ABSTRACT
Generally considered China’s most important playwright of “spoken drama” (huaju) of the twentieth century, Cao Yu (1910–1996) has exerted a strong influence on modern Chinese theater. Born as Wan Jiabao, Cao Yu grew up in a bureaucratic family in the coastal metropolitan city of Tianjin. His father Wan Dezun was a senior officer in the army and then worked for some time as a secretary for Li Yuanhong (1864–1928), a powerful warlord who was briefly the President of the Republic of China. Despite the prestige and affluence of the family and its powerful connections, however, Cao Yin’s childhood was by no means happy. Wan Dezun was a man of a hot temper, who frequently rebuked his children. Bearing the brunt of the impetuous father’s verbal abuse was often Cao Yu’s older half-brother, and the continuously strained father-son relationship was probably partially responsible for the young man’s premature death in his thirties. Wan Dezun married three times, and Cao Yu was his son by his second wife, who died a few days after the boy’s birth. Soon afterward Wan Dezun married his third wife, Cao Yu’s mother’s twin sister. Cao Yu’s father and stepmother were both opium addicts. As Cao Yu reminisced his boyhood many years later, on many days, even when Cao Yu was back home from school around four o’clock in the afternoon, his parents were still sleeping, having spent the entire previous night smoking opium together. 1 In Cao Yu’s memory, the Wans’ big house, with the entire family and multiple servants living in it, was as silent and still as the inside of a tomb. His experience of the suffocating setting in the household apparently had a significant impact on his theatric works, especially Thunderstorm.
