudo-poetic, and an affectionate mimicry of Chinese classic phrases. This is intended to be a tribute to the Chinese language that I love.