'Nixon in China' can't hide behind art to avoid social responsibility

Pat Nixon despises the East.

In John Adams' 1987 opera, "Nixon in China," which has a 30th anniversary production at the Houston Grand Opera through Jan. 28, the First Lady, played by soprano Andriana Chuchman, struts around the austere Chinese countryside with an air of All-American superiority, her head whipping back like wheat caught in a monsoon when she sees an evil Chinese man - you can tell just how wily he is by the Fu Manchu that wears him - abusing a local peasant girl.

Mrs. Nixon cries out, falling to the ground where the girl lies crumpled. "Just look at this," she says, her eyes trained upward, probably at God. "Poor thing! It's simply barbarous!" Her tears aren't just for all the oppressed women of China. Mrs. Nixon is speaking her mind as a civilized being, her lily-white skin and golden hair a symbol for the decent, Christian Americans that the opera encapsulates early on as a white, heterosexual nuclear family of four.

Her sympathy toward the peasant girl belies an attitude about China that's so condescending it's almost colonialist. But Mrs. Nixon is more than just another annoying white savior trope whose arc recalls "The Last Samurai" (the 2003 film starring Tom Cruise as Japan's savior) and "The Great Wall" (the soon-to-be released movie starring Matt Damon as the heroic leader of the Chinese army).

No, the way she views the Chinese - as savage, exotic and ripe for salvation - symbolizes demeaning treatment of Chinese culture throughout "Nixon in China," an opera featuring non-Western culture but directed, written and composed by all white people.

Instead of presenting Asians as human beings, we are offered a world of lazy stereotypes - tai chi, terracotta warriors, Fu Manchu facial hair, Kung Fu, conical rice hats, even white men in fat suits clowning around in Asian-style masks, evoking minstrel shows of the 1800s.

Acts one and three of "Nixon" are too dreamily abstract to carry true cultural violence. The second act, however, features a scene in which the Nixons attend the Chinese ballet "The Red Detachment of Women," a representation of Asian people so nostalgic, so inaccurate and so out of touch with the way we talk about and view race in modern times that it at first evokes more confusion than disgust.

Patrick Carfizzi plays an abusive landlord in a shameful display of yellowface that recalls Mickey Rooney's role as Mr. Yunioshi in "Breakfast at Tiffany's." More than that, it's an example of the way racism can worm its way into stories when it's conflated with other human rights issues.

Carfizzi's role, taken at face value, is backwards enough, but here it's also used hypocritically as a plea for feminism. Evil Fu Manchu (that may as well be his character's name) calls a local girl a "slut," Mrs. Nixon cries her white tears and the opera seems to have absolved itself of its sexist themes of female victimization by pawning it off on the "barbarous" Chinese.

After we see a girl repeatedly whipped and spat on by men, we're meant to direct our outrage not at the opera but at the metafictional setup it's laid out before us.

When we see the minstrel show in act two, we're meant to discount it as a play-within-a-play. When we raise cultural, social and historic issue with the portrayals of the Chinese, we're meant to dismiss those issues in favor of appreciating its painterly stage, a masterwork of light and shadow that accentuates the elegantly modernist choreography, as well as John Adams' score, which rises and falls like an ocean wave with the plaintive circularity of Phillip Glass' "Einstein on the Beach" and the throbbing urgency of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring."

In fact, "Nixon in China" does a lot of hiding behind art to avoid social responsibility. Its compositions drown out the mind's objections, lulling it into an impressionistic dream by the third act. Tenor Chad Shelton, as Mao Zedong, has a stellar performance, his voice vivid and nuanced. Chuchman shines in her thankless role as Mrs. Nixon, her winding melodies carried out with purpose and ringing out like bells.

There was a time when we would merely applaud all this. Perhaps we'd question the opera's decision to eschew narrative suspense for modernist portraiture, or wonder if the contemplative third act was more languid than bold. But that would be enough, and it'd be back to praising a well-executed, relatively new opera that included people of color - because, honestly, how many of those even exist?

But that time has passed.

The fact that Shelton is white is not a trivial one. It is at least worth asking questions about its historic symbolism - what does yellowface say about the erasure of history for people of color? What does yellowface say in 2017, considering its origins in a time when, because of racial discrimination, only Caucasians were allowed to play Asians in Hollywood?

Sure, the image of yellowface stings on a personal level. They recall my childhood, when I saw again and again white kids in high school imitating Asian people by saying "ching chong ding dong," by pretending to be Bruce Lee, by bowing and saying "konichiwa" and by using their fingers to slant their eyes.

I've seen white people pretend to be Asians many times in my life, and never once has it made me feel anything other than small, anything other than less than human. The case with "Nixon" is no different.

But yellowface hurts more than one person or group of people. What "Nixon in China" says about Chinese people is ugly, but it says even more about what the Houston Grand Opera, not to mention Houston, and opera, stand for. While HGO looks back on 1987, I ask that the company consider the future, when the majority of Americans will be people of color. HGO has let down not just the Asian community but all people invested in the future of its art form. HGO has let down those who want to live in a society that celebrates different cultures and races rather than caricature them.

The missteps in "Nixon" are so pronounced, awkward and nostalgic that its blunders stand out far more than its achievements. I wish only that, if nothing else, it were more aware of the strange contradictions that it embodies as a show performed today.

The most ironic line in "Nixon," of which there are many, goes not to Pat Nixon or Evil Fu Manchu but to Mao, who expresses exasperation and talks about the erasure of identity: "I am no one. I am unknown," he says, from the libretto by Alice Goodman. "Give me a cigarette."

And what a line. I'm sure he wasn't the only one that night who yearned for a sense of individuality and, of course, a break. I shook my head and chuckled. Finally, on a night filled with falsehoods, someone gave us a glimmer of the truth.