The Public Face of Chinatown: Actresses, Actors, Playwrights, and Audiences of Chinatown Theaters in San Francisco during the 1920s

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-270 ◽  
Author(s):  
NANCY YUNHWA RAO
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
The Public ◽  
Cantonese Opera ◽  
Interior Layers ◽  
Artistic Self

AbstractIn the twentieth century, elaborate and prosperous Chinatown theaters in New York and San Francisco (from the 1920s to the early 1930s) constituted a golden age of Cantonese opera in the United States, a vivid musical life that has been almost completely expunged from U.S. cultural memory. Seeking a historical narrative for this musical past—preserving those vivid sonorities and glamorous images that “threaten to disappear irretrievably”—entails an examination of the actresses, actors, musicians, and playwrights who enlivened the stages of these opera theaters, as well as the audiences who flocked to see them. In particular, this study sheds light on the significance of the performers named on the daily playbills and pictured in newspapers or on immigration bond papers. The images and sonorities extend beyond the bounds of the theaters to epitomize the Chinese community. The study not only offers a significant window into the interior layers of the music lives of Chinese America, but also reflects on the Chinatown community's sense of its musical and artistic self.

‘Chinatown’ and Global Operatic Knowledge

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 280-290
Author(s):  
Yvonne Liao
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Music ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Southern Chinese ◽  
Theatre Companies ◽  
Cantonese Opera ◽  
Twentieth Century America ◽  
Selection Of

In recent years opera studies have taken a distinctly global and migratory turn: Nancy Rao's Chinatown Opera Theater is a notable example. Rao's book sheds new light on the art form's transpacific networks, Cantonese immigrant communities and their highly racialised experience of everyday entertainment in early twentieth-century America, thereby ‘strip[ping] the veneer of exoticism from [southern] Chinese [i.e., Cantonese] opera, placing it firmly within the bounds of American music and a profoundly American experience’. Still more illuminating is Rao's focus on the Chinatown theatre companies, their contracting of touring performers and their role in transoceanic commerce. Woven into the book is an intimately connected narrative of Cantonese opera in the 1920s, encompassing San Francisco, Vancouver, New York, Honolulu and (to a lesser extent) Havana. The selection of these locations is no coincidence, given their significance in the interwar years as port cities linked within imperial steamship networks, amidst the part-conflicting, part-intersecting agenda of dominant and emergent empires (for instance, Japan and the United States, in the case of the latter).

scholarly journals Saint-Saëns, Debussy, and Superseding German Musical Taste in the United States1

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 113-119
Author(s):  
James R. Briscoe ◽  
Chloé Huvet
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Claude Debussy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Great War ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
Solo Piano ◽  
Pelleas Et Melisande ◽  
French Music ◽  
The Great War

In an interview published in the October 21, 1908, issue of the Boston Transcript, Debussy had been asked to comment on American musical life. He remarked, “The distinction of a country like [the United States] is that it imbibes from all sources... it is less German bound than are the countries who hear little or no other music through chauvinism or antipathies.” This paper examines the roles of Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921) and Claude Debussy (1862-1918) in driving such a modernist evolution. Saint- Saëns performed with and conducted the New York Symphony in 1906, including his symphonic poem Le rouet d’Omphale and playing solo piano in his Africa, Fantaisie pour piano et orchestre. He thereafter appeared in both Chicago and San Francisco, and critics could already hear the modernist aesthetic in formation. When conductor Frederick Stock, a stalwart champion of French music, led Prélude à “L’après- midi-d’un faune” in Chicago in December 1908, the symbolist dimensions of the new music were grasped by both critics and audiences, and Paul Rosenfeld wrote: “We should look to France for the latest gospel [of the new musical advancement] […] Claude Debussy has broken through the limitation of the old, and shall we say he has found new musical dimensions?” Contemporaneously, the premiere of Pelléas et Mélisande in New York dramatically impressed the new hearing on American audiences. To be sure, anti-German feelings after 1910, brought with the Great War, promoted such a shift from the aesthetics of the Gilded Age, but the new French music had itself led the way since just after 1900. By 1923, Carl Van Vechten, in Music after the Great War, wrote, “It is not from the German countries that the musical invention of the past two decades has come. It is from France.”

The “Japanese Turn” in Fine Dining in the United States, 1980–2020

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 45-54
Author(s):  
Samuel H. Yamashita
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
San Francisco Bay Area ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Further Training ◽  
Bay Area ◽  
Wide Acceptance

In the 1970s, Japanese cooks began to appear in the kitchens of nouvelle cuisine chefs in France for further training, with scores more arriving in the next decades. Paul Bocuse, Alain Chapel, Joël Robuchon, and other leading French chefs started visiting Japan to teach, cook, and sample Japanese cuisine, and ten of them eventually opened restaurants there. In the 1980s and 1990s, these chefs' frequent visits to Japan and the steady flow of Japanese stagiaires to French restaurants in Europe and the United States encouraged a series of changes that I am calling the “Japanese turn,” which found chefs at fine-dining establishments in Los Angeles, New York City, and later the San Francisco Bay Area using an ever-widening array of Japanese ingredients, employing Japanese culinary techniques, and adding Japanese dishes to their menus. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, the wide acceptance of not only Japanese ingredients and techniques but also concepts like umami (savory tastiness) and shun (seasonality) suggest that Japanese cuisine is now well known to many American chefs.

scholarly journals A Comparison of Mental Health Outcomes in the United States and Italy at Different Levels of Cumulative COVID-19 Prevalence

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony D Mancini ◽  
Gabriele Prati
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ptsd Symptoms ◽  
General Distress ◽  
High Prevalence ◽  
Low Prevalence ◽  
Different Levels

How does the prevalence of COVID-19 impact people’s mental health? In a preregistered study (N = 857), we sought to answer this question by comparing demographically matched samples in four regions in the United States and Italy with different levels of cumulative COVID-19 prevalence. No main effect of prevalence emerged. Rather, prevalence region had opposite effects, depending on the country. New York City participants (high prevalence) reported more general distress, PTSD symptoms, and COVID-19 worry than San Francisco (low prevalence). Conversely, Campania participants (low prevalence) reported more general distress, PTSD symptoms, and COVID-19 worry than Lombardy (high prevalence). Consistent with these patterns, COVID-19 worry was more strongly linked with general distress and PTSD symptoms in New York than San Francisco, whereas COVID-19 worry was more strongly linked with PTSD in Campania than Lombardy. In exploratory analyses, media exposure predicted and mapped on to geographic variation in mental health outcomes.

scholarly journals Big Data and Journalism: How American Journalism is Adopting the Use of Big Data

Novum Jus ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-89
Author(s):  
Julián Rodríguez ◽  
Andrew M. Clark
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Big Data ◽  
New York Times ◽  
The United States ◽  
Freedom Of Information ◽  
The Public ◽  
Digital Format ◽  
American Journalism ◽  
Depth Interviews

This research uses in-depth interviews with three data journalists from the Houston Chronicle and the New York Times in the United States to describe the role of data journalists, and to illustrate how and why they use big data in their stories. Data journalists possess a unique set of skills including being able to find data, gather data, and use that data to tell a compelling story in a written and visually coherent way. Results show that as newspapers move to a digital format the role of a data journalist is becoming more essential as is the importance of laws such as the Freedom of Information Act to enable journalists to request and use data to continue to inform the public and hold those in power accountable. 

scholarly journals A statewide analysis of SARS-CoV-2 transmission in New York

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erica Lasek-Nesselquist ◽  
Navjot Singh ◽  
Alexis Russell ◽  
Daryl Lamson ◽  
John Kelly ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
New York State ◽  
The United States ◽  
York State ◽  
Multiple Introductions ◽  
The Public ◽  
Travel Restrictions ◽  
Westchester County

AbstractNew York State, in particular the New York City metropolitan area, was the early epicenter of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in the United States. Similar to initial pandemic dynamics in many metropolitan areas, multiple introductions from various locations appear to have contributed to the swell of positive cases. However, representation and analysis of samples from New York regions outside the greater New York City area were lacking, as were SARS-CoV-2 genomes from the earliest cases associated with the Westchester County outbreak, which represents the first outbreak recorded in New York State. The Wadsworth Center, the public health laboratory of New York State, sought to characterize the transmission dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 across the entire state of New York from March to September with the addition of over 600 genomes from under-sampled and previously unsampled New York counties and to more fully understand the breadth of the initial outbreak in Westchester County. Additional sequencing confirmed the dominance of B.1 and descendant lineages (collectively referred to as B.1.X) in New York State. Community structure, phylogenetic, and phylogeographic analyses suggested that the Westchester outbreak was associated with continued transmission of the virus throughout the state, even after travel restrictions and the on-pause measures of March, contributing to a substantial proportion of the B.1 transmission clusters as of September 30th, 2020.

Community Services: Contrasts Between Resident and Nonresident Landowners in the Adirondack Region of New York

1975 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 132-142
Author(s):  
Robert G. Craig ◽  
Harry P. Mapp
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
Community Services ◽  
World War ◽  
Revolutionary Change ◽  
Role Of Government ◽  
The Public

“There is more than enough evidence to show that the states and localities, far from being weak sisters, have actually been carrying the brunt of domestic governmental progress in the United States ever since the end of World War II … Moreover, they have been largely responsible for undertaking the truly revolutionary change in the role of government in the United States that has occurred over the past decade.”–Daniel J. Elazar, The Public Interest

Asian and Asian American Suburbs in the United States

Urban Studies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Zarsadiaz
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Southern California ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Research Literature ◽  
Bay Area

Asians and Asian Americans are the most suburbanized people of color in the United States. While Asians and Asian Americans have been moving to the metropolitan fringe since the 1940s, their settlement accelerated in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. This was partly the result of relaxed US immigration policies following the 1965 Hart-Celler Act. Globalization and burgeoning transnational economies across the so-called Pacific Rim also encouraged outmigration. Whether it is Korean or Indian immigrants in northern New Jersey or Vietnamese refugees in suburban Houston, Asians and Asian Americans have shifted Americans’ understandings of “typical” suburbia. In the late 1980s, academic researchers and policymakers started paying closer attention to this phenomenon, especially in Southern California, where Asians and Asian Americans often clustered together in select suburbs. Sociologists, in particular, observed how greater Los Angeles’s economic, political, and built landscapes changed as immigrants and refugees—predominantly from Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Philippines, South Korea, India, and Vietnam—established roots throughout the region, including Orange County. Since then, other studies of heavily populated Asian and Asian American ethnic suburbs—or “ethnoburbs”—have emerged, including research on New York City, Boston, and Washington, DC. Nonetheless, scholarship remains focused on Southern California, the San Francisco Bay Area, and other hubs of the metropolitan West Coast. Research and scholarship on Asians and Asian Americans living in the suburbs has grown over the last decade. This is partly a response to demographic shifts occurring beyond the coasts. Moreover, geographers, historians, and urban planners have joined the discussion, producing critical studies on race, class, architecture, and political economy. Despite the breadth and depth of recent research, literature on Asian and Asian American suburbanization remains limited. There is thus much room for additional research on this subject, given a majority of Asians and Asian Americans in the United States live outside city limits.

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