Cover of The Moon Opera

The Moon Opera

In a fit of jealousy, Xiao Yanqiu, star of The Moon Opera, disfigures her understudy with boiling water. Spurned by the troupe, she turns to teaching.

Read more

Twenty years later The Moon Opera is restaged, under the patronage of a rich local factory boss who insists that Xiao Yanqiu return to the role of Chang'e. So she does, this time believing she is the immortal moon goddess.

Set against the dramatic backdrop of the Peking Opera, this devastating portrait shows the extent to which a desperate woman will embrace an exalted image of herself in an effort to flee earthly concerns.

The Moon Opera is translated by Howard Goldblatt.

Bi Feiyuis one of the most respected authors and screenwriters in China today. He was born in 1964 in Xinghua, in the province of Jiangsu, China.

He is the recipient of several literary awards, including the Xu Lun Prize, and the Man Asian Literary Prize 2010. He co-wrote the film Shanghai Triad, which was directed by acclaimed Chinese director Zhang Yimou.

Audience
adult
Length
short · 120 pages

Click a tag to see books like this one that share it. Point at it (on a phone, tap it) for less of it instead.

Read it? Sign in to help tag it.

Liked The Moon Opera? Here’s where I’d start.

These suit anyone who liked The Moon Opera. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.

  1. Please Don't Call Me Human Shares China, chinese, chinese literature
  2. My Life as Emperor Shares China, chinese, chinese literature
  3. Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth Shares China, fiction, chinese
  4. Rickshaw Boy Shares China, chinese, chinese literature

“People who read The Moon Opera tend to reach for these next.”

  1. Chairman Mao Would Not Be Amused: Fiction from Today's China
  2. Cries in the Drizzle
  3. Notes of a Desolate Man
  4. Women Poets of China

“If you want more of the same (literary fiction about music), start with these.”

  1. A Cup of Light
  2. Peking Picnic
  3. The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed
  4. The Banquet Bug

“If it was the China that hooked you, try one of these.”

  1. The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai
  2. Rice
  3. Raise the Red Lantern: Three Novellas
  4. Chronicle of a Blood Merchant

“These start from a similar idea, even if they go somewhere else with it.”

  1. The Birthday of the World and Other Stories
  2. Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban (Film)
  3. No One Belongs Here More Than You
  4. The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice