A dramatic work will occasionally gain importance for its place in history and occasionally for its exceptional literary value. Beneath the Red Banner (
Jiao plays Lao She (
"Lao She's story is more than just a story, it's an epic tale with great historical relevance," Jiao said while meeting reporters last Friday. "As someone who lived through the Cultural Revolution, I feel quite close to the suffering portrayed in the story."
To say that 1899, when the story is set and when Lao She was born, was a time of great upheaval for China is an understatement. The Middle Kingdom was decades behind a world that had recently and rapidly modernized. The Japanese had routed the Chinese military just four years earlier and foreigners in the Chinese countryside, both Japanese and Western, were growing in numbers and helping themselves to the nation's resources. An organization of outraged Chinese, the Fists of Righteous Harmony (
To the characters of Lao She's novel, all this was a source of particular consternation. Like the Qing rulers, they were themselves Manchurians, albeit of a low societal level, and had an undying faith in the divinity of the emperor and the power of his court.
But the Qing court was itself in a state of upheaval. In his late twenties, the Emperor Guangxu tried to assert power and instigate liberal reform in the kingdom. His efforts were opposed by the empress dowager Cixi, who had adopted Guangxu as an infant and seen to it that he was made emperor at the tender age of three.
A powerful woman who ruled China literally from behind a curtain, she served as regent while the young emperor came of age. When her power became threatened by Guangxu's reforms, she had him immured in a palace outside Beijing and resumed control of government.
She cunningly co-opted the Boxers' hate for foreigners and supported their efforts to kill missionaries and rid the kingdom of outside influence. In 1900, the Boxer Rebellion would be quashed by an international military force -- 2,500 men from eight countries who had come both to rescue their missionaries and establish a permanent foothold for merchants. Cixi would flee the palace disguised as a peasant shortly before Westerners would enter the Forbidden City for the first time without an invitation.
The pain of military defeat, the strain of revolution and palace intrigue line the margins of Lao She's novel, but its pages are dedicated not to history's characters, but ordinary citizens of Beijing who bore witness to the upheaval.
This was Lao She's greatest strength as a writer. He left China and his job as the principal of an elementary school in 1924 to lecture at the School of Oriental and African Studies at London University. While there, he polished his English by reading the works of contemporary masters like Mark Twain, whose wit and ability to fully develop characters he would later put to use in his own novels. He was expert at depicting detail and in using the color of the Beijing dialect to develop his characters.
Red Banner's gentle and honest father, the thrifty and diligent mother, the sarcastic and conceited aunt, the foppish brother-in-law, the overbearing mother-in-law and her good-natured husband all show a kind of humanity, humor and hubris that was uncommon in Chinese storytelling before Lao She. It was a trait that, in 1951, earned him the title "People's Artist" by the Beijing Municipality.
Despite the fact that its events take place in the year of the author's birth, Red Banner is autobiographical and Lao She spent most of his professional life writing it, but died in 1966 before it was finished.
Like his characters who witnessed the tottering of the Qing dynasty, Lao She himself felt the changes of modern China. He suffered physical and psychological
persecution at the hands of the Red Guards and is widely believed to have taken his own life as a result. It's in this context that Red Banner takes on even greater historical weight.
Jiao brings the master storyteller to life. Something of a master storyteller himself, Jiao became famous in China and Taiwan for his turn as the emperor Kangxi in the TV movie The Yongzheng Dynasty (
"Throughout the production of this play, my sole aim has been to maintain the presence of Lao She in the story," Jiao said. "Representing him faithfully is paramount if you understand the importance of history."
The play was adapted for the stage from Lao She's novel by Lee Lungyun (
Beneath the Red Banner opened last night and will play again tonight and tomorrow night at 7:30 and Sunday, Nov. 16 at
2:30pm at the National Theater (
On April 26, The Lancet published a letter from two doctors at Taichung-based China Medical University Hospital (CMUH) warning that “Taiwan’s Health Care System is on the Brink of Collapse.” The authors said that “Years of policy inaction and mismanagement of resources have led to the National Health Insurance system operating under unsustainable conditions.” The pushback was immediate. Errors in the paper were quickly identified and publicized, to discredit the authors (the hospital apologized). CNA reported that CMUH said the letter described Taiwan in 2021 as having 62 nurses per 10,000 people, when the correct number was 78 nurses per 10,000
May 5 to May 11 What started out as friction between Taiwanese students at Taichung First High School and a Japanese head cook escalated dramatically over the first two weeks of May 1927. It began on April 30 when the cook’s wife knew that lotus starch used in that night’s dinner had rat feces in it, but failed to inform staff until the meal was already prepared. The students believed that her silence was intentional, and filed a complaint. The school’s Japanese administrators sided with the cook’s family, dismissing the students as troublemakers and clamping down on their freedoms — with
As Donald Trump’s executive order in March led to the shuttering of Voice of America (VOA) — the global broadcaster whose roots date back to the fight against Nazi propaganda — he quickly attracted support from figures not used to aligning themselves with any US administration. Trump had ordered the US Agency for Global Media, the federal agency that funds VOA and other groups promoting independent journalism overseas, to be “eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.” The decision suddenly halted programming in 49 languages to more than 425 million people. In Moscow, Margarita Simonyan, the hardline editor-in-chief of the
Six weeks before I embarked on a research mission in Kyoto, I was sitting alone at a bar counter in Melbourne. Next to me, a woman was bragging loudly to a friend: She, too, was heading to Kyoto, I quickly discerned. Except her trip was in four months. And she’d just pulled an all-nighter booking restaurant reservations. As I snooped on the conversation, I broke out in a sweat, panicking because I’d yet to secure a single table. Then I remembered: Eating well in Japan is absolutely not something to lose sleep over. It’s true that the best-known institutions book up faster
RSS