“The quintessential China Doll is submissive, eager to please, obedient, and permanently pleasant, and lives for no reason other than to make her white lover happy. Nowhere has she been embodied quite so roundly as in the most-performed opera in the United States today, Puccini’s classic Madama Butterfly, based on a one-act play that was in turn based on an 1887 smash-hit semiautobiographical French.”
