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Chinese Entertainment, Ethnicity, and Pleasure

2005; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 18; Issue: 2-3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/08949460590914813

1545-5920

Chan Kwok-bun, Yung Sai-shing,

Socioeconomic Development in Asia

ABSTRACT Early forms of entertainment in the Chinese immigrant society of Singapore took the form of festivals and festivities that invariably occurred on the streets. Celebration of festivals served religious and ethnic as well as moral functions, when values were reproduced and reinforced. People of the same kind gathered together to reproduce their ethnicity. Such festive events were as recreational as they were community-building and identity-bestowing. The character of leisure changed sharply when the entertainment went indoors, into amusement parks, cinemas, theaters, and dance and music halls. Leisure thus became less communal, more individualistic, more voluntary. Entertainment was becoming consumption, or consumption was displacing entertainment. One witnessed a profound moment of social transformation, because leisure had taken on a voluntary, individualistic character. The individual would labor to pay for his leisure and pleasure; pleasure was commodified—a sort of recreational consumption or consumptive recreation. At this moment of history, he reduced himself to a nonparticipant relationship with his objects of desire, maintaining a detached and alienated relationship with all, just like in the realm of work. The consumption of entertainment as offered later on the air, through radio and television, was made possible by the mediation of machines. Machines now came between the entertainer and the entertained, and created strangeness and anonymity. Increasingly, one listened to the radio, watched television, enjoyed a movie, all on one's own. A movie-goer faced the silver screen, alone, himself wrapped up in darkness. The completion of privatization of entertainment and leisure meant the ascendancy of the individual and the demise of community and tradition. PERSONAL INTERVIEWS Bai Yan & Mrs. Bai Yan, 21 February, 1997; 27 May, 1997. Foong Choong Hon, 10 May, 1997. Lee Fook Hung (ada Lee Dai Soh, Li Dasha), Oral History Centre (000260/07), Singapore National Archives. Shangguan Liyun, 28 May, 1997. Tan Giak, Oral History Centre (001040/02), Singapore National Archives. Weng Shu Dao, 10 May, 1997. VIDEORECORDING Singapore Broadcasting Corporation, Radio Singapore, 4 January, 1959. Singapore: Television Corporation of Singapore, c1998. WEBSITE The Shaw Story: 77 Years of Entertaining the World. http://www.shaw.com.sg/shawstory/shawstory.htm ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We would like to thank Mr. and Mrs. Bai Yan, Madam Xu Lianmei, Mr. Shangguan Liuyun, Mr. Foong Choong Hon, Mr. and Mrs. Wang Shudao, and Mr. Chew Kok Wei. We also thank Yap Wee Cheng, Julia Chee, Moey Kok Keong and Jason Lim for their help at the various stages of our writing. Notes Piet van der Loon, "Les Origines rituels du théâtre chinois," Journal Asiatique, 265 (1–2) (1977): 161–162. We are using the translation by Stephen Teiser. See his "The Ritual Behind the Opera: A Fragmentary Ethnography of the Ghost Festival, A.D. 400-1900," in Ritual Opera, Operatic Ritual: Mu-lien Rescues His Mother in Chinese Popular Culture, ed. David Johnson [Berkeley: Chinese Popular Culture Project, 1989]. Oral history interview with Lee Fook Hung [000260/07, transcribed in 1989], pp. 42–43. Oral History Centre, National Archives of Singapore. All transcriptions of interviews conducted by the Centre will be hereafter cited as Oral History, followed by the page number of the transcript. Personal interview with Bai Yan on 21 February 1997. Ibid. "Tingge Kanxi De Na Duan Rizi," (The Days of Song and Drama), Lianhe Wanbao, 26 March 1984, p. 19. Personal interview with Shangguan Liuyun on 28 May 1998. Guan Xinyi, a late getai performer, also postulated that getai was started during the Japanese occupation. He particularly mentioned the Yinzuo (Ginza) getai of the Great World. Refer to his talk entitled "Fengfeng yuyu yi getai" ("My Recollections of Getai"), 18 November 1995, Qiongzhou Huiguan, Singapore. See also Pan Xingnong (ed.), Xinjiapo-zhinam, p. 83. [Singapore: Nantao Publishing House, 1955; 5th edition]. Personal interview with Bai Yan on 21 February 1997. Personal interview with Shangguan Liuyun on 28 May 1997. For a discussion of the concept of acoustic space, see Lee Tong Soon, "Technology and the Production of Islamic Space: The Call to Prayer in Singapore," Ethnomusicology, 43 (1): 86–100, (1999). Report of the Department of Broadcasting for the Years 1946–52, p. 1. [Singapore: Government Printing Office, 1953]. Foong Choong Hon and He Bijuan, "Da zhan qian hou da diantai" (Radio broadcasting before and after the World War II), in Chengshi Huixiang (Echoes in the City), ed. Zhang Liping et al., p. 88. [Singapore: Radio Corporation of Singapore, 1996]. Report of the Department of Broadcasting of the Year 1953, p. 3. [Singapore: Government Printing Office, 1954]. Ibid., p. 8. Singapore Broadcasting Corporation, Radio Singapore 4 January 1959, ©1988. Report of the Department of Broadcasting for the Years 1946–52, p. 10. Report of the Department of Broadcasting for the Year 1953, p. 8. Personal interview with Foong Choong Hon on 10 May 1997. Report of the Department of Broadcasting for the Year 1954, p. 17. [Singapore: Government Printing Office, 1956]. Report of the Department of Broadcasting for the Year 1953, p. 8. Singapore Broadcasting Corporation, Radio Singapore, 4 Jan 1959. Radio Singapore: A Story of Progress (1945–1959), p. 10. [Singapore: Government Printing Office, 1959]. Personal interview with Weng Shudao on 10 May 1997. Personal interview with Chew Kok Wei on 4 June 1997. Personal interview with Foong Choong Hon on 10 May 1997. The following discussion on the history of the movie industry of Singapore is based on Nanyang nianjian, ch. 16: 198–212; Lim Kay Tong, Cathay: 55 Years of Cinema [Singapore: Landmark Books, 1991]; Timothy White, "When Singapore was Southeast Asia's Hollywood," The Arts, 5: 21–24 [1998]; Ong Ngiap Chye, "Behind the Silver Screen: Cineplexes in Singapore and the Development of Total Entertainment," Honours Thesis, Department of Geography, National University of Singapore, [1994–95]; Jan Uhde and Yvonne Ng Uhde, Latent Images: Film in Singapore [Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000]. Additional informationNotes on contributorsChan Kwok-bun CHAN KWOK-bUN is Head and Professor, Department of Sociology, and Director, David C. Lam Institute for East-West Studies, Hong Kong Baptist University. He is author of Stepping Out: The Making of Chinese Entrepreneurs [Singapore: Prentice Hall, 1994]; Chinese Business Networks: State, Economy and Culture [Singapore: Prentice Hall, and Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 2000];Crossing Borders: Transmigration in Asia Pacific [Singapore: Prentice Hall, 1995]; Alternate Identities: The Chinese of Contemporary Thailand [Singapore: Times Academic Press, and Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2001]; andPast Times: A Social History of Singapore [Times Editions, 2003]. His current research interests are in migration, transnationalism, and diaspora; ethnic identities; and business networks and ethnic capitalism. Yung Sai-shing YUNG SAI-sHING is Associate Professor in the Department of Chinese Studies, National University of Singapore. After his first book, titled Anthropology of Chinese Drama (in Chinese) in 1997, he is completing a second on the cultural history of gramophone records of Cantonese opera and music. His research interests include: traditional Chinese theater; anthropology of theater, print culture and popular novels, and the social history of Chinese opera in Singapore.