Opera then was not a highbrow affair. The crowds that I saw in the audience would have been equally at home watching a tractor pull at the county fair. There was much spitting, pushing, and general unruliness, making it feel more like a prizefight than an opera.

Things have moved upscale since then. When we finally discovered a performance space, it was a big classically-styled hall, with multistory columns and a 30 yuan admission fee. But I was so excited by the prospect that we bought tickets without even knowing what we would be seeing.

It turns out that it wasn't an opera after all, but a modern dance performance. For those of you for whom that evokes images of abstract, avant garde, incomprehensible movements, well, you're not far from the truth. Deb was able to translate enough of the program to conclude that what we were about to see was something like the "history of the world." I supposed it would be worth giving up two hours of my time for that.

Let me give you a rough idea of how it ran. In the first act, cave men dominated the world, wearing rope outfits that looked like macrame potted-plant hangers from the 60's. They stomped around with splayed legs looking very angry until one of them discovered fire. This enabled them to produce dramatic stagelighting effects, leading us to Act II.

The world became a much better place because there was now agriculture and women. The men seemed to be off watching a tractor pull somewhere, leaving the woman behind to gracefully harvest the fields. Then, in Act III, shopping was invented, and men and women alike gleefully traded goods in a Chinese multicultural market. In China, there is not a lot of ethnic diversity, and multiculturalism is mostly a matter of which kind of traditional outfit you choose to wear. But this makes for exciting costume design, so Act III was a big hit.

In Act IV, the men got back to work making metal. Metal was symbolized by women in silvery leotards dancing on top of fiery forges. They wiggled like demure go-go-girls, with lots of red light bathing their feet. Behind them, real fires burned, raising the level of realism and our level of anxiety. This was the same week that the news was carrying reports of a fire in a provincial disco that killed over 300 people.

But we survived to go on to Act V, which was so obscure that neither Deb nor I could make any sense of it. It appeared to involve an abandoned infant (Moses?) who grows up to be some sort of savior (Jesus? Mao?) We'll leave that one to the experts. Finally, in Act VI, all the people of the world (or at least China) worked together to produce Civilization, which proved to be the silhouette of a train being dragged shakily across a backdrop of mountain tops.

Well, even though nobody spit or pushed throughout the entire performance, I was pretty excited! Sure, it was a little on the hokey side, but it was great fun to watch.  I had been starting to worry that the Bailongsi circus would be the peak of our entertainment experience; this made that show look more pathetic than ever (if it's possible for that sorry performance to be any more pathetic.)

On the back of our tickets was a schedule of future performances. Deb made a research project out of deciphering the tiny print and concluded that in two weeks there would be a performance of Beijing opera. I could hardly wait.

The opera was being staged in a different hall, much less grand. The entrance was plastered with dozens of old movie posters. For 5 yuan, we could have had our choice of half a dozen Hong Kong action movies (and we may very well go back for one of them.) It took Deb about 15 minutes to find someone who could sell us a ticket to the opera; when she did, the woman she found was sitting in a theater watching one of the movies.

To make us happy, the woman took a pre-printed ticket, crossed something out, rubber stamped something new, and charged us each 20 yuan. If we were getting ripped off, at least we were saving 10 yuan over the previous price. We went in to an almost empty hall, took seats near the front, and were immediately shepherded back several rows by one of the ushers. Their primary responsibility appeared to be to serve like maitre'ds at a fancy restaurant, seating you by status in the place you deserved.

This was much more of a neighborhood affair. It was a Beijing opera, but it was performed by a theater group from Yunnan, our local province. A lot of the people in the audience knew each other and they all socialized while waiting for the performance to begin. The seats up front became filled with men whose dress and manner suggested that they were government or party officials. I kept waiting for someone to spit, but no such luck.

One detail was as I remembered. Along either side of the stage, the words spoken and sung by the performers were shown on vertical LED displays. (Twenty years ago they were projected using prepared slides.) This, combined with what Deb could understand of the singing, allowed her to translate enough of the dialog to give us the basic idea of the story.

But in truth, the story was insignificant. What was memorable were the extravagant costumes, consisting of layer upon layer of bright silks, golden embroidery, and absurd headdresses; the elegant sets, like lifesize scroll paintings; the music, with instruments that sound like cartoon sound effects, and of course, the singing.

Once you have heard a woman singing Beijing opera you will never forget it. Imagine Minnie Mouse singing at the top of her register. That's what the men sound like. The woman can bring tears to a dog's eyes. I think the biggest expense of the opera company is not the costumes or the sets, but the countless tanks of helium that I became convinced the cast was inhaling during every offstage moment.

Beijing opera is also know for its gratuitous acrobatics. For no good reason, men will come bounding onto the stage, flipping head over heels at alarmingly high speeds, cartwheeling madly, leapfrogging each other and rolling about like human bowling balls. This is invariable accompanied by a cacophony of instrumental noise, sounding like a sustained kitchen cookware disaster. In a highly uncharacteristic manner, at these moments the audience will burst into spontaneous applause, making it feel less like an opera hall and more like a smoky jazz club.

Even after the three-hour performance I was ready for more. It's a good thing too, because the next night, we were invited to a special performance of Yunnan opera staged for all of the "foreign experts" in Kunming. It was being arranged by the governor of Yunnan who had once before invited us to a dinner at the Marriott, where after some boring speeches, we were served some of the worst Chinese food I have ever eaten. I was hoping this would be better.

The governor's office had sent complimentary tickets to the college waiban. We also got programs and a page of "Author's Remarks" to prepare us for the event. The written material was less than enlightening. In it we learned the essentials of the story, which involved a romance between a horseman who works for the "dawk post service" and "Yelu, the daughter of the cacique." Trouble develops when there are charges that "the horseman Tienfeng has enveigled Yelu." Got that? Good!

Once again, the story was secondary. But this performance included some of the most spectacular staging that I have ever seen. The costumes were inspired by the dress of the non-Han minority tribes. No embroidery, but acres of billowy fabric. In a showdown between the men of two competing villages, one side wore what were essentially floor length skirts. As they challenged the other men, they stretched their legs into a menacing crouch. If they had had switchblades, it would have looked like a fight scene in West Side Story. But instead, they took the hems of their skirts in their hands and flounced them from side to side, pulling the edges alternately above their heads, spreading the bright fabrics like a moth frightening its prey. I would never have guessed that men in skirts could look so macho.

Towards the end of the evening, in a dream sequence, the young woman imagines a reunion with her lost lover. In the center of a darkened, spot-lit stage, four men held a huge square of red silk, draped to touch the floor. In unison, they pulled the silk high into the air, and then sharply down, so it blossomed like a parachute. Underneath, the woman and her lover appeared embracing, but frozen like a snapshot. Each time the canopy drifted down over them; each time it was lifted again to reveal the lovers in a newly posed embrace. When the canopy reached its apex, dozens of slender women in long white gowns drifted around the couple. The woman floated effortlessly across the stage, moving with no apparent steps, fluttering red fans in front of faces, concealing their identities. It was truly breathtaking, and magnificently dreamlike.

It has taken us almost half of our time in China to discover such performances. It is possible that given the right tour group, we could have been at one of these theaters during our first week in the country. But having uncovered them in the course of our everyday lives has made the experience feel so much more genuine. The movies are going to have a hard time living up to this.