Summary
Scene 7.
Gallimard changes out of his tuxedo while he talks to his wife, Helga. He tells her that "The Chinese are an incredibly arrogant people," and they discuss the fact that the culture is always referenced as being very old. He then tells Helga that he met Song, a member of the Chinese opera who sang the death scene from Madame Butterfly in Italian."Evidently the Chinese hate it," he tells his wife, explaining that Song objected to the story of a white man getting the girl. Helga replies, "Politics again? Why can't they just hear it as a piece of beautiful music?"
Scene 8.
After four weeks, Gallimard narrates, he visited the Chinese opera—a hot room filled with smoke. Upstage floods with light as Song and two dancers perform. Song zeroes in on Gallimard and walks towards him, pointing out that he stands out in the crowd as a white man with a tie. She removes her costume, signifying that they are backstage after the performance. "So, you are an adventurous imperialist?" she asks him and they banter. At one point, Song says, "'Art for the masses' is a shitty excuse to keep artists poor," before asking Gallimard to light her cigarette.
Outside, Song laments that there isn't an expatriate cafe they might sit in. When Gallimard suggests that she wouldn't be allowed anyway, she corrects him, saying, "...a woman, especially a delicate Oriental woman—we always go where we please." She adds, "We have always held a certain fascination for you Caucasian men, have we not?" to which Gallimard responds, "But...that fascination is imperialist, or so you tell me."
Coyly, Song tells him that it is often an imperialist connection between a white man and an Eastern woman, but that "sometimes, it is also mutual." Before she can explain herself further, they arrive at her flat and she exits. Gallimard is befuddled, insisting, "Women do not flirt with me. And I normally can't talk to them."
Scene 9.
At home, Helga wonders why Gallimard is home late and he lies, telling her that he was at the Dutch ambassador's house, at a reception for a visiting scholar, who is writing a treatise on the Chinese revolution. Helga tells him she went to a martial arts demonstration, which she found very arousing.
As Helga exits, Gallimard addresses the audience, acknowledging that he lied, and telling them that he had a dream that night about Marc.
Marc appears onstage, in the dream. He compliments Gallimard on the fact that he found a girl, and gives him a bottle of fine wine. They drink it together and discuss the fact that Song likes him. "I am a married man!" Gallimard says, to which Marc responds, "I cheated after...six months. Then again and again, until now—300 girls in 12 years." Marc assures him, "Their women fear us. And their men—their men hate us."
Suddenly, they come upon Song's window, which is lit up. The "One Fine Day" aria plays, as Song begins to remove her robe. Marc delivers a monologue about the fact that Gallimard has been waiting his whole life to fall in love with a beautiful woman. He says, "As the years pass, your hair thins and you struggle to hold onto even your hopes. Stop struggling, Rene. The wait is over."
As Marc exits, Gallimard calls to him, just as Song drops her robe, with her back turned to Gallimard. There is a blackout as a phone rings in Gallimard's room; it is 5:30 the next morning. He goes and answers the phone. It's Song, who asks him if he's actually interested in the opera, and invites him to see her in The Drunken Beauty. He accepts, and she hangs up.
Scene 10. Song's apartment.
Gallimard narrates that he continues to attend the opera weekly, speaking with Song for 15 or 20 minutes after each performance. "...I am left each week with a thirst which is intensified." After 15 weeks, he tells us, he began to lose hope that she was interested, but expects that she is at odds with herself. "It is the Oriental in her at war with her Western education," he suggests.
The scene turns into the first night that Song invited Gallimard into her apartment. She is in the other room, as Gallimard looks at a photograph she has, and snoops around. She enters, unseen by him, and tells him that the photo he's looking at is of her father. She calls to her servants and apologizes to him many times. Shu-Fang, a servant, comes in with tea and Song tells her that she will pour the tea herself.
"There is an element of danger to your presence," Song says to him. Gallimard counters that their meeting would hardly be scandalous in France, but Song insists, "France is a country living in the modern era. Perhaps even ahead of it. China is a nation whose soul is firmly rooted two thousand years in the past."
They try to make more conversation, when suddenly, Song sends him away, insisting that her forwardness in inviting him to her apartment is making her too anxious. "I'm a modest girl," she says. and insists that she cannot "hold a Western woman's strong face up to my own....in the end, I fail." As Song exits, Gallimard speaks to the audience: "Did you hear the way she talked about Western women? Much differently than the first night. She does—she feels inferior to them—and to me."
Scene 11. The French embassy in Beijing.
Gallimard narrates that he tried an experiment, wondering if his experience is analogous to Pinkerton's in Madame Butterfly. Marc enters, now playing a bureaucrat. As Gallimard stamps papers, he narrates that he deliberately stopped keeping in touch with Song, eschewing the opera for work. "I felt for the first time that rush of power—the absolute power of a man."
Marc speaks as himself, as if in Gallimard's imagination. The two discuss the fact that Gallimard was not popular, Marc was, and now Gallimard has an exciting life while Marc lives in the suburbs. They then discuss a girl, Isabelle, to whom Gallimard lost his virginity.
After Gallimard stops coming to the opera, Song begins to write to him, asking why he isn't coming and inviting him to return. One reads, "Six weeks have passed since last we met. Is this your practice—to leave friends in the lurch? Sometimes I hate you, sometimes I hate myself, but always I miss you." Gallimard is dissatisfied with this correspondence and he still doesn't go to the opera.
Song's final letter reads, "I am out of words. I can hide behind dignity no longer. What do you want? I have already given you my shame." Hearing these words, Gallimard tells us, he becomes ashamed of himself, saying, "I had finally gained power over a beautiful woman, only to abuse it cruelly. There must be justice in the world. I had the strange feeling that the ax would fall this very evening."
Analysis
Song, while showing herself to be politically outspoken on her first meeting with Gallimard, softens in her approach in this section of the play. While she does not deny that there is a political problem of white obsession with the submissiveness of Eastern girls, she offers an addendum to this assertion in their stroll after Gallimard visits the opera. She says, "Yes. It is always imperialist. But sometimes...sometimes, it is also mutual." In this, we see that the complexity of Song's character, that she holds certain beliefs while simultaneously holding out for ambiguities, and that she is anything but submissive.
In this section of the play, we see Gallimard taken in by Song's feminine charms, enchanted by her beauty. The dream sequence in which he talks to his school friend Marc about his situation illuminates all of the simultaneous fear and excitement that Gallimard is feeling. He is at once surprised that any woman is giving him the time of day (in spite of already being married), and feels certain that it cannot be real.
David Henry Hwang further implicates us in Gallimard's journey by layering so many different realities on top of one another. The play is not only non-linear, but moves fluidly between realistic scenes, impressions, dreams, and memories. One minute the audience is in the present, listening to Gallimard talk about his biography, the next we are back in time, the next in a dream that he had. The stage is a space in which all of the layers of Gallimard's subjectivity can be woven together seamlessly, and Hwang's methods give us the impression of being inside Gallimard's head.
Gallimard has a very specific idea of what it means to be a man. Because he has always been a "wimp" and not very attractive, he has only ever observed what confident hetero-masculinity might look like—he has never experienced it firsthand. In his attraction to Song, he becomes the opportunistic imperialist, the man's man, who has power over members of the fairer sex and can revel in his own desirability. Gallimard's sense of self and his own power is very much determined by his alignment with his gender and the signifiers of power within his gender.
As soon as he has power, however, Gallimard realizes that it does not bring him any joy to abuse it. After receiving an impassioned correspondence from Song, he becomes sick to his stomach, ashamed to have hurt a woman that so captured his fantasies. The complexity of Gallimard's character, the fact that he has never had power before now, comes into relief as he realizes that his "experiment" of toying with Song's heart has had consequences.
