
Amnesia Princess as Punchline by Steffi Sin
My father pushes the tips of his fingers to the zippered scar along his sternum. Striking a superman pose, he angles his body side to side. I pause in the hall on the way to my room. “Does it bother you?” I ask.
He jumps a little, as if I’d caught him sneaking a cookie behind my mother’s back. He meets my eyes in the fogged mirror over the bathroom sink. “No. It looks funny, doesn’t it?” My father pokes both index fingers into two inch-long divots above his belly button. “Like two eyes and a nose. Isn’t it funny?”
Six years ago, the incisions were made after his triple bypass to insert tubes inside his body cavity to drain out blood and other fluids. On his lower belly, I draw an invisible, curved line I’ve seen women with C-sections bear. “There. Now you’re smiling,” I tell him.
I leave him with his reflection to go get dressed. My mother reminds us all to wear our lucky red underwear. These are the Chinese opera rules. Show up early. Wear red. Smile. Nod. Don’t jinx it. My mother thinks we jinxed my father’s show five years ago, and that’s why he needed emergency surgery a month before the performance. I think it was the fried foods and red meat.
My father, my mother, my brother, and I arrive at the Great Star Theater in Chinatown. The metal chain-gate is rolled up, and the faded paint on the sign reads, G e t tar T at. We sneak through the side entrance and down the alleyway painted with smoke and skulls to get backstage. My parents pass my brother and I each three stems of incense. We take turns bowing three times to the opera god, a two-foot bald statue on a pedestal surrounded by fruit. People hand us red envelopes. These are the dollar-envelopes, just for luck. The envelopes with the big bills are saved for the end of the show. I’d stopped coming to their shows years ago. The last show I’d been at, my father sang onstage with a hand pressed to his healing rib cage. People complimented his range, the strength of his voice. Is it strength if his chest hurt so much to sing that he couldn’t help but be loud?
In various stages of dress and distress, the middle-aged, chatterbox see lies flutter eagerly towards my father, and my mother only allows access for the makeup artist. Another group of see lie backup dancers call out to my brother, “Ah-Go-Bee! Go-Bee!” they mispronounce his name.
He doesn’t mind. He likes his see lie clique. They have the best gossip. Armed with charm, my brother goes to them, abandoning me. My father and my brother are a hot commodity among the opera see lies, but I am neither old or married, so as a girl, I cannot be one of them.
Our parents raised us in the backstage of Chinese operas. Our neighbors called the cops on us twice while my parents were dueting too loudly in the dining room, where the acoustics are best. When my brother was too young to get a summer job, he rented himself out for small opera parts as soldier, carriage bearer, and lobster. He lived off fickle red envelope money. His first show, he made two-hundred dollars. His last show, twenty. At the peak of his Chinese opera career, he was given five words as court jester. For months, my parents worked to reshape his Chinese to hide the American-boy accent that makes his words lean crookedly. The see lie clique loves him. I peek into empty dressing rooms I used to know like the back of my hand. They must’ve remodeled recently.
I shadow my mother, weaving in and out of hallways and lightbulbed rooms. She strikes small talk with small-time actors and big-time musicians. They each narrow their eyes at me as if I should be waiting in the audience, staring at drawn curtains. Like in a carnival or a cult, opera birds are wary of intruders. Each new corner I turn, I feel obligated to gesture at my mother’s back to indicate I am with her.
When my mother remembers to introduce me as her daughter, they belatedly feign surprise. “Wah! So big!” they all marvel. Do they mean I look older or that I gained weight?
A bald, potbellied man approaches us, greets my mother. He smiles like Santa Claus, generous and a price tag on everything. The scalp of his head glistens with more oil than the roast ducks hanging in the butcher windows. Addressing me in English, Dr. Ho asks about school, about my grandparents. Smile. Nod. I switch to Cantonese and respond politely as if he were a family friend. He hands me a red envelope. “Sun leen fie lok. Sun tuuy geen hong.”
I return his Happy New Year, “Sun leen fie lok.” Then I watch him wait for me to wish him good health too.
“Sun tuuy geen hong,” my mother chimes in. She thinks she’s saved me from social blunder.
Dr. Ho engages my mother in friendly conversation. He’s a popular man with the opera birds because he always buys dinner for the whole group. I ease away to fish my brother out of the see lie pond.
“Hey, is that Dr. Ho?” My brother slides a thin stack of red envelopes in his jacket pocket. I shrug. He snickers, “Doesn’t dad call him Dr. Ho-ly Shit?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Because Dr. Ho is only good at singing.”
“Okay, so?”
“So he’s dad’s doctor, and he’s not a good doctor. We don’t like him.” Dr. Ho is the man who put my father in the hospital, the one who slacked off and gossiped during general check-ups. The only thing Dr. Ho is good for is calling the ambulance when my father showed up at his office complaining of chest pains. If Dr. Ho had caught the blocked arteries, the surgeons wouldn’t have had to crack open my father’s chest. When I asked my father why he didn’t get a new doctor after the surgery, he told me Dr. Ho was also good for fake sick notes.
“Ding,” my brother swears lightly. “You know, mom holds onto things like this too. So does Popo.”
“I am not turning into our grandmother.” Breathing never hurt as much as it did watching my father learn to breathe without the machines after the doctors wired his chest closed.
“Dude, you yell at me in Chinese like they both do. It’s weird.”
I gesture to a box of fresh-baked baos. “Look. Food.”
“Ooooooh yeeeees.” He rushes the pork buns, and his muscled back and shoulders gives him the look of a tackle rushing a football field. “Don’t tell mom!” he calls out over his shoulder.
As my brother wraps baos in napkins, I overhear small melodramas between dressing room partitions. A woman in a pink, sequined gown swirls up in a fit. She thumps her small fist on the table. My father calls her Chanel Lady because of her infamous handbag collection. Her husband’s an artist, the kind who waves ink brush over parchment and receives five grand per painting. As her team struggles to zip the back of her dress and tells her they will have to use a chain of safety pins instead, I remember my mother saying once that if someone has money and likes to sing on stage, no one will stop them or tell them the truth about how they sound.
After my brother goads me into stuffing the illicit baos into my purse for him, our mother finds us. She leads us through the cemetery of props and backdrops, across the curtained stage, past the band, and towards the torn, red vinyl seats in the audience. The first row of a Chinese opera is hell. It’s right by the cymbals. My mother’s favorite row is the fifth row. No neck craning, and the drums will leave us with only a mild headache.
My brother tries to curl into himself in the cramped seat, but his frat-boy muscles are too bulky. Sitting next to him is like sharing an airplane armrest in coach with a bodybuilder. I use my sharp elbow to establish the shared armrest as my territory.
Rainbow lightbulbs frame the stage in an arch, and in the dark, the crinkled, red velvet curtains take the look of redwood bark. From our seats, we can see the band. Two men share five cymbals and three drums of varying sizes. The smallest is the size of a side plate, and the largest, the size of a car tire. Another man plays what looks like a stand-up violin. A woman in an ice-blue suit sits before the yerng kum. “She’s the best,” my mother whispers to me. There are only a few musicians who can play the yerng kum, and of those people, she knows how to pick up the song from the actors’ dropped notes. She is the only female musician I have seen at the opera. When I was eight, my mother thought learning piano meant I would know how to play the yerng kum easily. I spent three months proving her wrong.
House lights dim. Drum rolls like thunder. My father enters stage left, approaches the microphone. In Cantonese, he greets the audience with jokes he wrote himself. His voice carries strongly through the microphone. He sounds like god. The crowd already loves him, I can tell. They always love him. The show after his heart surgery, he’d sung a thirty-minute piece onstage and stolen the show. That was the first and last time he performed opera. He blames it on stage fright, but he’s not frightened of hosting opera shows these days. I think it’s only a matter of time before he sings onstage again, and only a matter of time before bad luck sends him back to the emergency room.
My father, the host, tells the audience the history of the musical— play? The opera was written and produced in the late fifties by a man. Then he says something about the early sixties. Something about a ship flipping over. Something about a princess. My Chinese is rusty.
He ducks behind the curtain. Drumroll. One of the musicians hit a tiny wooden block incessantly. My father bought one of these blocks to follow along with at home. I remember too late that I’d forgotten my construction-grade earplugs. I used to carry a pair of earplugs in every handbag because I would never know when my parents might burst into song at an opera party or an office party or a Christmas party.
Curtains rise. Cue gentle fog from dry ice. Cymbals crash and strings swell. Discordant notes strain against one another in a push and pull. My brother discreetly plugs his left ear with his fingers and turns his head to the side.
A man enters stage right. Step. Step. Turn. Opening note bursts. Long sweep of the arm, hold. The headpiece glitters with jeweled stones, and the robe of his lime-green costume drapes over white satin layers. His five-foot antennas bob with his swaying movements. My mother tried to teach me this opera walk when I was ten. It’s a heel-toe heel-toe step, a deliberate lift of the leg, of the thigh, arms like waves. I could never hold my muscles this way, and for most of my childhood, I’d wished I could if only to be included in the opera club with the rest of my family.
Screens on the side of the stage flash the lyrics to help the audience follow. They don’t help me because I can only read singular Chinese characters, words they teach to middle schoolers. I know my numbers. I know the word for sky, for heart, ocean. Love. I. You. No.
The screens don’t work for my Popo either because she only knows how to read produce prices.
The princess enters stage right, through the prop boat. Her arms are fluid, and the long, lemon-yellow sleeves flutter in the air. Suuy zhuuw, it literally translates to water sleeves. I’d donned one of my mother’s opera robes once, and she’d tried to teach me to do the suuy zhuuw, but my arms were too short, and patience was never my virtue.
My mother stage-whispers for me to take note of the stage makeup. Both actors are painted with a foundation of white. The red on the lover’s face is fanned down his cheeks like watercolor. The red on the princess’ face is sharp, pink-tinged, and shows her bone structure. My mother tells me the princess’ makeup artist is a professional.
“That’s the princess,” my mother explains. “She’s falling in love with the prince, but her father promised her to another family already. She’s leaving her lover and going back home.” The princess sings, and my heart laments. I don’t know the lyrics, but shows that begin with goodbye are destined to break hearts. Separation by circumstance only leads to tragedy. The princess sweeps a red-nailed hand, as if wiping tears from her lover’s cheeks. The princess doesn’t touch his face, and in the space between palm and cheek, a held sigh releases. But a lover’s goodbye cannot be worse than a father’s goodbye, I think.
The fog thickens. The audience can only see the actors from the waist up. Someone overestimated the amount of dry ice they needed for the show. A painted scene with a boat in the backdrop shifts. The princess lets go of her lover’s hand. Stage lights dim.
My mother leans in to continue explaining the princess goes on to lose her memory after her ship wrecks. The princess is pregnant with no memory of how she had become pregnant. Hilarity and bizarre situations arise. Everyone lies to the princess, and she is none the wiser. The mystery pregnancy belly is funny, the tricks and schemes other characters play on the princess are funny, the parts of the witty dialogue I understand are funny. Amnesia princesses serve as solid punchlines, and it’s funny the way my father’s scars are funny.
The scenes change from oceanside to rural village, to palace. Each new scene is a new fruit basket of costumes: red and blue berries, tropical assortment, citrus. Then a lost letter from the lover to the princess surfaces, but it’s written in English. How progressive, I think. My mother reminds me the show was written in the fifties. It was progressive.
The king demands a translator, and the fake father lies about having a son who can read English. The princess, dressed as a man, doesn’t know she can translate her lover’s letter until she was put on the spot. And yet, she doesn’t know it was written for her. even words are stolen from princesses.
Once, when I was offered a part, my mother declined for me, explaining that I had an American-girl accent. Chinese comes out of me as if words are cheap, as if I can say anything I want because my syllables are softened and feathered. My American-girl accent is passable at dinner and for small talk, but not for the stage. It was easier to straighten my brother’s Chinese than to have me relearn how to speak my first language, a language English teachers forced me to renounce. The most I ever did for an opera show was volunteer as usher.
The amnesia princess eventually regains her memory as her lover serenades her. The king, her father, successfully gives her away. I wonder, if I’d lived in her time, if my father would have given me away as easily too. They marry, but she never seeks revenge on the people who played tricks on her, schemed against her, used her. I think, if I were an amnesia princess, I’d be a good girl like her. I would make a good, solid punchline as a girl who sits quietly in a theater seat, a girl who sits across from Dr. Ho in a well-lit restaurant and does not speak a word at dinner, a girl who does not put herself between her father and fried shrimp, or fried chicken, or greased duck.
Steffi Sin is a Chinese-American writer from San Francisco, and she is currently working on her MFA in creative writing at Arizona State University. Her work has been published by Hyphen Magazine and is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review. She is Nonfiction Editor of Hayden’s Ferry Review.
Great work Steffi and it’s interesting to see how you and your brother have gone through those funny Chinese Opera days with your parents, and I can imagine how entertaining it has been. However I do believe that your dad should have been very proud of his devoted see lie clique.
As soon as I read the title and the first part of the article, I can’t help asking myself have I been giving my American born kids our Chinese heritage or planting the seeds deep enough to someday arouse their interest in searching the root of their parents’ upbringing. We are ordinarily white-collar working class from Hong Kong who have no or little interest or skills in Chinese performing arts. Well, my husband does enjoy watching the Cantonese Operas (though there’s a new trend of calling them Cantonese Qixu to distinguish the uniqueness of Chinese’s singing and action performance from the western opera) but I tried to stay away from it as much as I can since I have the perception or misperception that this is a non-fashionable entertainment with loud but unpleasant cymbals and drums and cliché stories that belongs to my parents’ generation. I do have a few friends of my age who loves this art but is impressed by the endeavor of the author’s parents to involve her and her brother in it and the desire to pass along their passion and heritage to them.
It’s interesting to see from the perspective of the author, an American born Chinese (ABC), on the plot of the Amnesia Princess and how she blends the family’s attendance and watching of the performance to bring out the theme of her love with her father. How the parting of the heroine and hero of the opera is no comparison of the parting of a daughter to her father had the medical emergency that strike the father turned into a real tragedy a couple of years ago. How the supposedly glamours costumes that go with the flow of the story impressed the author with colors of fruits. And how the heroine goes easy after regaining her memory and no repercussion or backlash on the tricks and punchlines played on her during the time she lost the memory of her true identity and lover. And finally, drawing the comparison of the happy ending and great love of the heroine to the author’s own love to her dad by letting him indulge in the unhealthy food that he craved for rather than be in his way, despite she still has a bad feeling towards the family doctor’s inability to detect her father’s health issues earlier.
Though I’m not personally into Chinese opera, I am impressed with the author’s ability to tell a good story with the backdrop of an opera performance. I’m sure my kids and us have no Chinese performance arts to share in common, but the theme of parent’s and child’s love is perpetual, and hopefully, our family movie going for Harry Porter’s series may bring us some comfort though I do wish there could be some Chinese elements in it for them. This article is a pleasure to read.