Ruth Wong-Miller meets Waymun the Lion in King of the Yees, Walterdale Theatre. Photo by Scott Henderson, Henderson Images
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
When director Barbara Mah discovered King of the Yees, she knew she’d found a soul-mate of a play. An alignment of the stars perhaps?
To help support .ca YEG theatre coverage, click here.
The Walterdale community theatre production that opens Wednesday is the result of this match-making between a director and a writer who share “the lived experience of being born in North America to Chinese parents.”
“She calls it the most autobiographical of her plays,” says Mah of Lauren Yee (Cambodian Rock Band), who’s a writer character in her own comedy, at a play reading in the first scene. Her 2017 play is about “trying to bridge the communication and culture gap between herself, very much a modern American living in San Francisco, and her dad, who was raised in Chinatown.”
“There are plenty of plays about newcomers and the immigrant experience,” says Mah. “Not so many about people born to immigrant parents and having to straddle both cultures.”
The story of King of the Yees is set at the time of the California State Senate race of 2015, when the real-life Senator Leland Yee was found guilty of corruption “and the Lee name went to pot,” as Mah puts it. “Lauren’s father disappears into Chinatown to try to restore the dignity of the name, and Lauren tries to find him….” Her quest “turns out to be a fantastical adventure where she has to negotiate all the things she pooh-poohed earlier, in order to ask questions and get help to find her father.”
Ruth Wong-Miller and Stan Woo in King of the Yees, Walterdale Theatre. Photo by Scott Henderson, Henderson Images.
“It’s all about a father (Stan Woo) and a daughter (Ruth Wong-Miller) coming to the point of understanding where each comes from. And Lauren gains a greater appreciation of her heritage and how it relates to her modern life.”
As Mah describes, “the play takes place in the Yee Family Association. “The Yees, the Wongs, and the Mahs, have ‘family associations’ which arose out of necessity due to racist policies of the time built into the Canadian Immigration Act, and in the U.S. the Chinese Exclusion Act.”
Tim Lo (centre, as Model Ancestor), Grace Li, Ivy Poon in King of the Yees, Walterdale Theatre. Photo by Scott Henderson, Henderson Images
It all rings a bell with her, says Mah, Walterdale’s artistic director. She’s the daughter of Chinese immigrants who arrived here as part of a wave of Chinese newcomers in the late 50s at the time of the Communist takeover, when exclusionary legislation in North America was lifted. “I was born in 1961, and I’m among the oldest of the first generation of Chinese Canadians….”
Her grandfather Henry Mah, who owned a grocery story in Chinatown, was a founder of the Mah Family Association in Edmonton. And her dad assisted him. More recently, some of the younger Mahs here got a grant to research family history, “and put together a timeline and a fascinating exhibit of the Edmonton Mahs, The Journey of the Horse (Mah is ‘horse’ in Chinese). “They interviewed surviving elders late in 2022, including my dad (now, alas, deceased) and my aunt. I was present during the interviews and heard stories I’d never heard…. Part of the culture is not showing the bad things,” she laughs.
‘The Journey of the Horse’ exhibit is on the walls of the Mah Family Society in Chinatown. As Mah explains, the ‘family societies’ became basically drop-in social clubs. “To this day every other Friday they give free pay-what-you-can mahjong lessons, as part of Chinatown revitalization.”
In their time “the family societies helped people come over here…. If you didn’t need your legal papers, because you weren’t planning to emigrate, you sold them to other who needed them.” And you took whatever name was on paper. Mah’s dad, a civil engineer for the Alberta government till he retired, was a so-called “paper son’. When the Canadian government granted amnesty to ‘paper sons’, says Mah, “no one took them up on it…. The Chinese immigrants had made themselves at home. They were successful. They’d fit into Canadian society and I don’t think they wanted to rock the boat.”
Mah herself “didn’t learn English (her parents spoke Toisanese) till I got dumped into a kindergarten.” But she didn’t grow up in Chinatown. “We moved to an upper middle-class white neighbourhood when I started school,” she says. “And until I was in high school, my sisters and I were the only Asian people in our school, until the ‘boat people’ started coming over.”
Piano and ballet lessons “were the done thing” for white kids in that milieu. “So I got sent to them,” says Mah, who has both a biology degree and a business degree. Much to the dismay of her parents, “the dance classes really took, and I ended up in university touring with a musical theatre dance troupe.” Parental dreams of a Dr. Mah in the family ended there. “It’s touched on tangentially in the play,” says Mah of the playwright, who went to Yale theatre school and married a white man.
Mah has assembled an all-Asian cast for the Walterdale production, including nine Chinese actors and one Filipino, and the stage manager is Asian, too. “Some were born here, one is a recent immigrant to Canada. And it was interesting to share with people how much this play reflects their experience,” says Mah of rehearsals. “It’s fun working with actors who have backgrounds similar to yours. And lived experience enriches their characters onstage. Five or six in the cast work regularly in theatre; for the other half of the cast King of the Yees is their first time onstage. And they’re having a riot…. It’s a wonderful thing that Walterdale is a teaching theatre.”
Erhu player Ivy Poon, King of the Yees, Walterdale Theatre. Photo by Scott Henderson, Henderson Images.
In the course of Lauren’s trip through a “heightened version of Chinatown” she meets a ‘lion dancer’. “So we sent our actors to a lion dance studio, the Hung Mon Athletic Club, to get authentic training. And the club did our choreography for us. There’s an erhu player in the show, too. And the violinist in the cast has been taking up the challenge of that Chinese instrument, a challenging cross between the violin and the bass.
Above all, says Mah, King of the Yees is a comedy. Stereotypes come under comic attack. “The playwright pokes real fun at the perception North Americans have of Asian and Chinese people.” She points to a scene where “two Chinese actors are rehearsing, trying to teach other other how to do a Chinese accent.” Or a scene in which the FBI is looking for a gangster, “and someone says it doesn’t matter who they catch: we all look alike to them.” Stage directions indicate that Model Ancestor “appears by way of RuPaul.” Says Mah, “our actor (Tim Lo) has been having so much fun chewing the scenery!”
Most of all “it’s a comedy about miscommunication,” says Mah, to be enjoyed by “anyone who’s had parents, ever. Very funny, heart-warming in places. The audience will have a good time!”
PREVIEW
King of the Yees
Theatre: Walterdale
Written by: Lauren Yee
Directed by: Barbara Mah
Starring: Andrew Kwan, Kingsley Leung, Ruth Wong-Miller, Tim Lo, Ivy Poon, Stanley Woo, Rupert Gomez, Tsz Him Hymns Chu, Grace Li, Helen Massini
Running: Feb. 5 through 15
Tickets: walterdaletheatre.com
