Goddess of the Luo River: Selected Plays by Wang Haiping

Copyright © 2014 by Wang Haiping.

Coordinator: Li Lingyun.

Library of Congress Control Number:         2014902915

ISBN:                  Hardcover                        978-1-4931-3691-9

                            Softcover                          978-1-4931-3692-6

                            Ebook                               978-1-4931-3693-3

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Rev. date: 03/17/2014

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Contents

Cai Yuanpei

Setting the Capital in Peking

Skybridge

The Goddess of the Luo River

Wu Duomei

Yellow Leaves, Red Mansion

Cai Yuanpei

A Musical

Written in Chinese by Wang Haiping

Translated into English by Ouyang Yu

The topic and the theme:

The New Culture Movement has a far-reaching impact in the modern history of China. Back then, the New Culture Movement, as the ideological foundation of the May Fourth Movement, played a role in ideological enlightenment and liberation. While the May Fourth Movement became the explicit state and the political form of radical revolution, its hidden state and the movement of comprehensive social forms at a deeper level are continuing, and the cultural modernising movement is also continuing as the shifting spirit and spiritual support of modernisation in China. As China is in the process of change, moving from a xiaokang society to a more affluent society, the central government has offered the challenge of great development and great prosperity that requires us to look back at history and to rethink on an ideological and cultural level. The thinking style, therefore, of Cai Yuanpei in the New Culture Movement is a typical su bject.

In the New Culture Movement, Cai Yuanpei’s propositions were not the main theme. But today they seem to explicate the comprehensiveness and profundity of the New Culture in exactly the right way. Mr Cai Yuanpei’s guidelines in running a university by replacing religion with aesthetics in an all-inclusive manner, his idea of running the country through education, and his concept of culture involving a philosophy of life are strongly relevant and realistically significant today. The spirit of university and the concepts of culture, as expressed in the New Culture Movement, exert a long-term enlightening influence in shaping the nation’s spirit and character.

In memory of the late sage and in an attempt to reconstruct the history, we have produced this musical as a way of feeling the broad-mindedness, far-sightedness, personality, and spirit of Mr Cai Yuanpei, shown in the New Culture Movement, to encourage and enlighten us in an even more enthusiastic and rational furtherance of great cultural development and prosperity as well as the revival of the whole nation.

The script: Each singing section is introduced by using opera terminology.

Time: Around the May Fourth Movement, in the period of the Republic of China

Place: Peking, West Lake, Hangzhou, and a certain place in Europe

Cast:

Cai Yuanpei: Then president of Peking University

Chen Duxiu: Editor-in-chief of New Youth and also a Peking University professor

Li Dazhao: Professor of Peking University

Gu Hongming: Conservative teacher of English

Hu Shi: Professor of Peking University and promoter of the written vernacular Chinese

Lin Qinnan: Conservative writer

Huang Zhongyu: Cai Yuanpei’s second wife

Zhou Jun: Cai Yuanpei’s third wife

Xu Beihong and Wang Xinkui: Professors of Peking University

Wang Kunlun: Student of Peking University

Wang Lan and other women students: First Peking University women students

The special commissioner, the Northern Warlords A and B, a group of students, military police, and prostitutes

Prelude

[This is the year 1916, before the Red Building, Peking University.]

[Students, wearing gowns and Mandarin jackets, in twos and threes, walk out of their classrooms. As Student A looks around, an attendant comes up and makes a bow, with his hands folded in front. A rickshaw is waiting nearby.]

Attendant [full of respect]: Your honour, I’m so worthless that I have come late.

[Student A pays no attention as he boards the rickshaw, followed close on his heels by the attendant.]

[The rest of them boo and hoot.]

Student B [in imitation of the attendant]: Ah, I’m so worthless that I have come late. Ha ha!

The group of students: Ha ha ha.

Scherzo ensemble [ ‘Drinking and Enjoying Music, with a Great Future of Officialdom’]:

Here is a university

That’s actually a vanity fair

Where people go for fame

As they do for a name

Reading for the time being

And hoping to crown themselves with the thing

Making friends while drinking and poetrying

Looking out for one’s own townspeople, enjoying music amidst the flowers

A university

Of vanity

Where you drink and enjoy music, with a great future of officialdom

[Situational dance: ‘A Happy University’]

[A representation of pomposity involving sworn brothers, card playing, flowery wine eating (a euphemism for going to dinner parties), and whore visiting on the part of old Peking University students.]

Act I, Scene i:

New Winds of Change

[In 1917, in front of the Red Building auditorium, where students, in twos and threes, are walking towards the auditorium. Cai Yuanpei goes onto the stage on his way to the auditorium, singing as he walks.]

Cai Yuanpei sings:

This imperial university of Peking

Is so well known at home and abroad

I am full of anxiety as I am about to take office

There are talented people everywhere under heaven

And it’s here they assert themselves

The campus, though small, is well connected in Cathay

Where a classroom resembles a martial field

And people seek the truth high and low

Determined to write new chapters

Putting all their hesitation behind themselves

And treading the waves on the strength of their hot blood

Student Group sings:

They say we’ve got a new president

Who, a revolutionary party member in the past,

Had carried a gun and made assassination attempts

Bang, bang, bang!

He, third best in the National Civil Examinations, went overseas

Overseas, overseas, overseas!

Now, the backwater of the Swallow Garden will be stirred

And the old Red Building will change its features,

Its features, its features, its features!

[Scene now changes to the inside of the auditorium, where Cai Yuanpei is giving his inaugural speech while Student Group, in the audience, is whispering among themselves.]

Cai Yuanpei sings:

This is an academic palace

That keeps the veins of literature age-old, alive in Peking

Where, as Western learning gradually seeps into the university,

There are reformation and transformation in a culture that changes

With surging new thoughts from a boundless sea of studies

Now it’s as much time for the waking of the insects, accompanied by the spring thunder

As for the thriving of literature, like the growth of grasses in March

When one should treasure every second in being industrious

And tolerant, with a heart that embraces the world

The prosperity of China

Lies in its culture that needs to be revived

With the enlightenment of new learning to strengthen the nation

And harmony achieved when heart hankers after beauty

One, though, must avoid treating the university as a corridor of power

As it may very likely to become one of corruption

After all, sores have grown in the world itself

Where people are vying with each other for power and profit

Each trying to cheat or outwit the other, engaging in malpractice

Without knowing that power and profit is much shorter-lived than learning

For there in the heart is a plan made for a hundred years

Full of spirit that lasts

Everyone of you, now, need to read thousands of books

Cultivating yourselves with a solid foundation

That’s where people of ideals and integrity come from

A towering palace hundred years long!

[Thunderous applause ]

Student Group sings in multiple duets ‘This President Is Different’:

This president is different

Who seems an entirely otherworldly being

Not interested in enjoying a life of food and sex

But insistent that we must all study hard regardless

This is a confused world running with human desires

In which the black gauze cap is valued over mere literature

Oh, boy!

Mr Gu, stop strolling in the red-light Eight Alleys

And, foreign professors, no more frivolities please in Peking

This president is different

So inclusive that we have to be careful with him

[Scene changes to a brothel that Gu Hongming is visiting. The prostitutes, in red or green, cluster around Gu in various postures, preening themselves. Gu, in a long gown and a mandarin jacket, has a pigtail that reaches down to his waist.]

Gu Hongming sings:

I pay everyone a buck

But each has a hundred charms

With tender feelings for me to taste

The world is in chaos, but here things settle down

The human heart is a piece of dirt, but a brothel is clean and cool

Who gives a damn if I go wild here, in tears

Wearing my old garments and long tail, my bones all proud

China is a country with strong roots

No need to kowtow to the West

Its people, though, lacking self-respect

Would have reduced Confucius and ancient saints to sadness

Let me utter a long and loud cry to the sky over a cup of wine

And wash my intestines of sorrow amidst the flowers

Ha ha ha ha!

[Gu swaggers off as he scatters a handful of silver dollars. The prostitutes pick them up as they stare at this monster. When Gu bumps into two English professors, he hardly even glances at them and leaves in style.]

English Professor A sings:

That is the foreign Li Sao.

English Professor B sings:

Exactly right, the one who speaks nine languages.

Professors A and B sing in chorus:

A guy who comes and goes in a strange fashion,

One preferring to go mad, who’s nevertheless not into sex.

A few students join in:

Yuanpei is organising a carnival

As gods and monsters stream into the school

Who cares how the Red Building goes

As long as we have fun in a sex cave!

[They, in pairs, go behind the bed curtains.]

[Scene changes to the president’s office, where Cai Yuanpei decides to sack two professors who have visited a brothel with their students, and he rejects the plea from the British envoy in Peking.]

Cai Yuanpei: They, as a model for others, must be dismissed from office as it is a brazen breach of the university rules.

British Envoy: As far as I am aware, there are many more of them at Peking University. What about Gu Hongming?

Cai Yuanpei: Mr Gu, by nature, is different as he is a playboy of the mind, not of the body.

British Envoy: All right ! We’ll see how much longer you can last as the president of the university!

[British Envoy storms out in a huff.]

[A new notice is put out at the Red Building with the president’s recommendation that a moral welfare society be established.]

Cai Yuanpei: It does not stand to reason that the Ministry of Education has wanted to change the decisions made at Peking University on a number of occasions just because the Englishman has informed against Yuanpei at the Ministry.

He sings:

This is Peking University

And this is China!

How can they disregard the law here?

While Western learning could serve as my master

It is not one of hegemony!

I must clean up the university to warn them all

As the students need morality

Aside: A moral welfare society has got to be established shortly to promote three noes: no whoring around, no gambling, and no concubine taking. So they pay attention to their studies and become useful soon.

Student Group sings in duets ‘First Three Forbiddances and Second Three Forbiddances’:

No gambling, no whoring around, and no concubine taking

Just as Mencius says:

Everyone is a Yao or a Shun, our legendary sages

As they study diligently

With no time to visit the flowers in the brothels

Then they have to quit smoking and quit drinking the wine or tea

Studying and living like a monk

For there is much Zen in a poor and bitter style of living

Or should one go and ask our saint in his study?

Ha ha ha

Hi hi hi

Aye aye aye . . .

[Scene changes to a hotel at Qianmen, where Cai Yuanpei and Chen Duxiu meet.]

[There are people around discussing the war in Europe, to which both Cai and Chen are listening. Cai can’t help making a comment that Europeanisation of China has been going on for over sixty years,