What the Chinese Opera Taught

Epigraph over the entrance to a Chinatown theatre in the 1880s:

"Neighbors all, observe and listen well! Be as one family, happy and content. Whether in heaven above or on earth below, things great and small are judged and receive their just desserts. The whole story of life unrolls before your eyes. Consider well what you would choose: the reward of the good or the punishment of evil."

The anti-Chinese agitation died down as the economic crisis eased in the late 1880s, but the Exclusion Act and other discriminatory laws weighed heavily on the Chinese immigrants. Thousands returned to China. Those who remained, adjusted to an industrializing, modernizing America. Many journeyed to more tolerant mid-West and Eastern cities - Chicago, New York, Boston, Philadelphia - and the Cantonese Opera troupes followed to entertain, educate and hearten them.

These opera scenes photographed by the May studio of Leo Chan in the 1920s in Chinatown would, except fro the painted backdrops, be quite like the operas staged in the 1870s.