Conference Agenda

Trump on Show (Jyutkek Daklongpou), a new Cantonese opera written and produced by playwright and Feng Shui master Edward Li Kui-Ming, features Donald Trump and his fictional twin brother, along with such supporting characters as Chairman Mao and aliens. Due to its topicality and sensationalism, this opera uncharacteristically garnered much attention from the local public in Hong Kong when it premiered in April 2019, even receiving international media coverage. It has been perceived, especially among younger Hong Kongers, as a radically novel kind of Cantonese opera. While critics disagree over whether it was a genuinely innovative work or a mere gimmick, the opera has turned out to be a public relations and commercial success: the fourth round of performances in June 2025 fully sold out.

In this paper, I show that Trump on Show is not, in crucial respects, unprecedented but shows close dramatic and musical affinities with several mid-20^th-century Cantonese operatic political satires (such as Gandhi Meeting Xi Shi (1948)) and with the then-mainstream, Hollywood-influenced “fashion Cantonese opera” subgenre and related film productions. To my knowledge, the work has not been discussed in any detail in Sinophone and Anglophone academia. By addressing it in relation to its historical predecessors, I aim to contribute to a growing literature on Cantonese opera as a highly commercialized, urban, trans-regional/-national genre, which has focused mainly on the late 19^th to mid-20^th century but not contemporary times (e.g., Yung, 2012, Ng, 2015, Rao, 2017; Latham, 2000 is a notable exception).

I argue that the main reason why the opera has been misperceived in Hong Kong as a new kind of Cantonese opera lies in the collective amnesia surrounding the existence of the “fashion Cantonese opera” subgenre and the concomitant misperception that Cantonese opera has always essentially been a traditional Chinese art form. The work may thus be understood as part of Li’s creatively valiant effort to sustain and promote Cantonese opera through commercially re-popularizing or “re-fashionable-izing” the genre. Theoretically, this case study demonstrates well the constructivist and fluid nature of the often-presumed dichotomy between “traditional” and “popular” music, which should be more thoroughly problematized.

American (U.S.) musical life has been profoundly shaped by both its trans-Pacific and trans-Atlantic histories. Although little recognized in the narratives of American music history, the transoceanic aspect of American music in the Pacific West began well before the Gold Rush and California statehood in 1850. It began with the Pacific and Atlantic oceanic trade routes connecting Spanish and Mexican Alta California to China, Hawaii, and Mexico City, first established in the eighteenth century, as well as to Boston traders. Since the Goldrush in the mid-19th century, Pacific Rim immigrants brought their skills, customs, musical performance practices, and repertories. A full-fledged Chinese opera troupe, Tong Fook Tong, staged its first performance in San Francisco in 1852, just a year after the city’s first fully staged performance of a European opera, La sonnambula. From then on, Chinese opera was woven into the cultural, financial, social, and family life in 19th-century California. By the end of the 1870s, four Chinese theaters were built in San Francisco. As a vibrant performance culture, Chinese opera theater was an early instance in the transpacific history of American music.

However, excavating its music and performing history is nearly impossible, not only because of archival hierarchy but also due to various forms of erasure, from conceptual to mockery and criminalization. This paper addresses the challenge of erasure, particularly the need to ‘listen for the unsaid, translate misconstrued words, and refashion disfigured lives. With a focus on the little-known diaries of a Chinese laborer from 1878 to 1880, the paper shows how the diary entries could give color to the faded image of 19th-century Chinese theater in San Francisco and pull us into its everydayness, in particular, how his linguistic code-switching can reveal the inner dimension of a theatergoer and help us hear the lost sound. Furthermore, with objects such as immigration inspectors’ notebooks, missionary diaries, early phonograph labels, and steamship flyers, we can not only gain insight into the circulation of Chinese opera culture as part of the trans-Pacific history of American music but also reconceptualize the notion and significance of the soundscape of the American West.