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An Interview with Kuang-Yu Fong, Founder of China Theatre Works

SONG Chenqing

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SONG Chenqing (Interviewer): It is a great honor to visit your studio today. Seeing the room filled with shadow puppetry equipment feels like stepping into a museum. Thank you very much for accepting our interview. Could you begin by telling us about the history of Chinese shadow puppetry?

Kuang-Yu Fong (Interviewee): Today, people see shadow puppetry mainly as a form of entertainment, but historically it was not like that. Do you know the earliest anecdote associated with shadow puppetry in Chinese history? When Han Emperor Wu¡¯s beloved concubine passed away, he fell into deep sorrow. To ease his grief, his imperial court officials set up a tent at night and asked the emperor to sit outside. An oil lamp inside the tent cast a silhouette, and Emperor Wu felt as though his beloved concubine had returned to see him again. That comforted his spirit.

        When I speak with Americans about puppetry, I explain to them that for thousands of years, the Chinese word for the artform was kuilei (¿þÀÜ). In recent years, however, people have started using ³¾³Ü¡¯´Ç³Ü (ľż), literally ¡°wooden figures,¡± as a general term for all puppets.  But I feel that ¡°³¾³Ü¡¯´Ç³Ü¡± is not appropriate for two reasons. First, referring to puppets as ¡°wooden figures¡± is misleading because puppets can be made out of all sorts of materials: for example shadow figures are primarily made of leather, and string puppets or glove puppets are mostly made of cloth. Nowadays many Chinese people dislike the word kuilei because they associate it with the meaning of being ¡°manipulated.¡± But puppets are, by nature, manipulated objects. I prefer it because the compound character word hints at the historical use of puppets as ritual objects. If you look closely at the first character for kuilei, it combines the characters for ¡°human¡± (ÈË) and the character for ¡°ghost¡± (¹í). The second part of the compound word, ¡°ÀÜ¡± uses the same character  for ¡°human ¡±on the left, combined with the character for ¡°fields.¡± Together these two characters evoke the image of humans in a vast field, giving thanks to, or communicating with, spirits and deities through puppet performance. This illustrates very clearly the Chinese belief that puppet theater is not just about storytelling, but it is also a spiritual and mediumistic practice linking and communicating between the Spiritual and Human planes of existence. This just what Emperor Wu felt when he saw what looked like the silhouette of his beloved¡¯s soul returning to him. 

        Puppet theater has historically served as a medium between humans and the spiritual world, and as a means of comforting the human heart. This understanding of puppetry is not just found in China, but can also be found all over the world. For many years, Stephen and I took part in the Bread and Puppet Theater¡¯s Domestic Resurrection Circus. One of the troupe¡¯s traditions was to burn a giant puppet at the end of a performance. This practice was imbedded in European ritual traditions.

        During the time when Buddhism spreading in China, shadow puppetry was used as a tool for propagating the religious message. By the Song dynasty, China¡¯s economy had become highly developed, and many forms of entertainment flourished, including a rich variety of puppet performances. At that time there were other genres such as water puppets, which are powered by hydraulic mechanisms, which still exist in Vietnam today. It may originally have spread there from China, though it has disappeared in China itself. Another form of puppetry that leaves a trace today is the Song dynasty¡¯s yaofa kuilei (¡°fire-powered puppets¡±), animated by gunpowder blasts. Puppetry arts reached a magnificent peak during the Song dynasty but have since declined.

        While I had never seen traditional shadow theater growing up in Taiwan, I feel extremely fortunate to have learned about this ancient artform from Americans. The first time I encountered it was from my teacher, Jo Humphrey. She had transformed her basement into a rehearsal space, where she was rehearsing ¡°Journey to the West.¡± I was astonished, thinking, ¡°Wow¡ªSun Wukong and Zhu Bajie have immigrated to America before I did.¡±

Song: Is Ms. Humphrey, one of the three American women shadow puppetry artists featured in a special report in Wenhui Daily in 2018? When I read that article, I felt that you shared some similarities, but also had many differences. From Pauline Benton to your teacher Jo Humphrey, and then to you, the three artists each have their own style. How do you think you differ from them?

Fong: Pauline Benton first encountered Chinese shadow puppets at the Field Museum in Chicago, where she saw an exhibition of traditional shadow figures brought back from China by the anthropologist Berthold Laufer. They sparked her curiosity. Later, she traveled to China, and through her aunt, who taught at Yenching University, she managed to contact a local shadow puppetry troupe. Although Benton wanted badly to learn the art, the traditional Chinese performers would not teach her, since at that time, women were not permitted to learn the artform.  She could only watch from the sidelines. But this was enough to help her learn a great deal about the technique and process. She bought a large collection of puppets and brought them back to the United State, where she used them to start her company, the ¡°Red Gate Players.¡± The music was composed by Americans based on their own interpretation of Chinese music. Unfortunately, Pauline left no successor after she died.  After her passing, her shadow puppets sat unused for over twenty years. Eventually, a friend gave them all to Jo Humphrey.

        Ms. Jo Humphrey, had worked on a shadow puppet exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History, featuring a collection of the figures that Laufer had acquired in China. Feeling that it was a pity such beautiful objects was not being used for performance, she spent several months with some friends learning to copy the figures and perform with them. After an initial performance at the United Nations, she was invited to perform at the Museum of American Folk Art in New York¡ªmarking her first paid performance. She went on to establish the ¡°Joyous Dragon Shadow Theater¡± (which later expanded into the Gold Mountain Institute for the Traditional Shadow Theater).

        Jo sourced the leather for making her shadow puppets from drum shops, since drumheads are also made of leather. She also spent many years carefully refurbishing the old shadow puppets from Ms. Benton¡¯s collection. They had gotten stuck together in their 20 years of storage. Jo carefully pulled them apart piece by piece, to clean and reassemble them. I still remember seeing in her office a clothesline on which the carefully restored shadow puppets were hung out to dry.

        When my husband and I took over the Gold Mountain company after Jo¡¯s retirement, we started bringing these shadow figures back to life and using them again in performance. However, our performance style was different from Jo¡¯s. We began experimenting with other ways of using them rather than in the traditional way. While traditional shadow puppets are manipulated form behind a backlit translucent screen, we decided to place an overhead projector in front of the screen or wall, with the puppets laying down flat on top of an overhead projector, casting their images onto a large screen. This shifts the shadow figures from a "standing" position to a "lying" one. But, because traditional leather puppets lacked the translucency to work well on the OP, we had to take them apart and make transparent copies of them onto acetate sheets. This offered us greater clarity and brighter colors. We also moved away from using full-body figures, borrowing from cinematic techniques, by changing the puppets¡¯ scale and incorporating different ¡°shot¡± sizes¡ªsuch as a close-ups, medium and long shots¡ªto keep the visuals dynamic, and create a cinematic-like aesthetic.

Song: Do you still use the shadow puppets from Ms. Benton and Ms. Humphrey today? Are the technical innovations in your current shadow puppetry performance methods intended to better adapt the art form to your performance needs in the United States?

Fong: Actually, this is a question that relates to artistic expression in the theater and has many factors behind it. We made new puppets from the traditional design of Benton¡¯s shadow figures and performed with them on the overhead projector.  From an artistic perspective, new performance techniques create more room for expression. The carving and design of a traditional shadow puppet is extraordinarily delicate and beautiful, but if the audience is sitting far away, they cannot see those details. But if the image is enlarged, or if specific parts are magnified, the intricacy of the carving becomes clearly visible. From a technical perspective, traditional Chinese shadow puppetry was designed for audiences of at most a little over one hundred people, whereas today we can perform for audiences of five or six hundred. The old performance methods are no longer sufficient for the modern theater, so we enlarged the image. However, our artistic design and the spirit of the show remains traditional. We also perform English translation of traditional repertoire, such as Journey to the West. But while the story is known to almost everyone in China, American audiences are unfamiliar with it.  We often had to explain to the children that the Monkey King is a monkey who can fly.

Song: Previous reports mention that when you first came to the United States, your dream was to help bring Chinese theater onto the world stage. Was that truly your aspiration at the time? Do you still hold the dream today?

Fong: Yes, that was truly what I thought at the time. But the idea did not come out of nowhere. Imagine a young person in her teens or twenties alone in the United States, who wants to bring Chinese theater onto the world stage! People would ask this person: what support do you have? What financial means? As an international student knowing nobody, on what basis could you possibly think that way? And yet I did think that way, and I¡¯ve never changed. I remember one member of our troupe, Tian Gang, once described me by saying, ¡°You are like a triathlete ¡ªno eating, no drinking, no sleeping.¡± I am also deeply grateful to the many, many people who allowed me to hold on to a dream that may have seemed unrealistic. In fact, there was a specific turning point when Dr. John Hu, who founded the Department of Drama at the Taiwan National University, translated The Essential Theatre (by Oscar G. Brockett) into Chinese. When I read this five-hundred-page book, the very first thing I did was turn to the section on Asia to see what it said about Chinese theater. But in this thick volume, I could only find five or six pages on the topic. At that moment, I felt anger rising from deep inside me. I had always been an extremely shy, introverted, even timid person. Yet someone like me suddenly found herself thinking: ¡°Why does Chinese theater occupy only such a tiny space in the history of world drama? I am going to change that!¡±

Song: Where did such personality and this very idea come from?

Fong: I had been a well-behaved girl since childhood. I also strongly stood by the traditional virtues, such as respecting the elders and caring for the young, the kind of upbringing passed down through tradition. My parents rarely taught me through words, but their deeds set examples that had a profound influence on me. My father was a community leader, who always brought people together to serve others and spent his whole life happily doing things for other people. This had a great impact on me. Ten years after he retired, the company even held a special appreciation ceremony for him, remarking that without everything he had done for everyone, the company would not be what it is today. My father, an orphan who went through many hardships in life, always maintained a heart full of great compassion throughout the difficulties and challenges of his life. In another sense, he also had very strong leadership¡ªwhenever he saw the needs of the community, he would step forward to solve problems and help everyone live better lives. In middle school, when I studied Confucian thought and read the ideas of ancient sages, I realized they are closely aligned with what we now call ¡°leadership.¡± At the core, they teach us how to be a proper human being. Some of these sayings deeply shocked and moved me: ¡°Because the world has lost justice, the king Wen goes to war in anger, and the people thereby gain a peaceful life.¡± ¡°If I examine myself and find I am upright, even against thousands and tens of thousands, I will go forward.¡± These words gave me immense strength and justification for my dream, telling me not to underestimate myself. I may fail, but I must not be timid.

Song: May I ask where your fervent love for xiqu came from?

Fong: I have always loved traditional Chinese opera, because it¡¯s most important aspect is visual and auditory beauty. This sense of ¡°beauty¡± is what first attracted me. My first encounter with opera was with Kunqu, but not in a classroom. In class, Kunqu was taught by Mr. Xu Yuanzhi,  known as the ¡°King of Flute Players,¡± but his teaching style did not allow me to feel that beauty. One day, my classmate Chen Yun and I were walking in ¡°Qi Garden,¡± a Suzhou-style garden built in memory of Mr. Qi Rushan. As we walked, she began singing. I asked her what she was singing; it sounded so beautiful. She said it was a Kunqu piece called ¡°Thinking of the Mortal World.¡± I immediately ran to a music record store, bought a vinyl record by Du Jinfang, and began learning by following along. When I was in college, I thought I was someone without much future. Without Chinese opera, I might not even have been admitted to the daytime program at university. My teachers even said that people in our program ¡°didn¡¯t have much hope.¡± But I fell in love with xiqu. Its radiance covered the darkness within me and made me part of the light itself. I believe that in today¡¯s world, many anxious parents should encourage their children to pursue what they love. There is a saying: ¡°Interest is the best teacher.¡± For me, it was interest that inspired everything. Many people go to university in order to find a job, to make a living. On this matter, I was completely unconcerned. Every week on my way to church, I bought a Chinese breakfast nearby. One day, the shop owner asked me, ¡°My daughter wants to study anthropology. How can I stop her? Otherwise, she won¡¯t be able to find a job in the future.¡± I was somewhat angry at that moment and replied, ¡°You spend so much money raising her and sending her to a good school. Is it just so she can earn a living? If it¡¯s only about making a living, then she could just run a breakfast shop, like you do now. Why bother going to university at all?¡±

        When I saw The Drunken Beauty for the first time, I felt as if my soul had been ¡°captured.¡± While others became fans of celebrities, but I was a ¡°fan of theater.¡± At that time, information was scarce, so I would search newspapers to find where performances were being held. Every time I heard the music of The Drunken Beauty, I would feel completely captivated and emotionally stirred. Only later did I understand that this was a form of aesthetic ability, a kind of talent, or specifically the ability to recognize what is beautiful. Even before royal concubine Lady Yang appeared on stage, the opening prelude alone would already make me lose myself. I later learned that this musical suite is a classic in Chinese opera music, created by the finest musicians of the time at the invitation of Mei Lanfang. I did not understand any of this then, but I was completely absorbed by it the moment I heard it, perhaps thanks to a natural sensitivity to beauty. As I grew older, I increasingly felt that this was not something achieved through effort, but rather a kind of innate talent. But when I think about the concept of ¡°the world,¡± I tend to view everything I do from a historical perspective. I am very careful about every action I take, because I understand life from a broader, more macro-level view, and therefore cherish it more deeply.

        Beyond my personal fascination with xiqu, there were other reasons that gave me the courage to pursue such a large dream. At that time, compared with mainland China, Taiwan felt like a very small place. Yet Taiwan was filled with great masters, and I had the opportunity to learn from many of them, which had a profound impact on me.

Song: Can you give me one example illustrating the impact?

Fong: I have many examples. I feel that I received too much love from these masters, for instance, Dr. Zhang Qiyun, the founder of Chinese Culture University. He was a geologist who established the Culture University on Yangming Mountain, with a campus architecture that blends Chinese and Western styles. I also had a distant relative, Professor Zhang Qijun, who helped him establish the university¡¯s Department of Philosophy. He brought me before the founder and introduced me as a very intelligent young woman who is worth cultivating. Because of that one sentence, even though the department did not lack teaching assistants, the founder allowed me to stay on as a teaching assistant after graduation. Every afternoon, I followed Ms. Liang Xiujuan, a dan-role performer, assisting in teaching dan-role movements while learning new xiqu plays. After work, during weekends, summers, and winters, I worked with the famous wusheng actor Sun Yuanbin to analyze and document the fundamental movements of xiqu. By the fourth year, I was already teaching this course myself. I received so much care from these extraordinary masters. They had expectations for me, and those expectations impel me work hard. I knew I was doing something very difficult, but it was precisely this sense of being loved that gave me courage. The founder once told me that I could go directly to him if I had any issues. It felt as if I had been given a special pass. After three years of studying basic movement techniques, I went to see him, first presenting my achievements, including performance photos, newspaper columns, scripts, and research notes. Then I asked him to give me time to focus on completing this research and to prepare to go abroad. The quite elderly founder stood up from behind his desk, walked forward, placed his hand on my shoulder, looked directly at me, and said: ¡°You are remarkable!¡±

Song: So far, you have mainly focused on your artistic accumulation and the sources of your motivation. But in the actual process of pursuing your dream, you had to take on many different roles, such as director, producer, teacher, translator, playwright, and even financial manager.

Fong: In fact, the roles I have played go far beyond these. There was simply too much to learn! I put my full effort into everything I did, but I am also very aware of my own shortcomings, for instance, procrastinating sometimes. Do you know why? It has to do with ¡°gear shifting.¡± It is like driving a manual transmission car. When changing speed, you have to shift gears. What I mean is in my life I had to switch between different ways of thinking and working modes, which for me, is relatively difficult. In doing theater work in the United States, what you see on stage is only the tip of the iceberg, the part above the surface of the ocean. The real work accumulates beneath the surface, but the audience only sees a very small portion. It can also be compared to a tree, which starts from a small bud or seedling, grows into a strong trunk, then branches out, produces leaves, and finally flowers and produces fruits. The fruits are delicious, and the flowers are beautiful.

        While I was initially attracted by the flowers to want to enter this field, I did not expect that over the past 30 years with Chinese Theatre Works, we would end up doing all of the foundational work underneath. In the beginning, Stephen and I had to do everything ourselves. We founded the company in 1995, and in that first year we failed to receive any government funding. We had to first bring something to the table, earn recognition and trust before receiving even small grants. By 2000, five years after our founding, the New York State Council on the Arts told us that if we did not hire administrative staff, they might stop funding us. Before that, we had to take on administrative work ourselves. If we did not do it, who would? Who would handle the paperwork for so many performances? Who would negotiate engagements? Most nonprofit organizations are like this, with everyone wearing multiple hats. Along the way, I felt many of my ¡°senses¡± turning off. It was like when an athlete running at full speed enters a highly focused, energized state¡ªyou no longer hear applause, and you do not feel tired.

        I am especially grateful to Ms. Humphrey, who noticed my resistance to administrative work and told me that writing grant applications actually requires creative thinking. I got her point and realized it was not only important, but also interesting and challenging. A former administrator once said to me, ¡°I have learned a great deal from you.¡± He said, ¡°Every time I work with you on grant proposals, we are doing something that has never been done before, because you are integrating Chinese theater with Western theater and culture. When you write, you¡¯re able to clearly translate ideas into text and also bring them into practice.¡± When I started to understand what Ms. Humphrey meant, and then reflect on it, I realized that grant writing is a crucial part of running a nonprofit organization, a fundamental skill that must be mastered. It is like learning xiqu, where one must repeatedly practice seemingly monotonous movements such as circling the stage. Grant writing helps artists think about creation from different perspectives, from the work itself, to personnel arrangements, theoretical frameworks, and financial structures, treating artistic creation as a three-dimensional, systemic whole.

Song: Why could you perform so many roles so well?

Fong: I think one very important point is that my timid and introverted personality since childhood has made it difficult for me to become arrogant. Many intelligent people actually become arrogant very easily¡ªespecially in the opera world, I have seen too many such cases. The more intelligent one is, the more easily one becomes arrogant, and the more likely one fails to reach a truly high level. This is actually related to traditional training methods, which often emphasize confidence and the idea that on stage one should be ¡°supreme¡± or ¡°above all others.¡± But Mei Lanfang was not such a person. He remained extremely humble throughout his life. Precisely because of his humility, he was able to constantly see his own shortcomings. His biography mentions that when he was young, he was not outstanding, his conditions were not good, and he was not particularly quick or gifted. He never became complacent. I feel that the arrogance of some performers is actually the result of insufficient education. One¡¯s pride should not be built on achievement, because so-called ¡°achievement¡± is not merely the result of an individual¡ªit is the accumulated essence of countless predecessors who have brought you to that level. If you equate achievement entirely with ¡°me,¡± that becomes dangerous. In the end, you may feel immensely great while forgetting your roots. The reason I have always persisted in working so hard is because I feel that everything I have today is so hard-won¡ªonly the right timing, circumstances, and people coming together made it possible. How could I not work hard? There is a saying from one of my teachers, Wang Jingzhi, that I have always remembered deeply. He was a student of Mei Lanfang, and later became the chair and graduate director of the Chinese Department at Fu Jen Catholic University. He said: ¡°The two things I am most proud of in my life are studying calligraphy under Shen Yinmo and studying opera under Mei Lanfang.¡± After Mei Lanfang¡¯s visit to the United States in 1930, when he received an honorary doctorate, the social and academic status of Chinese opera performers was greatly elevated. After returning to China, Mei Lanfang recruited a group of university students and personally taught them, similar to what we would now call master classes. Professor Wang Jingzhi was one of them. Mei Lanfang told them: ¡°In order to perform opera well, I have risked my life.¡± Becoming Mei Lanfang¡¯s student was not only about learning to sing opera. That is a sentence I have always remembered. Being able to study with Teacher Wang was also an immense piece of good fortune for me.

        I studied in the Chinese Theater Department at Chinese Culture University for eight years. My teachers all came from Beijing, and most of them were famous performers from the Fu Lian Cheng Troupe. My dan-role teacher, Liang Xiujuan, was the daughter of Liang Huanong, who came from the Chongya Society, the first all-female professional training troupe in China. Liang Huanong later founded her own theater company, even going so far as to divorce and leave her family for it. You can imagine what extraordinary determination that required. These women were truly pioneers, breaking new ground in their time. Although I did not come from a traditional conservatory training background, these formally trained teachers had a profound influence on me. From my early admiration for performance to later taking on all kinds of work in order to pursue my dream, I was willing to step behind the stage. I was never fixated on becoming a performer, because there was no shortage of actors, and I did not have that kind of vanity. What truly captivated me was the beauty of the art form. It was this beauty that made me willing to devote my life to the art.

Song: Thank you very much for sharing your stories so openly. Your story and experiences will surely be an inspiration to younger generations who hope to engage in the international dissemination of xiqu!

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