This fall, the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto gave a botched face-lift to “Turandot,” a Puccini opera about a barbaric Chinese princess in “ancient Peking” who executes her suitors.

To try to mask the racism of the opera, the director changed the names of Ping, Pang and Pong, three of the main characters, to Jim, Bob and Bill, and swapped their Chinese costumes for black suits. My father, a Taiwanese-American tenor, performed the role of Pong (or I guess, Bill?) for the production’s 2019 run. But the characters continued to play into stereotypes of effeminate Asian men as they pranced around onstage, giggling at one another.

Alterations like these have become part of a broader trend as opera clumsily reckons with its racist and sexist past. But if it hopes to win favor with younger listeners like me, opera needs to realize that shallow changes can’t erase the problematic foundations of season fixtures like “Turandot,” “Madama Butterfly,” “The Magic Flute” and “Carmen.”

The Orientalist stereotyping in “Turandot,” for instance, seeps into the music itself. The only way to get rid of it would be to rewrite the opera entirely, a revision that would destroy the classical canon. So how do we bring opera into the 21st century? How do we preserve the beauty of Puccini’s music, the likes of which will never be composed again, while also recognizing that it taints how we perceive Chinese women like me?