Synopsis

Lily, a young Chinese opera singer performing in America, comes off stage into her dressing room as her latest performance ends. She removes her costume, beginning the shadowy transition from performer to lay-person, from Chinese to American, from artist to woman. Layers of history recent and distant reveal themselves. She relives her brush with the pop music industry, the pulsating club scene it backdrop, temptation and trouble its effect. Those troubles are the thread to her grandmother, a path-breaking Chinese suffragette and childhood friend and confidante to Madame Chiang Kai-shek. The lofty Madame Chiang Kai-shek is by turns quietly powerful and in denial. Her grandmother dreams of emancipation and of a future for women yet to come, one constantly denied by her friend. Those dreams become rerouted by the opera singer’s mother and sister, whose lives are bound as in a Chinese folktale. Her sister loses herself in her own reflection and drowns, plucked away by Guanyin, goddess of the moon, who whisks her away in a ballet involving dancer and wayang kulit (Southeast Asian shadow-puppet theater). The mother and daughter reunite once in old age, but they cannot be reconciled and are never released from their bond of death. As the opera singer reflects on those people who are her, she has slowly removed her costume, her make-up, her character, and her art, transforming into a recognizably modern woman. Rejecting authority’s denial and death’s long reach, she embraces the never-realized dreams of her grandmother. She enters into the night defiant, no longer a Chinese performer of an ancient Asian art, but a modern American woman of an eclectic, ecstatic culture, releasing history and embracing life.