6 - The Qin opera and the ballad: from rebellious daughters to social mothers

Summary

In the fall of 1944, Yuan Jing, a young female teacher from Longdong Middle School (Longdong zhongxue 陇东中学), was called to Yan'an for her political background check. While in Yan'an she read the article “Ma Xiwu's Way of Judging” and was deeply attracted to the story of the marriage dispute. She subsequently drafted a libretto based on this article and titled it Liu Qiao'er Goes to the Law (Liu Qiao'er gaozhuang). The libretto was immediately set to music by a group of young students who were lovers of local opera (Qinqiang 秦腔, Shaanxi opera) and staged in early 1945. In the following years, the opera was performed many times in Yan'an and its surrounding areas. Shortly after, a blind local troubadour named Han Qixiang (1915–89), who listened to someone recount the opera, created his own version of the story of Liu Qiao'er in ballad form and brought it to an even broader region of the SGNBR. Han not only changed the title to “Liu Qiao's Reunion” (Liu Qiao tuanyuan) but also modified the story with his own interpretations. This ballad, combined with Yuan's version, later became the foundation for a new opera and a film in the 1950s, which will be discussed in Chapter 7.

The appearance of these cultural products indicates that the case of Feng v. Zhang was not confined within legal realm as a “pure” legal issue, but extended to a broader social sphere for a new interpretation. Yuan Jing reshaped Peng'er's story into a cultural model of womanhood in the political and cultural environment of the 1940s’ SGNBR. The activities of Yuan and many other educated youth were the part of the CCP's cultural positioning project, as in Anyuan, helping the party to promote the idea of self-determination and to mobilize rural women for the marriage reform. Moreover, by using various forms of cultural products for the revolutionary purpose, the party also was able to attract a number of talented youth to cultural production. Thus this chapter also addresses how this model reflected the mentality of the educated youth of the post-May Fourth generation in viewing the relationship between family and state, and their identity in the revolutionary state.