Day Eight: Streets, singers and scooters.

During the day I went to a teashop to buy gifts for Mr. Sun and Ju Huang. At dinner, Sat and I watched a part of the Beijing Olympics on TV. My understanding from the little politics we talked about was that the Taiwanese felt that the people in Mainland China had suffered greatly and lost a lot of their culture and tradition.

In the evening Sat and I visited Mr. Sun at his opera. He had promised to give us photos of his grandfather as Monkey King.

We watched the opera company setting up—Mr. Sun took part in everything--and then we went backstage to give bananas to the cast. People from all over the city passed on their motorbikes. As they caught a glimpse of the drama, they would stop their bikes and wheel them over to watch the ancient opera. The opera was a romantic melodrama. Mr. Sun said that when he presents Monkey King he does the beginning, from Stone Monkey’s birth to banishment, and then usually just one episode from the adventures, usually Spider Woman. The audiences today, he said, want dramatic scenes, not poetry or philosophy. And of course, they prefer scenes with women.