Disciples of the Pear Garden: Cantonese Opera in 19th-Century California

Chinese opera theater found brick-and-mortar homes with San Francisco theaters like the Hing Chuen Yuen and the Donn Qui Yuen. But troupes had already followed Chinese immigrants to mining and railroad towns, and across the American West. As Chinese theater became part of California and San Francisco culture, popular Chinese actors advocated for their art alongside appeals for civil rights. Rao draws on personal diaries, newspapers and artifacts to place Chinese theater within the everyday lives of San Francisco. She also examines the costumes, singing, staging, and storytelling that impacted mainstream reception and influenced how Chinese communities saw themselves.

Author Nancy Yunhwa Rao excavates and contextualizes the important history of Chinese Opera Theater, bringing to light the ways it became woven into the financial, political, social, and family life in California and beyond in her book Inside Chinese Theater.

Learn more about this history during this intimate conversation at CHSA on Sunday, December 7 at 2PM.

Admission:
$15 general admission
$28 admission + copy of the book

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nancy Yunhwa Rao is a Distinguished Professor of Music at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. She is a music theorist and historian specializing in the analysis of American ultra-modernist musical works, the transpacific history of American music, and contemporary composers of East Asian heritage. Previously, she taught at Oberlin College and has held visiting professorships at the Curtis Institute of Music, Shanghai Conservatory of Music, Princeton University, and Bard College. She has also regularly served as an outside reader for dissertation committees at universities including Harvard, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, and the National University of Singapore.

Rao's ongoing research addresses music theory and the interdisciplinary fields of musicology, ethnomusicology, ethnic studies, and Asian studies. Most notably, the transpacific perspective presented in her work offers a new framework for understanding American music history, advancing multiple fields of study, and shedding light on the often-unheard voices of Asian American in American music history.

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