Sunday December 2, 2012
9:15 a.m. 7-11 on Zhongshan Road, Taipei.

I don’t think I have much to say this morning. I spent a good chunk of time yesterday morning just waiting for the opera. It rained the entire time and I set off to the opera in the rain. I don’t mind the rain, really. It’s just rain. But it does mean that it’s much more problematic to take pictures, and I didn’t bother to bring my camera with me.

I had tracked the Dadaocheng Theater down once before, so at least I knew where it was. I walked down to Dihua street, which is about a fifteen minute walk. Then I turned north up Dihua. The theater is on the 9th floor of a big building just a short distance north of Nanjing on the right. Once you know where it is, it’s obvious. If you don’t know, it is pretty much impossible to see.

I was about half an hour early, but there was already a large crowd of people gathered in front of the elevators to go up. I joined the line-up, though I wasn’t sure whether I should get off on the 8th or the 9th floor. The theater was listed on both of them. I got off on the 8th, and it was the wrong floor. A young woman there brought me to a stairwell and through some back routes to bring me up to the 9th floor. She then walked me to the entrance where they were taking tickets. She was very nice and helpful. The man who took my ticket showed me right to my seat – second row on the right side. The theater was nice but nothing particularly special. The seats were comfortable. I believe there was seating for about 500 people. It was a fairly standard audience for this sort of thing – 90% elderly and 70% female with just a sprinkling of young people. This type of entertainment is so traditional and, to be frank, boring from a certain point of view, that I wondered what even the few young people could be doing there. Do their parents force them to attend?

I think I can safely say that I’ve now seen enough Chinese opera to tide me over for a while. Luckily, this one wasn’t pure Chinese opera. I don’t know anything about the story, but it appeared to be set in the somewhat recent history of Taiwan. It involved, I believe, the Dutch, the British, the aboriginals, and the Chinese. I’m not quite sure who the hero was, but I think the hero was an aboriginal. The show started with a group of aboriginals dressed somewhat like Native Americans complete with bows and arrows. The swords and bows and arrows and headdresses meant that they couldn’t really do all the regular acrobatics. Certainly, my introduction to this sort of thing at the Taipei Eye and the full operas at the Taipei Cultural Center were much more interesting, and to my eye, much more professional. This troupe didn’t seem nearly as professional or as skilled. They seemed an amateur troupe to me.

I hung in there for quite a while simply taking my entertainment where I could find it – in the costumes, in the music, in the occasional pretty girl. However, this was a very talk-heavy production, and I tuned out to an extent. I plugged in my iPod and listened to a podcast while watching the action of the opera. Considering the advanced age of the audience, the first half went on far too long. It was about an hour and forty minutes long. It was so long that I thought when the curtain fell that the show was over. I watched the audience carefully to see how they reacted. At first, there seemed to be a mad rush for the exits. I figured they wanted to beat the crowd for the elevator. But not enough people left. I realized they were racing for the bathroom. By then, thinking the show was over, I had already gathered up my jacket and umbrella. I let that momentum carry me to the elevator and I left with no intention of returning for the second act. That broke one of my rules – to always remain for the second act – but I didn’t care. If the opera continued in the same vein, I would have lost my mind. Still, it was a successful outing. I enjoyed the overall atmosphere if not the performance itself. I’m sure it would have been much more engaging with English subtitles.

I walked slowly back to Rooftop Paradise. I picked up some food and snacks and then settled in for the evening. I decided to get my ebooks organized, and I started copying and pasting them into folders labelled by the names of the authors. It’s going to be a long and laborious process – probably a waste of time – but I have to do it anyway. At least this long process is making me look at each book and file individually, and I’m seeing what books I currently have. I found a couple that interested me and I copied them to my Kindle. One in particular caught my eye. It is called “The Magicians” and is billed as a more mature version of Harry Potter. It’s hitting somewhat familiar and obvious notes, but I’m enjoying it very much. It feels very real and honest in exactly the way that the Harry Potter series feels fake and cartoonish. I particularly like the idea that the young people selected to attend this special school of magic are all geniuses. Being almost a savant is a requirement in this world for someone being able to understand and use magic. Magic is not accomplished with a wave of the wand and a magic word as it is in the world of Harry Potter. It comes only with intense work and discipline and repetition – the sort of effort that would go into becoming a concert pianist or violinist. The students, therefore, are of a certain type – the geniuses of the world – very smart and intensely competitive – those who practically die when they get 99% on an exam. In this way, the magic can sometimes take a back seat. These students are typical teenagers in some ways, typical students in some ways, and typical geniuses. So they don’t actually question what they are doing. They do the work because the teachers tell them to do it, and they work extremely hard not because they want to learn that subject but because they want to get the highest grade and beat the other students. They are used to being the best and suddenly being at this school where everyone is a super genius adds an interesting element. The characters are also flawed in very human ways, in very natural ways. They aren’t divided into black and white categories of good and evil. They are more nuanced than that. They can even be good but not self aware to such an extent that they misinterpret things and behave badly when they think they have right on their side. It feels real in exactly the way that the Harry Potter books don’t.

The weakest part for me is the relationship between the magic world and the real world. That was a VERY weak part of the Harry Potter books. I’m hoping that this book will eventually make it more realistic and believable and come up with ways and means for these two worlds to coexist. We’ll see. Right now, the hero of the story has never yet hinted at any desire to tell his two best friends that he is attending a school of magic. It just doesn’t come up. His story is that he is attending some elite unnamed university. It seems a bit unbelievable. But the book did mention early on that his parents were bewitched to simply not care much about what he was up to. That was an ethical gray area in the Harry Potter series. The wizards used magic to simply alter the memories of “muggles” whenever they felt like it. They even took it so far as to have Hermione place a spell on her parents to make them forget that they even had a daughter and then move to New Zealand. Seems a bit nasty, and yet the book just glosses over the fact.

 

Tags: Dadaocheng Theater, Harry Potter, opera, Taipei Eye