Several days ago, when I got back home from work, it was already one in the morning. I suddenly realized it was the Tomb Sweeping Day. The Tomb Sweeping Day is an important festival in China. On this day, people visit their relatives’ graves and wipe the tombstones to honor them. I thought of my parents. Both of them have passed away. I didn’t even get a chance to see my father when he died because I was in New York. I suddenly felt tons of different emotions rushing through my heart. I started singing “Oh, dad, mom…”

We always joke that we are high on Peking Opera. How do you celebrate when I am happy? You sing. How do you heal when you are sad? You sing. How do you pass time when I am bored? You sing.
No matter if it’s a comedy, a tragedy or a fighting scene, every show tells a story about the traditional Chinese values. We value humanity, justice, courtesy, knowledge, integrity, loyalty and filial piety. These values will never be outdated.

Singing Peking Opera is hard, so is listening to it. We live in a fast food culture. It is the exact opposite of what Beijing Opera represents. This is a huge problem for all traditional arts. How do you cultivate the audience? How do you make them understand it, appreciate it, or even go crazy for it?

Before coming to the U.S., I thought I’d regret for my whole life if I didn’t come. But now that I’m here, I feel like I regretted for the second half of my life. One day I was doing pedicure for a customer. She was lying on the chair very comfortably. I was scrubbing her feet with a stone. As dirty water dropped into the sink, I felt like my tears were flowing to the stomach.

Although I live in the U.S., my roots are in China. Beijing Opera is what connects me with my culture. If I were a kite, Beijing Opera would be the kite string.

Before coming to the U.S., Lv was a director in Chinese arts program at a local television station in northern China. Feeling unmotivated and stuck, Lv decided to challenge himself by emigrating to America. Giving up a stable and well paying career to become an underprivileged nail salon worker wasn’t the easiest transformation Lv had to make. With his feet set in foreign land, he realized Beijing Opera has become the closet tie between him and his culture.

Lv’s experience is an example of what many Beijing Opera artists are going through in New York City. Knowing little English and lacking marketable skills, most of them found nail salons the easiest industry to enter with low stakes. Working long hours and distracted by trivial daily routines, many are not practicing the traditional art any more, in which they have received decades of training.

Once a renowned national performing art for more than 200 years, Beijing opera is facing a crisis in modern China. A great number of Beijing opera artists were persecuted, some even killed, in Cultural Revolution, when the art form was deemed feudalistic and reactionary.

Not only is China losing its talents as legendary performers are aging, but it’s losing the audience to modernization. In China, young people would much rather see a Western movie than sit through nearly three hours of traditional opera singing that they cannot understand.

Growing up studying Beijing opera, Lv was even discouraged by his master from pursuing the art. “What’s the point of studying Beijing Opera in this era?” said his master. “It’s dying.” To Lv’s comfort, his 3-year-old daughter seems to enjoy the old tune, amid his wife’s protest against his prioritizing arts ahead of businesses.