Act Like Jackie Chan the Cinematic Legacy Ofjingju Training Schools in Hong Kong Pui-Lun Chan

Act Like Jackie Chan The Cinematic Legacy ofJingju Training Schools in Hong Kong Pui-Lun Chan When the National Went Local Jingju (京劇), also referred to as Beijing Opera or Peking Opera, is one of hundreds of genres of traditional Chinese theatre. In the late 18th century, it first emerged as a hybrid form draw- ing on several northern genres; it developed into a sophisticated, independent form in Beijing. In the first two decades of the 20th century, as a result of efforts by some dedicated intellectu- als and practitioners, jingju was “nationalized” as representative of traditional Chinese culture. Its status as the “national drama” (guoju, 國劇) of China is still recognized within the country and internationally. As an imported theatrical genre with northern origins, jingju has never been popular in Hong Kong, especially when compared to the local genre of Cantonese Opera. Nevertheless, thanks to the community of mainland immigrants who formed a core audience base, jingju has successfully maintained a secure place in the local cultural spectrum. Between the 1940s and the 1970s, jingju made considerable progress in putting down roots in Hong Kong as a genre of traditional Chinese theatre that was available to local spectators. I designate this a forma- tive period for two reasons: first, local (as opposed to touring) performers based in Hong Kong began to participate; second, some of them established a recruitment system for jingju, which included training schools and private lessons that were open to local people. Local jingju training schools flourished between the 1950s and 1970s, the same period during which Jackie Chan, the internationally renowned movie actor, studied at one such school. The story of his training in the China Drama Academy (Zhongguo Xiju Xuexiao, 中國戲劇學校), an active jingju school at the time, details how the school operated, and shows the significance of jingju training schools to local students and society at large. There were great obstacles to being a professional jingju performer in Hong Kong in this period, a determin- ing factor in the phenomenon of training school graduates entering the movie industry instead. By making this move, these graduates — Chan being the most well known globally — greatly impacted the industry with what they had originally learned for a jingju career. In addition to Chan’s autobiography (1998), my research is also informed by Li Juhua (李菊華), a senior-level student with Chan at the China Drama Academy, whom I interviewed during fieldwork in Hong Kong in 2015. Pui-Lun Chan received his PhD in Chinese Studies at the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies in 2017. He received his MPhil in Ethnomusicology from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2010 and a BA in Music from the Hong Kong Baptist University in 2007. His main field of specialization is traditional Chinese theatre. [email protected] TDR: The Drama Review 62:2 (T238) Summer 2018. ©2018 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 115 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00751 by guest on 01 October 2021 Jingju in Hong Kong? Jingju is a traditional Chinese theatre genre with an archaic performing language of “Mid- land” dialect,1 so the question is: Was there an audience for jingju in Hong Kong, where most locals only spoke Cantonese? Indeed, despite the warm recep- tion of occasional guest performers from the Chinese mainland — which, I argue, mostly reflected local spectators’ spontaneous curiosity about what was to them an exotic genre — jingju was hardly a popular local choice for entertain- ment. Unless the featured play was based on a famous Chinese myth or legend, the locals could barely understand the lyrics and dialogue or, consequently, make sense of the narrative. Ye Shaode, a Cantonese Opera scriptwriter, comments that local spectators usually were drawn by the stories of the plays and rarely by the skills of performers or the niceties of the art form (in Li Jian 1993:91–92). If that is the case, one can imagine how Figure 1. Yuan Hong (元紅) and Jackie Chan (right) in Cuiping Shan difficult it would be for locals to (翠屏山, in Cuiping Mountain). Hong Kong City Hall, 1967. (Photo from enjoy jingju. Qixiaofu 2009:49) Nevertheless, changes in the local ethnoscape in the late 1930s also changed the story of jingju in Hong Kong to a certain degree. In particular, the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) and the Second Chinese Civil War (1946–1950) led to large-scale emigration from the Chinese mainland to Hong Kong. Among the migrants were skilled jingju practitioners, who sought opportunities to perform, to give private lessons, and to establish training schools in order to earn a living. The community of mainland immigrants in Hong Kong created an audience base for jingju, many of whom arrived in Hong Kong with a cultural background in the popular performance form. In particular, many of these immigrants were from Beijing and Shanghai, where jingju was considered a major theatrical genre. For the same reason, language did not pose a problem for this group, even though the archaic performing language of jingju might have been different from the standard Mandarin or other Chinese dialect they spoke. 1. Jingju is performed mainly in Mid-land dialect, which originated in the mid-region of ancient China. The region covers the modern province of Hunan. Pui-Lun Chan 116 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00751 by guest on 01 October 2021 More importantly, social factors contributed to the community’s enthusiastic support of jingju in Hong Kong. Many reports comment on the social aspect of jingju performances. For example, a column in the Xinsheng Wanbao (新生晚報, New Life Evening Post) reads: For the purpose of budget control, the troupe has to book the slot from half past nine in the evening. The film that started at half past seven has not ended yet, and spectators have to wait outside the theatre. To all intents and purposes, it looks like a “Shanghai- nese clansmen gathering.” People appear to be constantly shaking hands with each other, to the point where they end up shaking hands with the same person twice, but they still seem to want more [...] Although the performance is proceeding, spectators do not sit properly, and face backward, because this position enables them to conveniently greet friends sitting a few rows back [...] Rather than just a jingju performance, it may be more exact to describe the event as a social gathering. (Xinsheng Wanbao 1957)2 For the immigrant community, who had to adapt to a new place, a new society, and a new culture, jingju was a site of nostalgia where community members maintained their connec- tions in the diaspora: the desire to remain connected with a familiar past was an incentive for attendance. Jingju Training Schools in Hong Kong 1950s–1970s Some jingju practitioners who migrated from the mainland during the immigration wave tried to continue their professions by establishing training schools in Hong Kong. Inevitably, they faced challenges, the language of the form being the primary point of hesitation for locals. Initially, the audience base of the genre consisted mostly of mainland immigrants, which still comprised a relatively small portion of the Hong Kong population. It may not have seemed wise to join one of the schools from a career perspective. Nevertheless, the tough economic environment in Hong Kong in the post–World War II period inadvertently provided an oppor- tunity for these immigrant practitioners to break through social barriers with financial incen- tives. By the late 1950s they managed to establish a sustainable recruitment system for jingju in Hong Kong, based on the long, successful history of recruitment on the Chinese mainland. The Recruitment System of Jingju on the Mainland 1790s–1950s From the 1790s to the 1860s, as jingju developed into its mature form in Beijing, a recruitment and training system for the genre also emerged. Teachers bought boys of seven or eight years old for training in Beijing, depending upon their personal needs, or at the request of troupe leaders, to fill specific roles. The scope of the trade involving potential students was nation- wide, as many boys from southern provinces — especially Anhui and Jiangsu — were also bought and taken to the capital. In my view, the far reach of the trade to the south was probably due to the continuing domination of erhuang (二黃) and kun (崑) singing modes in jingju at the time, which were not local to Beijing.3 It was practical for troupes in Beijing to look in Anhui and Jiangsu, the core areas of the two modes respectively, for boys who might have linguistic famil- iarity with the singing modes. Act Like Jackie Chan 2. All quotes from Mandarin, unless otherwise indicated, are my own translations. 3. A singing mode can be understood as a specific set of structural rules that govern melodic formation of musi- cal lines in a traditional Chinese theatre play. These rules of melodic contour are highly dependent on linguistic tones of the performing dialect and, thus, singing modes are highly region-specific. 117 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00751 by guest on 01 October 2021 The student trade was based on an indenture system. Teachers would offer a boy’s parents an amount of money in return for the “ownership” of their child for a specific period of time. A preexpiration buyback clause applied, though the cost was usually way beyond what ordinary families could afford. Upon arrival in Beijing, the boys would either join a troupe or be resold to established performers.

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