Colloquium: Nancy Yunhwa Rao

Operatic Space: Chinese Theater in 19th century San Francisco and the Cantonese Pacific 

Nancy Yunhwa Rao

Board of Governors Professor of Music, Rutgers University 

This talk examines the entanglements between Chinese opera theater and urban life in the Americas from the mid-nineteenth century to the turn of the twentieth century, a period during which Chinese immigrants became an integral part of cities such as San Francisco. Within dominant historiographies, Chinatown opera in North America has often been treated as an isolated ethnic enclave culture. However, Chinese theaters in San Francisco maintained a prominent presence, deeply enmeshed in the city's self-image, its transpacific steamship routes, railroad labor infrastructure, print culture, and political agenda. It contributed significantly to the broader currents of cultural modernism burgeoning in the city, including experimental theater and ultramodern music, as well as the start of ethnic phonograph records. This talk argues that Chinese opera theaters were embedded in the city's urban entertainment culture as dynamic participants. The talk will draw from the perspective of a theatergoer, Ah Quin. An ambitious laborer, he left behind eleven volumes of diaries, a rare primary source. Several volumes record his activities between 1878 and 1880, which illuminate the intimate and emotional world of a Chinese immigrant navigating life in nineteenth-century San Francisco through theatergoing. The talk will consider language, network and apparatus of Chinese opera, and questions of erasure, as well as the relevance of this history in the present. 

About Nancy Yunhwa Rao

Nancy Yunhwa Rao is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of Music at Rutgers University. Holding a Ph.D. in Music Theory from the University of Michigan, she began her career as a theorist writing about American ultra-modernist composition and treatises. Her "Ruth Crawford's Imprint on Contemporary Composition" won the 2007 Lowens Article Award from the Society for American Music.  She is the author of Chinatown Opera Theater in North America (2017), which sheds light on the often-unheard voices in American music history. Recognized by the Lowens Book Award, it also received awards from the American Musicological Society, the Association for Asian American Studies, and the Association for Recorded Sound Collections. The Chinese translation was published in 2021 by the Shanghai Conservatory. Her Inside Chinese Theater: Community and Artistry in 19th-century California and Beyond was published in 2025. Ongoing projects include Music and Sound in Transpacific East Asia: Transformations and Trajectories, co-edited with Hannah Chang and Hedy Law, forthcoming with Palgrave, as well as Translating the Field, co-edited with Susan Thomas and Michael Iyanaga. She held visiting professorships at Princeton, Oberlin, and Curtis. Rao is the Editor-in-Chief of American Music, as well as an Honorary Member of the American Musicological Society and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.