As a child, Pui Yan Li remembers trying on her mother’s clothes — even though she was forbidden to touch them. These were not ordinary dresses but precious keepsakes. Li’s mother, a former Cantonese opera singer from Hong Kong, had kept her costumes as mementos when she began her new life in New York, and Li could not resist pulling out the elaborate headdresses and embroidered gowns.

“She always found out,” recalls Li, shaking her head and smiling. “The way I folded things was different from how they are supposed to be folded.”

Today, there is no longer any need for furtive rustlings of fabric. Li, 37, is herself a Cantonese opera singer based in Hong Kong — and onstage she wears those very same costumes, passed down from mother to daughter.