AlliterAsian (6 page)

       
A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR

Jenny Uechi is the managing editor of the
Vancouver Observer
, an award-winning news site (winner of Canadian Journalism Foundation's Excellence in Journalism Award, 2012 and 2014). She is a former news director at NHK, assistant editor of
Ricepaper
, and translator.

A Writer's Life: Speaking with Denise Chong

Ricepaper
14, no. 4 (2009)

Eury Chang

We often look to writers in order to get a better understanding and sense of the world that we live in. One writer whose work powerfully illuminates the world around us is Denise Chong. Educated in economics at the University of British Columbia and in economics and public policy at the University of Toronto, Chong has authored a number of bestselling books over the past fifteen years. Her titles include such well-known works as
The Concubine's Children
(1995),
The Girl in the Picture: The Story of Kim Phuc
(1999), and most recently
Egg on Mao: The Story of an Ordinary Man Who Defaced an Icon and Unmasked a Dictatorship
(2009). In many ways, each of these books delves into the challenging and tumultuous worlds of their subjects and, in the process, offer an insightful social and cultural commentary of the times.

In October 2009, Chong, who now lives in Ottawa, returned to her native West Coast for two readings—one at the University of British Columbia and another at the Vancouver Public Library (VPL) as part of a national book tour promoting her latest literary work, affectionately known as
Egg on Mao
. On the day of her reading at VPL, I spoke with Chong about her career trajectory, the content of her books, and the craft of writing. She is what one may expect from a member of Canada's literati: articulate, well read, and profoundly inquisitive. But at the same time, the writer that we've
come to know is down-to-earth, with a delightful sense of humour. These traits make me feel as if I'm speaking with an old friend, and the sense of familiarity is comforting.

We travel back in time to the eighties, when Chong began her career in the public service. Chong speaks frankly of her early ambitions: “I was certainly shaped by living on the frontier, so far from what was seen as the centre, which was Toronto and Ottawa. I always wanted to be rooted where I was and also to be part of a bigger world.” Then came Trudeaumania. “I was affected by it,” she confesses. Chong took the bold leap, packed her bags, and relocated to Ottawa, she says, “inspired in part by Trudeau's own vision of a country big enough with heart and ideas to hold us all.”

After being recruited as an economist with the Department of Finance, she worked in a public service briefing capacity, dealing with natural resources. Then came an opportunity as a special advisor on BC issues, working with appointed cabinet minister Ray Perrault. Chong recalls many intense negotiations dealing with a range of matters relating to Expo '86, the Vancouver Convention Centre, Canada Place, northeast coal, and the light rapid transit system. It was while working in this liaison capacity in Ottawa that Chong came to the attention of the Prime Minister's Office and, around 1980, began serving as economic advisor to Pierre Trudeau.

When Trudeau retired in 1984, Chong didn't follow the various other leadership candidates, because she intended to take up a writing life. “That was my ambition,” she says. Having become friends with Trudeau, the two would talk about his early experience with
Cité libre
, the magazine that he cofounded and edited, and her own desire to embark on a career in writing. “When the opportunity came to go to China, he told me to go.” In yet another bold
move, Chong boarded a plane to join her boyfriend, now husband, in Beijing. In China, Chong would take on journalistic assignments here and there and even covered Rick Hansen's Man in Motion Tour. How many of us recall the stunning photo of Hansen wheeling himself up the Great Wall of China? Cutting her teeth on human interest stories and refining her craft, Chong sent such articles back to Canada, sharing her letters across land and sea. While in China, she decided to visit her ancestral homeland and unexpectedly found members of her extended family. The resulting memoir traced generations of her family through stories of hardship, growth, and great social transformation. The rest, as they say, is history.

Chong says that being in China gave her the foundation and impetus for her first novel. “This, of course, became the basis for my book and the play based on
The Concubine's Children
.” The book was so well received that it stayed on the bestseller list of the
Globe and Mail
for ninety-three weeks, won the City of Vancouver Book Award, the Vancity Book Prize, and the Edna Staebler Award, and was shortlisted for the Governor-General's Literary Award for Nonfiction. Needless to say, all of this attention secured Denise Chong's place as a voice that should be heard and followed. During Citizenship Week in 1995, she gave a speech entitled “Being Canadian,” which would be widely anthologized in the forthcoming years. Soon after this, other book titles followed, namely
The Penguin Anthology of Stories by Canadian Women
(1997), and
The Girl in the Picture: The Story of Kim Phuc
. Meanwhile, Chong never lost her passion for public policy. In the years of transition from state politics to cultural journalism and book publishing, she continued to pen many government reports on issues ranging from online culture and participation of visible minorities in the public service to what was once known as the “information highway.”

Which brings us to the question of craft—writer's craft. I'm curious to hear Chong's views on fiction and nonfiction and her take on the blurry shades of grey in between. In her mind, Chong is clear about how her content informs the structure of writing and even clearer about these literary genres, saying that, “there is one critical difference between fiction and nonfiction, and it's so simple. In fiction, the characters are born in the writer's mind. In nonfiction, someone actually gave birth to the characters.”

Chong writes about real peoples' lives, pulling the work out of living memory. “But a book is not a life,” she cautions. “It's a front and back cover,” alluding to the fact that she stays within the facts of her subjects' lives, while exercising her licence as a writer.

I can't help wonder how Chong's time in the public service has influenced
Egg on Mao
, which she often describes as a “biography of a gesture.” In her latest book, she traces the story of Lu Decheng, one of three men who attempted to stand up to the Communist regime by throwing eggs at the painting of Mao Zedong, surely a force much greater than themselves. No doubt, the book offered Chong opportunity to play with structure even as it details one man's personal and public struggle to act on his rights as a human being.

“With this story, I didn't go strictly chronologically,” she says. “I played with stretching time.” The book starts right after the last egg is thrown and ends with the moment before the three men go to throw the eggs. According to Chong, the structure of the book's narrative is intended to bring the reader on some emotional and moral journey, which, of course, is what it does. In this story, we are offered the intimate details and life story of an ordinary man and his seemingly extraordinary gesture.

Just before returning to her busy writer's life, Chong leaves us with a few reflective thoughts. Humble enough to name the pioneers that came before her, “I would bow down to people like Jim Wong-Chu, Larry Wong, and
SKY
Lee,” Chong says. “As artists, we're here to break boundaries and push the envelope. That's what a writer does and that's what we do as Canadians. We take on a complexity of identities—and I would have that over one simple identity any day.”

       
A
UTHOR
C
OMMENTARY

Chong's profile outlines some of the writer's major contributions but was intended to coincide with the 2009 Vancouver launch of
Egg on Mao
, a book which focuses on human agency and social justice issues pertinent to contemporary readers. Chong called her book a “biography of a gesture,” which shows how seemingly simple acts can make a difference. —
Eury Chang, 2015

       
A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR

Eury Chang is a Vancouver-born writer and theatre artist. He worked as the editor of two publications:
Dance Central
(2004–2011) and
Ricepaper
(2008–2012), during which time he wrote many artist profiles, critical reviews, and commentary on the Asian-Canadian cultural community.

The Mysterious Life of Wah Kwan Gwan

Ricepaper
17, nos. 3–4 (2012)

Jackie Wong

Vancouver's Chinatown is changing fast. On East Georgia, Union, Keefer, and Pender streets, the bright newness of independent art galleries, coffee shops, performance venues, and cocktail lounges stand in sharp contrast beside the now-dwindling number of traditional, generations-old grocery stores, bakeries, and butcher shops that were once the main features of the streets. “Chinatown has changed,” says Paul Cheng, who immigrated to Canada from Hong Kong in 1975. “It's only [busy] in the daytime for tourism, or for people who live close by to get groceries. Historically, it's nice to have it there. But the real functions, the real developments [that formed Chinatown's social and economical hubs] are not there anymore. Now, Richmond [BC] is said to be the new Chinatown.” Cheng frequented the neighbourhood during his first twenty years in Canada. He'd regularly pop in to the martial arts clubs, and he was part of a Chinatown musical society that has since moved its headquarters to Richmond. Speaking with me today from his home in Surrey, BC, Cheng rarely finds himself in Chinatown; he's had little reason to visit in the thirteen years since the death of his friend, Wah Kwan Gwan, who used to live in an East Hastings Street rooming house.

Gwan was a longstanding member of Chinatown's Cantonese opera community. His presence and contributions to the community were largely unacknowledged during his lifetime, but his
memory lives on in Vancouver's present-day Cantonese opera community, powered in large part by Cheng and his wife, Rosa.

Cheng and Gwan would occasionally meet for dim sum at the Pink Pearl Restaurant on East Hastings Street near Gwan's apartment. They frequently saw each other when working backstage together on Cantonese opera productions mounted by the Jin Wah Sing Musical Association, which has since moved to Richmond. “I worked with him for almost seven years backstage,” Cheng says of Gwan. “In Cantonese opera, they follow traditional rules. He's the one who showed me all the rules.”

Back when Chinatown's streets were awash with neon lights in the 1950s, 1960s, and part of the 1970s, people packed the afterhours musical societies, gambling clubs, and clan associations that formed the nucleus of Vancouver's Chinese community. Restaurant workers would drop by late at night after they had finished their shifts to socialize, play games, and make music together. Gwan was a regular fixture in the halls of Chinatown's musical societies. The neighbourhood's two oldest were the Jin Wah Sing Musical Association and the Ching Won Musical Society, formed in 1934 and 1935 respectively. Both groups were hubs for practicing, performing, and preserving the art of Cantonese opera.

This musical art form elevated the lives of Vancouver's young Chinese men who worked long hours at multiple jobs to make ends meet. Yiucheung Ling, now eighty-four years old, spent his working life in Chinatown restaurant kitchens and at a poultry shop where he would slaughter, de-feather, and butcher chickens for customers. He fondly remembers the lively spirit and camaraderie of the afterhours musical societies.

“Even though we were tired after work, we felt energized once we got there,” Ling says of Chinatown's musical societies. “When I
heard the gong and cymbals of the opera music, I felt at home.”

Ling met Gwan when the two frequented the Ching Won Musical Society as young men in their twenties. There, Gwan was a familiar, if unusual, face. When he wasn't quietly observing the rehearsals and performances, he would provide valuable instruction on costume comportment, props, and performance. He had spent [the] formative years of his life with a Cantonese opera family in China, and he was eager to pass on his knowledge to others.

This Cantonese opera expert with a mysterious past lived on the margins of both Vancouver's Chinese- and English-speaking communities; he was, in fact, ethnically Aboriginal but had lost all ties to his birth family. While he was fluent in two dialects of Chinese—Toishan and Cantonese—he could not speak English, so, like many Chinese bachelors, he spent his days in Chinatown. During his lifetime, only a few people appreciated his wisdom derived from a textured, often misunderstood, life that transcended geography, language, and the colour of one's skin. “The Chinese and Aboriginals saw Vancouver's Chinatown as a refuge,” explains Bill Chu. He chairs the Canadians for Reconciliation Society, a grassroots movement to honour and acknowledge the history of Chinese and Aboriginal people in British Columbia. “From the folks I ran into, they usually refer to that as their common experience, that Chinatown served as a place of refuge for both, because both are subjected to discrimination.” An understanding of the history of Chinese-Aboriginal relationships in Vancouver is now fairly minimal, underlining the importance of revisiting that part of history. Chu continues, “I think there's a deep need to understand that piece of history again.”

Throughout the course of a friendship that grew from their shared participation in Chinatown's musical societies, Ling, just one year older than Gwan, learned that the two shared a similar family
background. Both had spent significant parts of their childhood in the Cantonese opera community in Kaiping city, also known as Hoiping, in Guangdong province, China.

Ling's father was a scriptwriter for a Cantonese opera company in Kaiping. Gwan's adoptive family was part of the city's thriving Cantonese opera community. Gwan, born in 1929 near Hastings and Carrall streets to Aboriginal parents, was separated from his birth family as a boy. The details of the separation—and whether it was, in fact, abandonment—are unknown.

According to what Ling gathered from casual conversations with his friend, a Chinese man named Mr Gwan adopted the boy and named him Wah Kwan Gwan, the name he lived with for the rest of his life. His Aboriginal birth name is unknown. The adoptive uncle took the boy with him back to China, to Kaiping city where Mr Gwan's brother owned cinemas and restaurants, and the entire family was also deeply involved in Cantonese opera.

By the time Gwan returned to Vancouver in the 1950s, he was a young man in his twenties. Even though the return to Vancouver marked a return to his birthplace, Gwan would live the rest of his life on the margins of Canadian society. After years spent in China, he had lost all connections to his Aboriginal roots. While not fitting in entirely within his adopted community, his inability to articulate in English further isolated him and restricted his ability for economic and social advancement. Consequently, Gwan did not have steady work and relied on social assistance and adhoc housing arrangements provided by Chinatown community members to sustain his livelihood.

Gwan spent his days in Chinatown where his fluency with the Cantonese language and interest in performance art helped him connect with the local Cantonese opera community. He frequented
the Ching Won Musical Society, and the chairman temporarily rented him a room in his home. Gwan used the skills learned from his adopted family in Kaiping to help mount local Cantonese opera productions. He worked backstage, and he eagerly shared his extensive knowledge of the intricate traditional rituals around costuming and props with younger performers and stagehands.

Gwan's contributions and commitment to the opera community went largely unacknowledged. He was often left with the opera-related grunt work that few others wanted to do.

“When you go out to all the opera groups in Vancouver, nobody is interested in the backstage. The backstage is a very dirty job, a lot of heavy moving, and nobody appreciates it,” says Paul Cheng, who used to work with Gwan backstage during Jin Wah Sing Musical Association productions in the 1990s. “People wanted to put [Gwan] backstage. He was quite a helpful person. The only thing is, nobody respected him.”

Gwan had been dealt a difficult hand in life. He lived in poverty, relying on social assistance and the goodwill of Chinatown community members to help him find places to live and meals to eat. He turned to drinking that sometimes resulted in abusive, polarizing behaviour that alienated him from the people who knew him. “People thought he was a nobody,” Paul's wife, Rosa, says.

Working against the odds, Gwan proved himself as a talented singer and performer in the opera community. He eventually earned onstage parts, but he was never able to play the principal male roles typically filled by conventionally attractive male actors.

“If you are a principal male role, he's usually the hero of the show. Traditionally, it's someone who's good-looking, the prince,” Rosa says. “So he [Kwan] was not in that kind of role.”

Rosa and Paul became involved with Vancouver's Cantonese
opera community at the same time in 1993, and they met Gwan in the same year. If Gwan did appear onstage, he played a villain or political leader. He loved it, Rosa said. He shone.

Gwan was, to Rosa and Paul, a very special, essential player in the traditional Chinese artistic community. “We learned a lot from him,” Rosa says of Gwan's encyclopedic knowledge of the Cantonese opera art form. The couple is working hard to keep Cantonese opera alive and pass it on to future generations through the Vancouver Cantonese Opera society they founded in 2000, the last year of Gwan's life.

“It's like literature, a poem, when you sing,” Rosa says of Cantonese opera. “The performance technique—the miming, the gestures—is unique. It's an art form.”

The Vancouver Cantonese Opera society, Rosa says proudly, has a mission to popularize the art form in English-speaking mainstream society. It's hard work, she admits. But she and her husband are no strangers to working against the grain in the interest of those on the margins.

“For me, it's an art. I want to preserve it, I want to promote it,” Paul says. “We're not involved in any Chinatown groups anymore. We're totally different; it's not for people to hang out after work anymore. We do real production, we do real training.” For his part, eighty-four-year-old Yiucheung Ling continues to share his knowledge of costuming and props work with Rosa, Paul, and the Vancouver Cantonese Opera Society. “As long as I'm healthy, I'll keep going,” he says, smiling.

“He's a gem,” Rosa says of Ling. “He's the only one left in Vancouver who knows the traditional ways of Cantonese opera costume preparation.”

It's rare, special knowledge that Ling and Gwan used to share. It
was raining on Boxing Day, 2000, when seventy-one-year-old Wah Kwan Gwan died alone in a government-subsidized rooming house on East Hastings Street. His passing was quiet and without fanfare, much like the years he spent in Vancouver's Chinatown. Gwan was on income assistance when he died, and with no next-of-kin, the provincial government stepped in to sort and do away with his possessions, which included numerous valuable texts on Cantonese opera.

“Suddenly, I got a call that Wah Suk [an affectionate Chinese term of endearment for Gwan] passed away,” Paul recalls. “But by the time I knew, everything was gone.”

Intent on preserving the memory of a man they respected and admired, Paul and Rosa cobbled together what they knew about Gwan's life to write an obituary that ran in Vancouver's
Sing Tao Daily
newspaper in January 2001.

The story of Gwan's life and connection with Vancouver's Chinatown community should give us pause to reflect on historical relationships between Vancouver's Chinese and Aboriginal citizens, says Bill Chu of Canadians for Reconciliation.

“For a long time, we had been subjected to similar treatments, and we'd coexist and help each other on those fronts during those terrible times,” he says. “If you look back, anything before 1967, the Chinese were subjected to all kinds of discriminatory legislations, both provincially and federally. And the indigenous people at that time had their own limitations in terms of what the government allowed them or didn't allow them to do. So both were subjects of big-time, official discrimination.”

The situation with Gwan and the Cantonese opera community, Chu says, should not be considered to be an anomaly restricted to a few relationships between select individuals.

“It's not just something exotic that we should be looking into but something which is real, which should cause us to reflect on how we should relate to indigenous people today.”

“We learned a lot from him,” Rosa says of her relationship with Gwan. “A lot of people will think he's nobody.” She pauses and looks to Gwan's friend, Ling, seated next to her. They both know that Gwan led a remarkable life and that his memory deserves to be preserved, honoured, and celebrated.

       
A
UTHOR
C
OMMENTARY

While Jim Wong-Chu was guest editing
Ricepaper
magazine, he wanted to tell me about Wah Kwan Gwan and his unique presence in the Cantonese opera community. There's not a lot of discussion about historical relationships between Chinese and Aboriginal communities, he told me, and certainly not enough contemporary discussion of the ties between Vancouver's Downtown Eastside community and nearby Chinatown residents. Jim connected me with Wah Kwan Gwan's friends Rosa Cheng and Yiucheung Ling. It was very special to hear how much they valued a person who many thought of as unremarkable and, worse, undeserving of care and a place in the community. —
Jackie Wong, 2015

       
A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR

Jackie Wong lives and works in Vancouver, BC. She currently works as the editor at
Megaphone
, a monthly magazine on urban issues and independent culture sold by homeless and low-income vendors in Vancouver and Victoria. She is also an instructor in UBC's creative writing program and works as a freelance editor for local publishers and non-profits.