“We keep our heads down and work hard, believing that our diligence will reward us with our dignity, but our diligence will only make us disappear. By not speaking up, we perpetuate the myth that our shame is caused by our repressive culture and the country we fled, whereas America has given us nothing but opportunity.”

-Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

In a sound world dominated by high Cs and virtuosic coloratura runs, qualities such as volume, presence, and dimensionality are prized in a voice. The entrance of the leading lady of the opera is applauded; she sings passionately about her love and her troubled relationships with family members. Even as the distressed heroine dies, she sings. Quietness, in a word, isn’t operatic.

But for Asian opera singers—and particularly East Asian female opera singers in the United States—quietness is all too familiar. Asian women are stereotyped as submissive, passive, and meek. They are easy to take advantage of, objectified as things to be attained. Such is the case of the character Cio-Cio-San in Giacomo Puccini’s 1904 opera Madama Butterfly. First introduced to the audience by her supposed lover Pinkerton, Cio-Cio-San is described in terms of her bridal beauty, sold for only one hundred yen. Pinkerton compares her to an ornament on a painted screen, as delicate as a butterfly that can be damaged by his grasp. To him, her voice is a mystery: “Di sua voce il mistero l’anima mi colpi [The mystery of her voice touched my soul].” Only after Pinkerton’s exposition does Cio-Cio-San enter the stage, her voice growing more present as she ascends the hill to Pinkerton’s Nagasaki residence.

The opening of Madama Butterfly always fills me with ambivalence. It is an extended exposition to Cio-Cio-San’s voice, and it contextualizes Pinkerton’s transactional attitude towards her. On one hand, my ears strain for the faint sound of Cio-Cio-San’s voice. I know she will soon grace the stage, and I respect the significance of seeing an Asian woman there. On the other, I find myself bracing for the tragedy to come, the betrayal not only of Cio-Cio-San, but also of every East Asian woman she has come to represent.

As an Asian American music scholar, I listen for the gaps in the historical record: whose voices do we hear in our historical narratives, and where are the silences? In opera, these questions often point out the whiteness of the voices, on and off the stage. Trailblazers like Marian Anderson and Leontyne Price have made it possible for a more diverse range of voices to be included in the twentieth-century narrative of American opera history. But while we can—and should—celebrate their voices and legacies, I have to ask: who are those heroines for Asian communities? Who has paved the way for the next generations of Asian singers?

Implicit in these questions are some assumptions we need to examine. Today, AAPI representation in opera is growing, but hardly celebrated. As Mari Yoshihara has discussed, Asian participation in Western Art Music has been characterized as a hyperbolic binary: either there are “too many Asians,” suggesting a hypervisibility, or there are simply “no Asians present,” an absolute invisibility. In opera, this is complicated by one additional factor: an assumption of cultural authenticity is made when a singer’s visual appearance matches the identity of their fictional character.

It’s the invisibility end of the spectrum that I want to challenge: after all, it is not only in recent memory that Asians have burst onto the opera scene. Asians have played a crucial role in opera for generations, and Madama Butterfly has been key in simultaneously advancing and pigeonholing Asian singers. This results in countless careers in which singers have been cast only as Asian-presenting characters. One of the most important women who became almost exclusively associated with Cio-Cio-San is famed Japanese soprano Tamaki Miura (1884-1946), who made her successful debut in London in 1915. Born in Tokyo to a bourgeois family, Miura studied in both Japan and Germany. Praised for her “natural” and “innate” portrayal of Cio-Cio-San, Miura went on to perform Butterfly internationally. Descriptions of her “little feet” and her “dainty” disposition on stage littered reviews, conflating her performance of Cio-Cio-San’s character with her public identity as an Asian soprano.

In the review of Miura’s New York debut, the subheading summarized the critic’s skepticism towards Miura with the simple question, “is she an artist or merely a curiosity?” According to this unnamed critic, Miura had been given the opportunity to perform Butterfly “just because she happened to be born in the country where an Italian librettist and an Italian composer had set a story,” two cultures that were said to be “as different as the earth and Mars.” Despite Miura’s convincing performance, her “seldom good” lower vocal range led critics to denigrate her artistry. While we might scoff at the outdated and offensive remarks, there are two unspoken truths in this critique that persist today: first, to be an Asian individual in a Western world is to be the perpetual foreigner, perceived as lesser than one’s peers, and second, with such a high barrier to entry, anything less than perfection is unacceptable.

As the first Japanese soprano to sing at all four of the world’s top opera houses, Yoko Watanabe (1953-2004) performed as Cio-Cio-San in over 400 performances over the course of her career. While Miura’s critics were quick to suggest her outsider status, Watanabe recognized the incongruence between Puccini’s imagined Japanese woman and the reality of her performance: “I am Japanese, and my figure is Japanese… but the music is Italian, so I try not to do too much of what we would think of as Japanese theatrical movement. In Japanese theater, our movements are very small. We walk in small steps, we make small gestures. I don’t believe those would really convey the character of Butterfly fully to the public.” Ironically, her movements were often reviewed with commentary on her “certain air of reserve in her acting.” Her Japanese identity allowed her critics to associate her artistic persona with her portrayal of Cio-Cio-San, albeit to ill-effect: she was “exceptionably plausible in her oriental delicacy of manner… She was not merely a soprano dressed as Cio-Cio-San; she was that betrayed creature.” In a stroke of a pen, both Cio-Cio-San and Watanabe were stripped of their humanity and reduced to the Other.

The stereotyping of East Asian women in the music industry extends far beyond the final curtain of Madama Butterfly. Take Hei-Kyung Hong (b. 1959), the South Korean-born soprano who came to the United States at age fifteen to study at Juilliard. She began her career as Susanne Hong at the Spoleto Festival, following the suggestion of Kurt Adler to adopt “a name we can pronounce,” but her peers encouraged her to retain her Korean name. Hong is one of the first Korean singers to appear on the international stage, and she has been singing named roles regularly at the Metropolitan Opera since her debut there in 1984. Her nearly 400 performances on that prestigious stage notably include her June 4, 2006 portrayal of Violetta, making her the first Asian to sing the role at the Met. No matter which role she performs, Hong is said to “inhabit her characters quietly, subtly, but with palpitating humanity.” Her almost four-decade-long career was not without a great deal of pressure; Hong has described feeling that she was “representing Asian society as a whole, so [she] wanted to become a formidable soprano who would gain everyone’s respect, regardless of the color of their skin.” As a testament to her talent and resilience, Hong is often called in the case of illness or injury. As one reviewer writes, we should be “giv[ing] thanks for the quiet artistry of underappreciated singers like Ms. Hong.”

There’s that word again, “quiet.” We find it in many guises: reserved, dainty, small. It manifests in silencing voices, diminishing mannerisms, reducing the character and the performer to a flattened being while ignoring these performers’ expertise. At the core of this alleged quietness is a form of racism so insidious we often don’t recognize it happening. Instead, we may see these sopranos as examples of success, perpetuating the Model Minority myth that paints Asians as hardworking, rule-abiding, modest people. But beneath that surface is a mentality conditioned by the myth that if you’ve worked hard enough, you will be able to achieve success, surpass the racism, and beat the odds.

The irony is that this racism actually hasn’t been quiet – especially for these women. Performing Cio-Cio-San as an East Asian identifying artist can be a strategic move, a chance to step into the spotlight and make your name. That in itself is a privilege: East Asians have been afforded an opportunity in an otherwise whitewashed industry that continues to overlook the diversity of the pan-Asian community. Yet, this privilege has its limits: the very role that has given these artists their voice is an Orientalist one that continues to silence them. 

As I write this, I’m reeling from the deaths of two more women, Michelle Alyssa Go and Christina Yuna Lee, in New York City in the recent surge in violence against the AAPI community. These compound the pain of the March 16, 2021 Atlanta Spa Shootings and the deaths of Daoyou Feng, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Soon Chung Park, Xiaojie Tan, Yong Ae Yue, Paul Andre Michels, and Delania Ashley Yaun. News of additional incidents breaks all too frequently, making the message clear: Pinkerton’s objectification of Cio-Cio-San persists today, causing continual harm towards East Asian women both on and off the operatic stage. For me, reflecting on the stories of these sopranos mentioned above, and all the Asian musicians that have and will come after them, I am struck by their resilience, continued presence, and boldness. These singers weren’t quiet because of societal perceptions or fear—they were “quiet” because no one listened to them.

This time, I listened to them. I write about them not to prove their success, though hard work and talent have certainly helped them. Tamaki Miura, Yoko Watanabe, and Hei-kyung Hong are far from the only East Asian soprano stars. No, to me, they were the women who dared to raise their voices.

Allison Chu is pursuing her Ph.D. in Music History at Yale University. Her research focuses on the intersection of identity and opera in the twenty-first century.

For Further Reading

Chambers-Letson, Joshua. “‘That May Be Japanese Law, but Not in My Country’: Madama Butterfly and the Problem of Law.” In A Race So Different. New York University Press, 2013.

Hong, Cathy Park. Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning. One World, 2020.

Sheppard, W. Anthony. Extreme Exoticism. Oxford University Press, 2019.

Yoshihara, Mari. Musicians from a Different Shore: Asians and Asian Americans in Classical Music. Temple University Press, 2007.

Yoshihara, Mari. “The Flight of the Japanese Butterfly: Orientalism, Nationalism, and Performances of Japanese Womanhood.” American Quarterly 56, no. 4 (Dec. 2004): 975-1001.