Turandot's Challenge Part 2 - halfish....

What you're hearing in the background is an AP video from 1998 of rehearsals for a production of Turandot in the Forbidden City of Beijing, directed by Zhang Yimou, one of China's greatest film directors: Turandot produced in the grandest, most glorified manner by the culture who, by the standards of contemporary American values, should be most offended by it.

A century ago, all the European/Marxist notions of class were largely irrelevant in North America. It's not that notions of social class weren't as true in America as elsewhere, but America was a continent in which millions had the opportunity to transcend their low station of birth, and eventually, hundreds of millions did. And in almost the precise opposite way, the Soviet bloc too transcended stations of birth, upper and middle class holdings were completely repossessed, their owners driven into exile, imprisonment, and quite often liquidated. Such is history's brutal lottery.

So in due time, East Asia may develop all kinds of ways to transcend American intersectional notions of race and identity. While East Asia is encyclopedically diverse in linguistic dialects, it's far less diverse in skin pigmentation than any place in the Americas save Canada due to its mostly northern latitudinal placements. And therefore, hundreds of millions less people would be defined by their physical identity. In light of that, the challenges of hailing from this side of the world are so vastly different from ours. In a place like Japan, identity may eventually become so mutable that new generations may one day feel next to no impediments to self-discovery, while in a place like China, questions of identity lie at an extreme crossroads. Depending on the beliefs of who China's absolute ruler is in any given era, identity in China may in our lifetimes become as mutable as in Japan, or so immutable that the problem vastly transcends mere questions of identity.

In Japan, the ever-increasingly popular conceptual practice of Ikigai, whose closest translation seems to be 'reason for being', entails that extreme uniqueness has a continuously growing acceptance in Japanese cities - whatever the clothes, whatever the hairdo, whatever the hobby, it grows increasingly unjudged and even celebrated. Part of what's shocking about this is that it's happening in Japan! We in the West often, and not completely without reason, think of Japan as the world's most shame-based culture. I suppose necessity is the mother of invention; but consider that just in the last two years, the Japanese education ministry added sexual orientation and gender identity to its national bullying policy, taking precautions about properly educating its teachers about the challenges of LGBT+ youth. The next year, the Japanese government started covering everything about gender reassignment surgery but the hormone therapy and legalized people with gender dysphoria to change their gender. In June of this year, the ruling Liberal Democrat party introduced the LGBT Understanding and Enhancement bill. LGBT activists correctly argue that none of these reforms go far enough. But this is all just in two years, and in the last four years, same sex marriages have been recognized in twenty-six separate cities and prefectures, and two more are due to recognize them in 2020. If a culture known for centuries for its shame and conformity is so ready to change its understanding of a concept that such drastic reform can happen so quickly, how much further can it go?

On the other hand, China shows little such progress, which is especially shocking because opposition to homosexuality seems to have been a Western import, brought only to China in the 18th century. Yet China has taken to this Western-oriented opposition as few Western countries currently do. Polls list Beijing as the single least accepting major world city of homosexuality.

......

In the 20th century, Soviet Marxists used their idea of a society without classes as a a cudgel, with a network of informers that led to the murder tens of millions. In the 21st century, China could use their social credit system to attempt a society without identities, with a video and computer surveillance system that could imprison and murder the millions who don't conform to it.

Morality has no monopoly, and

But the Rite of Spring tells its story in the most base of human musical urges - dance. Turandot tells its story in the most grandiloquent and incorporeal of musical urges - song. Stories of tribes are told through dance, stories of civilizations are told through song.



As the Rite of Spring does with absolute music, Turandot is a pass of the baton, but the baton has yet to be picked up. It is a challenge to the musicians of the East: Do better than us. Tell your story to the world in your own voice.

End with Peking Opera