Growing up in Edmonton as the daughter of Chinese immigrants in the ’60s and ’70s, Barbara Mah felt out of place. Until she was 19, she was the only Asian kid in her school. Her friends’ families were members of the Derrick Country Club, “and I never quite understood why my dad said it wasn’t for us.”
Back then, the differences were stark. Mah wanted sandwiches at lunch, not “whatever mom made at home.” Multiculturalism “wasn’t cool” when she was growing up, “so I did the things my white friends did. My family would go to Chinatown to get these ingredients, and I’d say, ‘Why can’t we get them at Safeway?'”
Mah got piano and ballet lessons “simply because all the other little girls in the neighbourhood did,” but that led to her love of musical theatre, and a prominent career in the Edmonton arts scene that’s already spanned 30+ years. But in all that time, the director-performer never saw a script that sums up her child-of-immigrants experience like Lauren Yee’s King of the Yees.
“I’ve seen plays written about the immigrant and the newcomer experience, but I’ve not seen a play written about someone who was born here to parents of a different culture, and the struggle to try to fit in both worlds.”
At the beginning of the story, we’re in San Francisco’s Chinatown, and the main character, Lauren, is writing a show about her and her dad. She talks about how Chinatown is dying, but she doesn’t quite understand what the culture is about, and she really can’t relate to her dad. It’s set during the 2015 elections for Secretary of State, in which real-life Senator Leland Yee ran. He’s found guilty of corruption, which taints the Yee name. Her dad disappears on a mission to maintain the dignity of the family name, “which Lauren doesn’t understand, because they aren’t related [to Leland].” But she nonetheless sets out to find him, meeting a whole host of colourful characters on her adventure through Chinatown.
While there’s a heavy emotional core, the play is a comedy. The licensed script recommends five actors, but rather than have actors change offstage to play other characters, Mah cast 10 Asian actors to fill each individual role.
“As you can imagine, there’s not a whole lot of roles written specifically for Asian-Chinese actors. But Walterdale is about community involvement. Some of the supporting roles are played by people who don’t get the opportunity [to be on stage] that often, so I worked as hard as I could to make room for their participation.”
While the plot is specific to the Asian experience, Mah says the the story is universal to anyone who’s ever felt a bit out of place, or that their parents were a bit out of touch.
“It’s a double story,” she says. “One is a communication gap between a father and a daughter, which is true no matter where you’re born, or who you’re born to. And the second is her cultural gap, which she eventually bridges. But early on she says to her dad that while he had to grow up in Chinatown because of racism, she did not. She actually asks him outright, ‘What is the point of Chinatown?'”
The show also provides audience members with a glossary of Chinese Family Associations that developed in Chinatowns across North America in the mid-1900s, in response to the Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred Chinese people from entering (it’s estimated that between 1923 and 1947, fewer than 50 people emigrated from China to Canada). The list includes the Mah and Yee names, “but Lauren would have been born a generation after that, so she would not have understood at a gut level what those associations were about. Her father maintains the Yee Family Association, while my grandfather founded the Mah Association in Edmonton, and my father helped him in later years. So when I ran across this play set in a Family Association from the perspective of a daughter who had zero clue, I thought, if you believe in signs from the universe, this is it.”
Looking back now, through the lens of directing this play, Mah cherishes her childhood trips to Chinatown.
“My dad was a silent partner in a grocery store that my grandfather owned and my uncle ran. But back when photography wasn’t common, there used to be people that stood in the streets — not just in Chinatown, but everywhere — randomly taking pictures of people. And then a week later, they would have a print you could buy. There’s a picture of my grandfather holding my hand walking down the street, and it’s one of the nicest photos I have.”
King of the Yees runs at Walterdale Theatre February 5 to 15.
