Chang-O Flies to the Moon

Liza LIM
Born 1966, Perth, Australia

Chang-O Flies to the Moon (1999)

From Yuè Lìng Jié (Moon Spirit Feasting) (1999) 20360
soprano, bass flute, koto, violoncello, percussion
Commissioned by ELISION Ensemble, Adelaide and Melbourne Festivals with the assistance of Arts Queensland and the Australia Council
Published by Ricordi, catalogue 138448
Text by Beth YAHP

`Memory´ and the idea of ritually evoking the spirit world are themes that recur in various ways throughout all my compositions. Many of my projects have been concerned with ways to somehow connect with a spirit realm or access thoughts, emotions and desires of the past. These are also the themes of my Chinese street opera Yuè Lìng Jié. The work is a collision of various South-East Asian theatre forms from Malaysian Chinese vaudeville and puppetry to Bangkok strip shows; from Hong Kong martial arts movies to street-side trance rituals.

The opera uses the structure of ritual propitiations of the Chinese Hungry Ghost Festival and various myths about Chang-O -- the woman who stole the herb of immortality and flew to the moon, as prisms to explore notions of transgression, transmutation or translation and also transcendence.

When I was researching materials for the opera I became fascinated with the subject of Chinese pronouns and how grammar or grammatical structures manipulate one's understanding of identity. Chinese is a grammatically uninflected language in relation to person, that is, verbs are not conjugated as they are in Indo-European languages. Unlike French, verb forms don't change whether one is speaking from the viewpoint of `I´, `you´, `he´, `she´, `it´, `we´ or `they´, and in Chinese poetry for instance, these pronouns are usually completely omitted.

This grammatical fluidity strongly shaped Beth YAHP's libretto for the opera. In Scene 6, Chang-O Flies to the Moon, the stories of the moon goddess are passed through a series of grammatical translations -- the singing subject `she´ transforms into `I´ through to `you´ until at the end `you´ (her shadow presence) comes into an embrace and unity with `I´.

In spoken Chinese, the pronouns `he´, `she´, `it´ are represented by the same syllable ta but are distinguished in their written form. I was astonished to discover that these written forms and specifically the written form of the 3rd person feminine, `she´, was only invented at the beginning of the 20th century. Previously, the written form for ta (meaning `he´, `she´, `it´) was written in an ungendered form denoting `human´ with specific gender indicated by the context.

To create the written character `she´, one component of the old word was lopped off and replaced with a feminine radical (sign). What this meant was that in creating the new written form `she´, the old ungendered word (`he´, `she´, `it´) was converted into a masculine pronoun whilst still maintaining its meaning as a `universal´ form -- as is the case in a language like English.

This addition to the written language was made by Chinese writers wanting to translate texts from European languages and the changes have become part of the mainstream vocabulary of modern Chinese. In other words, the pronoun ta cannot now be translated back into its previous state. Lydia Liu, a theorist in linguistics and gender studies has made a fascinating study of this. She talks about how the act of translation has hypothesized or `made up´ an equivalence in meaning across languages and how this is an interesting mirror of other kinds of exchanges that `reproduce the colonial relations of power´. Liu points out rather provocatively, that "English and the metropolitan European languages have not experienced a similar need in modern times to adapt to the formal characteristics of the other languages by eliminating, for example, one of its gender categories in a reverse mode of operation." French scholars don't alter the grammatical structure of French verbs to translate T'ang dynasty poetry for instance!

The libretto for this scene comprises a poem entitled Transformation Song. The transformation it describes is one of `breaking through´ into oneself. Whereas in the previous scenes, other people tell Chang-O's story, this is the first time that she says `I´, that she uses the first person pronoun to take hold of and relate the story herself. In the libretto, this process of self-realisation is enacted in a series of grammatical transformations. In the first two verses, there is a transformation from the third to first person, `she´ to `I´, and at the close, an interchange between `you´ and `I´ which finally become synonymous.

Transformation Song

Text by Beth YAHP

She is the moon-heart's furnace, brooding.
Her Fortune's flown, arrows pursuing.
Mouthless, throatless, she gorges sun and moon.

I take the Herb of Immortality.
I fly up to the moon.

I, Chang-O, turn myself
   into
      my
         self.

   Moon toad, moon shiver
unmanageable creature!


Celestial birds, I have your reason.
Your wishbone blazing.
   Alchemy of feathers
   Wind-heart tremors.

Earth falls away
   Miscarried weight
   Of ancestors.
Amorphous clouds, I am with you.
I unskin your scruples.
   Your airborne gravity
   propels me.

Earth falls
   A bride disrobing.


I seize your secret, Immortal Heavens,
while your jury's out hanging.
   Your quarrel
   quickens my slipstream.

Earth
   bound
      exile.


Before my blood and spirit fused,
I was already burning.
   Womb ice wanting
   Pregnant with fire.


Restless ghost, I recognise you.
Once we suckled like sisters.
   Your breath, my boldness.
   Your sting, my sinew.


I rise
I ripple
I reach

I resonate

I relinquish

I face

I embrace
   you.

In the opera production, Chang-O peels away layers of her costume as she climbs up a ladder and beyond the stage-space that had constricted her actions. She sees Earth falling away from her as she claims more and more her own story until she is able to say "restless ghost, I recognise you." This is a point of both self-recognition and release -- a release that comes in the form of acceptance rather than rejection of the complexities of freedom. Finally, the voice is unaccompanied -- the ensemble dissolves into silence leaving Chang-O singing alone, in an ecstatic opening up to the self.

Programme note © Liza LIM