Chapter 7 - Uncommon Sources on an Uncommon Life : Cantonese Opera Music Master Wong Toa (1914-2015)

Summary

Abstract

This chapter explores sources on the centennial biography of Cantonese opera master musician Wong Toa (1914-2015) whose life and career of unrivalled longevity bears witness to a sweeping panoramic history of traditional opera, folk music, transnational mobility, and cultural identity. These untapped sources include informative commemorative publications issued by Chinatown associations, invaluable compendia of longstanding Cantonese opera musical scores, self-published anecdotal accounts of an amateur chronicler, and detailed documentation in museum archives, all of which were created by or through Wong Toa. In addition, documents from his personal papers, made available recently by his family, furnish riveting, hitherto unknown, details on his life's complicated turns and shed light on his shifting historical consciousness and identity formation.

Keywords: Cantonese opera, Chinatown theatre, diaspora, identity, personal memories

In the summer of 1944 with the devastation of the anti-Japanese War swirling around him, a young musician named Wong Toa 黃滔 (1914-2015) was able to find a moment of respite to begin jotting down recollections and thoughts about his life. It is highly unusual for a person to attempt a memoir at such a young age. Not only did he start, he proceeded so quickly that his words soon filled up some sixty pages of a notebook. Although Wong Toa had stopped formal schooling as a teenager, his command of Chinese literacy was solid. He also displayed a penchant for planning by sketching out a chronological outline on the first page (Fig. 7). But then a very long pause set in after a few years. When the Chinese Communists under Mao Zedong took control of the mainland in 1949, Wong sought refuge in British Hong Kong together with his mother and several siblings. To make a living, he shuffled between the orchestras of various performing troupes and offered private lessons on the fundamentals of Cantonese opera to young new singers. However, he did not add a single word to the memoir. Another decade passed and Wong brought the notebook with him when he travelled further still, this time crossing the Pacific. In 1961, he was admitted into Canada as an instructor of Chinese operatic music and lived the latter, and lengthier, half of his life in Vancouver.