Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 March 2019
In March 1987, during the course of extensive interviewing among members of the Cantonese opera community in the southern Chinese city of Guăngzhoū,2 I listened with considerable amazement while Chàhn Keìhyàhn, the director of the Guăngdōng Cantonese Opera Institute, recounted an experience he had while staging a local Cantonese opera version of one of the “model operas” of the Cultural Revolution period. My fascination was only secondarily with the details of the story itself; of greater significance was what transpired on a linguistic, and even physical, level as this man related his story.
This is a revised and expanded version of a paper presented at the annual conference of the Society for Ethnomusicology, Seattle, Washington, October 24, 1992.