I never thought I'd be into Chinese Opera

My wife took me to a Chinese opera last night (Jingju Magic, part of the George Town Festival). I thought it was gonna be a drag but one of the stories had more drama than a daytime soap opera. This one guy called Zhuangzi married a woman and 3 months in, decided to go into the mountains to practise Taoism for 10 years. Then  he came back, faked his own death, pretended to be a rich young Jackson Wang-looking fella to seduce his wife and test her faithfulness. When, she fell for him, he's like, "Ugh! I have a terrible headache and I will die unless I eat the brains of your dead husband."

So she goes, "WHUT! You're kidding, right? You don't wanna like, try a Panadol or something first?"

He was like, "No, trust me bro. I need brains, if not, I'm dead by breakfast."

She's like, "Geez! Um, okay. I must say, this is highly irregular, but I suppose since he's dead, he doesn't have any use for his brains anymore..."

And he goes, "Aha! I caught you! You slut! You whore! It's me, Zhuangzi."

And then she kills herself, and he's like, "Ah, crud!"

I'm not even translating it that loosely. Google the guy. You'll see. Not even sure what the moral of the story is. Even the opera people wrapped it up as - this is a sad tragedy and we're not sure what it all means and we're not touching that with a ten-foot pole. But seeing as how the guy is supposedly some renowned philosopher, it would not surprise me if in the old days the moral was - look at this horrible horrible woman and don't be like her. To be fair, I thought she could have asked a few more questions when he said he needed to eat human brains, but that could be my modern sensibilities talking.

The other story was just a simple revenge story called Avenging Zi Du, about dead people asking to go back to the mortal world to scare the shit out of people who have wronged them, and just like modern revenge stories, it has that little bit of "revenge won't bring you peace" disclaimer thrown in there as an afterthought but they know and the audience knows we are all just there for the sweet sweet revenge at the end.

#gtf2024 #jingjumagic

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