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• 1 media/CTC_GuanBG.png 2024-10-31T10:49:07+00:00 Rescuing One’s Sister in the Wind and Dust (2021) 49 plain 2025-06-25T16:07:11+00:00

  Anglophone Spoken Drama
  Playwright: Amy Ng

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  LINKS TO THE PERFORMANCE

  • The Anglophone play, performed as a semi-staged reading, is streaming on YouTube.

  INFORMATION

  • Title: Rescuing One’s Sister in the Wind and Dust
  • Year: 2021
  • Direction: Anthony Lau
  • Adaptation: Amy Ng
  • Style: Semi-staged reading; spoken drama
  • Based on the play by: Guan Hanqing
  • Cast: Elizatheth Chan (as Pan’er), Frances Mayli Mccann (as Yinzhang), James Cooney (as Zhou She), Sky Yang (as Scholar An), Lourdes Faberes (as Mother Song/Innkeeper), Kwong Loke (as Judge/Slacker), Crystal Yu (as Ghost), Siu-see Hung (as Ghost), and Jennifer Lim (as Ghost)
  • Composer and Sound Designer: Benjamin Grant
  • Lighting Designer: Fraser Craig
  • Recording and editing: Robin Fisher
  • Venue: Almeida Theatre
  • Language: English
  • Duration: 83 minutes

  INTRODUCTION

  In 2012, the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) decided to diversify their repertoire of non-Western plays. They commissioned a famous British writer and academic, James Fenton (b. 1949), to undertake an adaptation of the Chinese classical play The Orphan of Zhao. The RSC staged the production as part of the A World Elsewhere season in 2012-13. The artistic director was Gregory Doran, and the stage designer Nikki Turner. This was the first time ever that the RSC had staged a Chinese play, but their dubious casting choices overshadowed the reception of the play, bringing to the fore issues of racial-ethnic theatrical representation. Even though the performance was “situated as an intercultural adaptation,” and was billed as “a creative response to various aspects of Chinese culture,” accusations of cultural imperialism and orientalism were leveled at the RSC (Rogers and Thorpe, “A Controversial Company,” 430). One critic incisively remarks, “Fenton has appropriated a piece of Chinese literature. Niki Turner’s design indulges in non-specific Chinoiserie. And while claiming universality through their multi-ethnic casting, Doran has relegated East Asians to non-agential, subservient, and voiceless roles on the margins of their own story. In this way, The Orphan of Zhao is a colonialist project” (Chow, “Here is a Story For Me,” 515).
  
  Sensitive to the criticism incurred by The Orphan of Zhao controversy, the RSC revamped their approach and launched the Chinese Classics Translation Project 中國經典戲劇翻譯項目. With major grant funding, RSC commissioned playwrights with Asian roots to prepare new adaptations of ten classical Chinese plays. Among other writers, Amy Ng, a British-Hongkong playwright and screenwriter, with prior plays such as Under the Umbrella (2019), Acceptance (2018), Shangri-la (2016) and a new adaptation of Strindberg’s Miss Julie (2020) to her credit, was given a commission. Ng chose to adapt Zhao Pan’er with Romance Saves a Courtesan (Zhao Pan’er fengyue jiu fengchen 趙盼兒風月救風塵), a Yuan dynasty zaju play.
  
  Born in Australia, Ng grew up in Hong Kong and then went on to study in the US. Having received her B.A. and M.A. in history at Yale, she moved to the UK and earned her doctoral degree in modern history at the University of Oxford. Reflective of her research interests in multinational empires, imperial decline, and national conflict, her monograph Nationalism and Political Liberty: Redlich, Namier, and the Crisis of Empire (2004) was published by Oxford University Press. She lived in Germany for several years to conduct postdoctoral research before she moved back to London and shifted her career path to theater. She is fluent in English, Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese), and German. Her multicultural, multilingual, and scholarly upbringing makes her enthusiastic about intercultural exchange; translating and adapting Chinese plays into English is one important outlet for this enthusiasm. As difficult as it is to get across dramatic subtext in different languages and make a play work within the different theatrical conventions of a different culture, Ng enjoys the challenge and regularly translates Chinese plays into English to make them accessible to Western audiences (“The Writers’ Room,” 2021). Therefore, when the RSC provided her a translator (as they always do with “world language” plays) as part of the commission, Ng made no use of their translation and used her own instead.
  
  Attributed to Guan Hanqing 關漢卿, the greatest playwright active in the latter half of the thirteenth century, Saving a Courtesan is one of Ng’s favorite plays for several reasons. First, it features women who do not conform to their expected social roles and celebrates honor, loyalty, love, and solidarity among courtesans. The subversive proto-feminist voices found in a classical Chinese play written eight hundred years ago break the stereotype of Chinese culture as innately misogynic and the lazy assumption that feminism is a Western ideology. The play is evidence that “all cultures contain heterodox voices within their traditions” (Ng 2023). Second, it is a comedy, which helps to showcase the diversity of Chinese drama to be more than just tragic, melodramatic, or nationalistic, as has long been assumed by Western audiences. Finally, it is a perfectly structured play in terms of stagecraft with four acts unfolding the exposition, development, climax, and finally denouement of the plotline (“The Writers’ Room,” 2021).
  
  Since Ng considers Saving a Courtesan a perfect play, her overall approach is to “hew to the original as closely as possible” (Ng 2023). Saving a Courtesan has two extant editions – the Famed Ancient Masters 古名家 edition and Select Yuan Plays 元曲選edition, both dating to the Ming dynasty, but featuring divergent endings. Ng’s adaptation is based on the Famed Ancient Masters edition, which is closer to the original text in the sense that it is more subversive than the play’s other extant edition. Although she adapted the text in a naturalistic “spoken drama” manner to accommodate the theatrical training available to actors in the UK, Ng’s adaptation retains the main plot, the four-act structure, and all the characters of the original. Mindful of the fact that Western mainstream theater audiences may lack the necessary background knowledge about Chinese culture and literature to assess the significance of certain aspects of the play, Ng made careful and strategic alterations to help fill in the gaps. For example, she added a framing device by setting the play in a nightclub in Shanghai in the late 1930s under military occupation. This frame story helped contemporary Western audiences to understand the life of courtesans in the Yuan dynasty when China was under Mongol occupation by resorting to a historical allegory that was more familiar to global audiences (i.e., 1930s Shanghai). Moreover, Ng modified existing characters and added new ones in an effort to introduce cultural, historical, and geographical background information that was difficult to translate directly in a play. From a proto-feminist perspective, Saving a Courtesan subverts serval dominant tropes in Chinese literature. The biggest challenge in the transculturation of the play, then, was making Western audiences aware that Guan Hanqing subverts archetypes that are well known to Chinese audiences. As Amy Ng puts it, “To appreciate the subversion, one needs to know what they are subverting” (Ng 2023).
  
  Among all the changes, the most consequential is the addition of a trio of ghosts of former courtesans. In this module, we will analyze how the three ghosts play the key role of an intercultural bridge that closes the gap between this Chinese classical play and its new audiences. Not only do these ghosts provide necessary contextual information, but they also create opportunities for the audience to understand how the play subverts different archetypes, thus helping them appreciate the beauty and power of this classical piece.

  PLOT SUMMARY

  The framing narrative brackets the entire play with a prologue in the beginning and an epilogue in the end. The play begins in a 1930s-night club in Shanghai during a military curfew where Pan’er and Yinzhang are singers entertaining a group of male patrons; they sing Marlene Dietrich’s song “Illusions.” After the song is finished, the patrons insist on hearing one more story before the party breaks up for the night, and Pan’er has to oblige with a “ghost story,” thus leading into the main plot of Rescuing One’s Sister, a tale about courtesans in ancient China. The context of the “Shanghai nightclub” familiarizes audiences with the material, making a 13th century story palatable by reframing it in terms of a certain romantic notion of Shanghai that cosmopolitan London audiences will likely have a good knowledge of from consuming contemporary media. Marlene Dietrich and her song further contextualizes the profession of Pan’er and Yinzhang for the audience. A German American actress and singer, Dietrich was one of the most popular film and music stars in the 1930s and 1940s. She played a courtesan in Shanghai Express, a 1932 American film set in China during the civil war. “Illusions” is a song from the 1948 film A Foreign Affair, in which Dietrich played an ex-Nazi café singer in post-war Berlin, her profession similar to what Pan’er and Yinzhang do for a living.
  
  In Act 1 (diegetically, the beginning of the 1930’s Pan’er’s “ghost story”), the setting shifts to the Song dynasty capital Kaifeng in 13h century China during the seventh month in Chinese lunar calendar. Yinzhang, a star courtesan, falls in love with Zhou She, a wealthy and handsome playboy. She accepts his marriage proposal on the Lover’s Festival (seventh day of seventh month) despite Madam Song’s —Yinzhang’s loving but indulgent mother— concerns about this match. As the Ghost Festival also takes place in the seventh month (on the 15th day of seventh month), Yinzhang’s sworn sister, Pan’er, concurrently prepares food offerings to feed the ghosts of former courtesans, presences invisible to all but herself. Scholar An, another suitor of Yinzhang’s and an impoverished playwright, is devastated upon hearing the news of Yinzhang’s marriage. He begs Pan’er to talk Yinzhang out of her impending union with Zhou She. Pan’er warns Yinzhang about Zhou She’s dubious character and the risks of marrying a playboy. Smitten with Zhou and determined to become a respectable woman through marriage, Yinzhang ignores Pan’er’s warnings. She marries Zhou anyway and leaves Kaifeng to live with Zhou in Zhengzhou. Pan’er foresees that Yinzhang’s marriage will not last long and she tells Scholar An to stay in Kaifeng to wait for Yinzhang, a proposal to which An agrees.
  
  In Act 2, several months later, Yinzhang finds her married life miserable, as Zhou She turns out to be an abusive husband. What’s worse, he would rather beat Yinzhang to death than divorce her and set her free. Desperate and afraid for her life, Yinzhang secretly sends a letter to Pan’er pleading for help. In Kaifeng, after being harassed by a client, Pan’er broods over whether or not she should retire, confiding her frustrations to the ghost courtesans, who function both as a theatrical chorus and a group of girlfriends with whom Pan’er can mull over life’s problems. Yinzhang’s letter arrives during their discussion. Pan’er is still angry with Yinzhang for ignoring her advice, but the ghost courtesans remind her of her vows of sworn sisterhood. Concerned about Yinzhang and her mother, Pan’er hatches a plan to rescue her sister.
  
  In Act 3, together with her ghost sisters, Pan’er travels to Zhengzhou to rescue Yinzhang. There, they find Scholar An, who had promised Pan’er to stay in Kaifeng. He is getting kicked out of an inn in Zhengzhou on account of his overdue rent. Having spent all his money on a prostitute, he is totally penniless and flees the scene. Meanwhile, having arrived in the town, Pan’er seduces Zhou She and promises to marry him if he divorces Yinzhang. Unable to resist Pan’er’s charms and eager to take possession of the rich dowry she brings, Zhou She agrees to divorce Yinzhang.
  
  In Act 4, Zhou She signs a divorce paper only to find that both “wives” have left. Realizing that he has been duped, Zhou chases after them all the way to Kaifeng and hauls them into court presided over by Judge Bao, the wisest and most impartial judge in Chinese literature. Zhou She insists that the divorce paper is forged and that the law protects the rights of the husband. To support Yinzhang, the ghosts show up in front of Judge Bao and accuse Zhou She of murder, but their testimony is dismissed because of the marginal status of courtesan-prostitutes. At that critical moment, Pan’er makes up a story that Yinzhang had been engaged to Scholar An, but was abducted by Zhou She. With this tall tale, she successfully convinces Judge Bao to decide that Zhou is guilty of violating the marital rights of the scholar. Yinzhang finally gets rid of Zhou She. In the epilogue, the setting shifts back to the night club in 1930s Shanghai, where the singer, Pan’er, finishes her story and sings one more song.

  THEME: GHOSTS AS AN INTERCULTURAL BRIDGE BETWEEN A CHINESE CLASSICAL PLAY AND CONTEMPORARY WESTERN AUDIENCES

  Ghosts and Lovers: The Significance of Time
  
  The temporal setting—the seventh month in the traditional Chinese calendar (roughly July) in the Prologue and in Act 1— facilitates the introduction of the ghosts into the play, as the seventh month is when the Ghost Festival (Yulanpen jie 盂蘭盆節) takes place. The holiday is somewhat analogous to the ghostly character of Halloween and All Souls holidays in the Christian and Western calendar. In Act 1, Pan’er prepares food and invites ghost courtesans to partake of these food offerings, thus ushering three new ghostly characters into the play (they do not appear in the original).
  
  During the Ghost Festival, it is customary to offer food to the dead to appease their souls. The living and the dead are connected as members of the same community through this act of “eating.” Pan’er’s generous treatment of the ghosts, despite her own financial straits, shows her compassionate character. She cares about her courtesan sisters even after their death and feeds them so that they do not suffer as so-called hungry ghosts, that is, the deceased who have been forgotten. Warmly received, the ghost courtesans do not talk or appear as alien or scary creatures, but rather, they act like affectionate sisters. Their jovial conversation over food is lighthearted and engaging. Although dead, they are foodies with a robust appetite. Reminiscent of the rich banquet dishes they often enjoyed in the past, Pan’er’s home cooked offerings make them happy and grateful. They mention fancy dishes like “lobsters steamed over a bed of shiitake mushrooms,” “eight treasure duck stuffed with red dates and pearl barley,” “plum blossom wine,” “the tender neck of a suckling pig,” and “tofu and mashed fish,” all culturally marked as Chinese, but legible as delicacies to anyone with a passing familiarity with Chinese cuisine. Enumerating the names of dishes has been a popular entertainment in China since at least the Song dynasty (960-1279) and can still be found  in modern comic shows such as cross-talk (xiangsheng 相聲). With this culinary banter, the ghost courtesans are not permanently separated from the living by death; rather, they are members connected to a community of sisters.
  
  
  In addition, the seventh month is also when the Festival of the Weaving Goddess (zhinü 織女), or the Lover’s Festival (qixi 七夕), takes place. Thus, the temporal setting not only helps introduce the ghost courtesans into the story, but also neatly connects two important motifs – love and death – as two sides of the same coin. It is easy for the audience to see the irony: Yinzhang accepts Zhou She’s marriage proposal on the day of the Lover’s Festival hoping for a happy life ever after, but as the romance transpires during the Ghost Month, an extremely inauspicious time for weddings, she in fact places herself in acute danger of becoming an errant ghost. This fate almost comes to pass on account of the spousal abuse she goes on to endure. The flip side of love in the courtesan quarters is thus not “happily ever after” but death. As Pan’er says in the play’s prologue, she is telling a love story that is also a ghost story. The play involves romantic love and marriage, but its thematic treatment of these ideas debunks them as fateful illusions. Ng’s choice of temporal settings gives Western audiences an opportunity to learn about two traditional Chinese festivals that correspond to love and death and seamlessly integrates the festivals into the core conflicts of the play.
  
  Ghost Guides: A Play of Two Cities
  Kaifeng, where Yinzhang and Pan’er live, is the capital of China in the 10th century. Zhengzhou is a military garrison governed by Zhou She’s father. These are the two main settings of the play. When Yinzhang moves from Kaifeng to Zhengzhou to marry Zhou She and when Pan’er travels from Kaifeng to Zhengzhou to rescue Pan’er, the ghosts travel with them and provide commentary on the two cities. In this way, the ghosts help introduce Kaifeng and Zhengzhou by providing social, geographical, and historical context to audiences who might otherwise be unfamiliar with these two places. Furthermore, their observations also help reveal the values that the two cities stand for symbolically, and then, to subvert this value hierarchy. Kaifeng, a grand city of both splendor and moral decay, initially symbolizes chaos and dissipation that both Yinzhang and Pan’er are eager to escape from. In contrast, Zhengzhou symbolizes order and respectability that the two courtesans aspire to. Yet as the plot unfolds, a second layer of meaning is revealed: despite its moral decay, Kaifeng also symbolizes freedom and female agency, while Zhengzhou, as orderly and respectable as it may seem, stands for control and male dominance.
  
  In Act 1, Yinzhang leaves from Kaifeng for Zhengzhou, determined to become a respectable woman. The ghosts accompanying her tell stories about the miseries they suffered after they married into big families, foreshadowing the gloomy prospects for Yinzhang’s new marriage.
  
  In Act 3, Pan’er travels from Kaifeng to Zhengzhou to rescue Yinzhang from her disastrous marriage. The ghosts’ comments about Zhengzhou as they enter the city make Pan’er realize how endearing Kaifeng, a place she once called a “pisspot,” actually is. She concludes that “better [to be] a hungry ghost in the Old Capital than this death in life here, buried in the mansions with deep courtyards and high walls.” In other words, it is better to be a courtesan of base status in Kaifeng than to be a married, respectable woman entrapped by oppressive patriarchy in Zhengzhou.
  
  Ghost Critics of the Play Within the Play: Subverting the Archetypal Romance
  
  Romance between the talented scholar and the good courtesan (caizi jiaren 才子佳人) is one of the archetypal love stories and marriage plots in popular Chinese performance genres. The archetypal story is typically centered on a love triangle among the talented, impoverished scholar, the beautiful, pure-hearted courtesan, and the wealthy, stupid merchant, usually facilitated by a greedy and manipulative madam. The courtesan is devoted to the scholar, but the madam forces the courtesan to abandon the poor scholar and marry the rich vulgar merchant. The romance between the scholar and the courtesan is typically consummated by the scholar’s success in the civil examination and the courtesan’s marriage into his respectable family, with the merchant humiliated and the madam dismissed. The most well-known examples of the genre are a ballad (zhugongdiao 諸宮調) about the story of scholar Shuang Jian 雙漸 and the courtesan Su Xiaoqing 蘇小卿 as well as a zaju play about the story of scholar Zheng Yuanhe 鄭元和 and the courtesan Li Yaxian  李亞仙. In Saving a Courtesan, Guan Hanqing subverts this archetype and reveals that to most courtesans, romantic love is an illusion and marriage is a trap. In the spoken drama, Ng turns Scholar An into a hack playwright who has just finished writing an opera based precisely on this archetypical story. His opera is scheduled to be performed during the Ghost Festival as entertainment for the ghosts, meaning that the ghost courtesans who comprise the play’s chorus are supposed to be the play’s primary audience. When Scholar An proudly introduces his play to Pan’er, the audience is given an opportunity to get acquainted with the gist of this Chinese literary and dramatic archetype. Meanwhile, the ghosts, invisible to Scholar An, ruthlessly mock the plot of his play. Rather than swooning over the tale of a talented literatus “getting the girl,” they laugh at An’s predictable plotting and generic prose, deflating the romantic notion that male literary success can rescue a courtesan from her fate.
  
  In response to Scholar An’s exalted description of the scholar and the courtesan, the ghosts’ smutty refutation is cutting and hilarious and mirrors the vernacular language register of the original play: “AN: He brims with poetry and history. … GHOST: He brims with shit, for sure;” “AN: but her heart is pure as a lotus blossom. … GHOST: Whore with a lotus heart?” “An: They play chess and make music together. … GHOST: Is that all they’re making together?” The ghosts’ trenchant tit-for-tat mockery effectively exposes the emptiness of the archetype as a self-willed fantasy by the scholar-playwright who turns a blind eye to the real conditions of courtesan-prostitutes.
  
  In addition to lambasting his play, the ghosts also ridicule Student An’s self-aggrandizing and infatuation with Yinzhang. In their eyes, he is not a talented scholar or playwright, but merely a “gullible idiot,” whereas Yinzhang, with her “crooked teeth” and “orange peel skin,” is neither beautiful nor has “a lotus heart.” The archetypal romance is doubly debunked both in the play itself and in the play-within-the play. Before the audience finishes the play and sees how this archetypal romance is parodied through Student An and Yinzhang’s “romance” in Rescuing One’s Sister itself, they first get acquainted with the relevant generic tropes in Act 1 through the introduction of the play-within-the-play and the ghosts’ mocking and subversion of Chinese dramatic archetypes. The sharp contrast between the ghosts’ bawdy and unsentimental attitude and Scholar An’s mawkish pedantry elicits bouts of laugher from the audience that can be heard in the recording of the play.
  
  Ghost Sisters: Expanding From Sworn Brotherhood to Sworn Sisterhood
  
  The original Saving a Courtesan celebrates female friendship and presents sworn sisterhood as a contrast to the dominance of sworn brotherhood most famously exemplified by the 14th century novel The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. It is important for western audiences to first learn about sworn brotherhood before they can fully understand the significance of a play that subverts the canonical male-centered concept of friendship. In Act 1, after they complain about Student An’s boring play, the ghosts demand to watch something exciting and bring up the theme of sworn brotherhood. The first ghost suggests a war play with kung fu 功夫 and acrobatics, the second a play about the Monkey King, and the third a play about the three sworn brothers.  
  
  Kung fu (martial arts) is probably the most familiar aspects of Chinese theater to western audiences, and Monkey King (also known as Sun Wukong 孫悟空) is a widely known character in the West thanks to Arthur Waley’s 1942 English translation of the classical novel Journey to the West (Xi you ji 西遊記), titled Monkey. Fewer Western viewers will have heard of the “three sworn brothers” of The Three Kingdoms stories. Now that the “three sworn brothers” are mentioned side by side with kung fu and the Monkey King, audiences at least get the idea that they too are well-known literary figures. Moreover, the significance of sworn brotherhood is underscored by the ghosts reciting “all for one and one for all,” at once a reference to the theme of sworn brotherhood in the Chinese corpus and an evocation the famous phrase deployed in Alexandre Dumas’ Three Musketeers. Chinese fraternal bonds of adventure are thus mediated by a reference to a text well-known to Western audiences and redeployed in feminine terms. The ghosts will reiterate the statement at critical moments later in the play to stress the value of sworn sisterhood.
  
  
  In Act 1, the bond between Yinzhang and Pan’er is ruptured when Yinzhang ignores Pan’er’s warning about Zhou She and even accuses Pan’er of being jealous and controlling. Yinzhang’s ingratitude deeply hurts Pan’er’s feelings. In Act 2, Yinzhang realizes her mistake and sorely regrets it. She writes to Pan’er pleading for rescue from her dire situation. But Pan’er is still angry with Yinzhang and is reluctant to help her. Sworn sisterhood is put to the test, and the ghosts play a crucial role in repairing this ruptured bond.
  
  In Rescuing One’s Sister, the conversation between the ghosts and Pan’er takes the place of Pan’er’s inner debate between her compassion for Yinzhang’s suffering and her anger toward Yinzhang’s lack of gratitude in the original play. Pan’er’s conflicted feelings of sisterly care and indignation that are expressed in arias sung by the leading female in the original zaju play are externalized in her conversation with the ghosts in the spoken drama. The ghosts soothe Pan’er’s anger, underscore the urgency of Yinzhang’s distress, and bring forth her compassion toward Yinzhang and Yinzhang’s mother. They urge Pan’er not to forget her obligation toward her sworn sister. As the ghosts reiterate the credo of “all for one and one for all,” the audience is reminded of sworn brothers and can grasp the analogy between sworn brotherhood and sworn sisterhood immediately. As strong and smart as Pan’er is, she still has her vulnerable moments and needs support from the ghost sisters. When she is not confident enough in her own ability to save Yinzhang from the powerful Zhou She, the ghosts encourage Pan’er by comparing her to the almighty Monkey King. When Pan’er is hesitant, they read Yinzhang’s letter to her again, reminding her that Yinzhang’s life is in danger. The ghost courtesans provide sisterly support and encouragement, thus giving Pan’er the strength to rescue Yinzhang. The ghosts, all former paramours killed by Zhou She, have experienced all the terrible nightmares that Yinzhang and Pan’er have been dreading, so they are particularly empathetic with Yinzhang’s suffering. The sworn sisterhood between Pan’er and Yinzhang withstands the test thanks to the ghost sisters. The ghosts’ deep concern about Yinzhang’s safety and their eager persuasion of Pan’er to rescue their endangered sister further expands female friendship beyond the two sisters to encompass the entire courtesan community.
  
  
  Invalid Ghost Accusation: Subverting the Legal System
  
  In the original zaju play, the judge in the courtroom scene in Act 4 has no name. Neither corrupted nor cruel, he is simply a watchdog of the existing legal system founded on patriarchal hierarchy and male dominance, a fool taken in by a lowly yet shrewd courtesan. The happy ending in Act 4 signals Pan’er’s personal victory thanks to her worldly wisdom. On a somber note, it exposes institutionalized gender inequality and questions the moral justification of the institution of marriage.
  
  To make this point even more explicit, Ng replaces the anonymous judge with Judge Bao, the embodiment of impartial law in Chinese popular literature in her adaptation. In addition, she further uses the ghosts to denounce structural inequality. Neither Yinzhang’s wounds nor her testimony is sufficient to establish Zhou She’s crime, and Judge Bao initially adheres to the law that protects the man’s right to beat his wife. As a result, the ghosts reveal themselves in court, hoping to bring down Zhou She by accusing him of murder. Their appearance, long hair covering their faces, reminds the audience of the female ghost in the movie The Ring (1998), a ghoul who kills people in the most horrible way to seek revenge and appease her soul. Supposedly, the ghosts’ appearance should scare Zhou She the murderer, and their testimony should likewise convince the judge and turn the case around. 
  
  
  But contrary to everyone’s (including the audience’s) expectation, the ghosts are summarily dismissed and their allegations declared invalid by Judge Bao on account of their marginalized social status. Zhou She declares that mere apparitions cannot hurt him. The sharp contrast between the horror the ghosts induce when they first reveal themselves and their deflated expressions upon dismissal runs counter to audience expectations. Unprotected by heavenly justice or human law, ghost courtesans are as vulnerable dead as when they were alive. As scary as they may look, the ghosts do not actually threaten the stability of the patriarchal system in the way people might expect. The audience’s laughter in the recording at this moment underscores that the generic expectation was subverted.
  
  Pan’er astutely sees through the fundamental inequality of the law and thereupon shifts the charge from Zhou She’s crimes against Yinzhang to Zhou’s violation of another man’s right over her. She argues that Zhou stole Yinzhang from a different man, Scholar An. Thanks to Pan’er’s shrewd manipulation of the law, Yinzhang wins the case, and Zhou She is punished. The irony lies in the fact that there is no way for courtesans to protect themselves by legal means even if all the evidence is on their side. They can win only when they plead on behalf of the rights of another man.
  
  The ghosts’ helplessness in the court further stresses that courtesans cannot count on romantic love, marriage, or law for protection; only sisterhood can save them. After the case concludes, Yinzhang decides there will be no wedding. The ghosts recite their credo once more to celebrate female friendship, driving home the major theme of the original zaju play.

  WORKS CONSULTED CLICK TO EXPAND/COLLAPSE

  Chow, Broderick D.V. “Here is a Story For Me: Representation and Visibility in Miss Saigon and The Orphan of Zhao.” Contemporary Theatre Review 24, no. 4 (2014): 507-516.

  Fenton, James. The Orphan of Zhao. London: Faber & Faber, 2012.

  Ng, Amy. “Reflections on Adapting Classical Chinese Plays for a Contemporary Western Audience: Adapting Guan Hanqing’s Wind and Dust for the Royal Shakespeare Company.” For the “In Search of the Sayable: Traditional Chinese Plays, Literary Translations and Stage Performances” Conference at Ohio State University, 13-14 May 2023. Unpublished Conference Paper (used with the permission of the author).

  “Conversation with Amy Ng.” Personal communication with Wenbo Chang and Patricia Sieber. Via ZOOM November 13, 2024.

  "Beyond the Canon: The Writers' Room--In Conversation with Amy Ng.” Posted May 24, 2021, by Beyond the Canon. Youtube, 58 min. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpFwfpaErPE/.

  Rogers, Amanda and Ashley Thorpe. “A Controversial Company: Debating the Casting of the RSC’s The Orphan of Zhao.” Contemporary Theatre Review 24, no. 4 (2014): 428-435.

  AUTHOR

  Wenbo Chang