City Stage: Hong Kong Playwriting in English

There Are No Innocents Here

There Are No Innocents Here XuXi My first encounter with English-language theatre in Hong Kong was in the mid-1970s, soon after returnin g home from th e US where I had spen t three years completing my bachelor' s degree. In college, I had acted a little and wanted to continue that interest. This led me to audition for a local amateur group, the Garrison Players. The verdict, however, had nothing to do with whether or not my audition was any good. The reason they said they could not cast me was simply this: they could not see a Chinese person acting a non-Chinese part, in English. Such an attitude seems at best quaintly innocent and at worst blatantly racist in our twentyfirst -century city , where actors of all races perform i n English-language dramas , and where the language o f performance slip s and slides between English an d Cantonese, along wit h Putonghua or Tagalog as well. Suffice it to say, English has long ceased being 'owned' by the English; certainly, my American college experience proved that even with my Asian face, I could be Eliza Doolittle, a Noel Coward sophisticate or a reader's theatre performer in a play about the American poet E. E. Cummings. Yet, Hong Kong theatre in the 1970s still remained hopelessly divided by language and culture. That a hybrid identity and culture emerged at all, in spite of the narrow colonial vision for local culture, demonstrates the 'spirit' of the Chinese and Hong Kong people. I borrow here the term from Lin Yu-tong's 191 5 tract The Spirit of the Chinese People, i n which he examined th e question o f the kind of humanity Chines e civilization produced. Mercifully, Hon g Kon g Englis h theatr e ha s evolve d fro m it s primitive origin s int o something richer , somethin g mor e imaginative , an d mor e humane. I t is als o mor e trul y reflective of the cultural hot-pot that defines this city. In this anthology, we attempt to showcase the diversity of talent in Hong Kong English theatre. Mike Ingham provides a history of that evolution and critical analyses of the plays. My introduction will focus broadly on three areas. The first is to comment on two of the actual performances wit h specific references to the bilingual or multilingual/cultural issues in these performances an d als o in the texts o f the other plays; this commentary wil l als o includ e reference t o a third play which we were unable to include in the anthology. Secondly, there is a general discussion of the 'spirit' or ethos of the plays, which appears loosely to be a kind of desperate desire for innocence. Finally, there is the arrangement of the selections into four aspects of identity which requires further elucidation: Hong Kong identity; expatriate identity; Chinese identity; and losing identity, all of which characterize and grace our city's stage. Changing Voices, Changing Faces, Changing Place s 'To change your language,' Derek Wallcott said, 'yo u mus t change your life.' This notio n wavered aroun d m y consciousness a s I watched Veronica Needa's Face, an d again whil e watching the Mike Ingham/Jessica Yeung adaptation of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, both of which I first saw performed in Cantonese prior to reading the English scripts. 12 X u Xi Needa's Cantones e performance o f Face did also include English, but the bulk of the presentation was in Cantonese. Although Needa speaks Cantonese with native fluency, she has minimal Chinese literacy. Consequently, memorizing the translated playscript was for her an entirely aural experience because she could not read this 'fake book'. The play mimicked the experience of Eurasians in Hong Kong, who switch languages with apparent ease, but whose lives constantly remind them of their dual existence; they are caught between these two places of blood, neither of which they fully inhabit . In the performance o f The Yellow Wallpaper, the 'life' of the text did, in some measure, change as a result of language. Gilman's protagonist in the original story never heard or sang Chinese opera. Yet, in listening to the Cantonese voice of the speaker slowly going mad, and as her words grew to have less and less connection to the 'reality ' around her, the strains of Chinese opera heightened...