Video: Chinese Opera

Dickie Tong and Shirley Savard are interviewed by Ed Nicholson about memories of music and the Chinese community in Ladysmith.

[Two men and a woman sit around a kitchen table looking at photographs.]

[Music plays Chinese Opera]

[Ed Nicholson] The impression I’m getting that is in because there was no real Chinese community, that you sort of became part of the Ladysmith community. And the same with the teachers. Did they regard you the same way? You never felt you were treated differently or

[Dickie Tong] No?

[E.N.] Sometimes, one of the ways we can mark our childhood is with songs or stories. And I’d like you to both to sort of think about, did your mother or father sing any songs? Like we would call them in Western lullabies. Going to sleep songs, or did they tell you any stories or Chinese legends? The four dragons, or

[D.T.] Do you remember he had an old gramophone upstairs? Crank one? Used to play them old records, I guess, from China, from somebody.

[Shirley Savard] Oh, Dad,

[D.T.] He goes upstairs, something.

[S.S.]  That is something that is Chinese. And I still have those records, Chinese opera records.

[E.N.] Oh my God. Cantonese opera.

[S.S.] Oh yeah. If you want them, I don’t know what to do with them, but my dad would sit and listen to those.

[E.N.] Yeah. That’d be his environment. Wouldn’t it?

[S.S.] Yeah. Like if say we were out of the house, no one was home or even if there was just us and my mom had gone to Vancouver to visit relatives or whatever, he’d sit there and play that phonograph and just let that and close his eyes and listen to the Chinese music.

EN : Do you understand it?

[S.S.] No, not at all.

[S.S.] It sounded like a lot of screeching to me.

[D.T.] Remember he used to cranking up and sit there and just listen. And I used to, oh, I used to just take off.

[S.S.] Yeah. And by what I remember, he actually was playing like phonograph. So you, we had that thing. You put the needle onto the record and

[Music Plays Chinese Opera]

[Slide show of images of the Early Chinese Community]

[D.T.] And in Chinatown, I guess they had a club there and, and a store there’d be about three stories high, some would have maybe the second or third store,y you’d hear the Chinese doing their things. They know like for a concert or something. They’re practicing something up there. And some of them usually have a story to tell, usually put a PA system out the street and talk about it in their music or some of that. And there’s quite a lot of seniors would go to Chinatown just to listen to old opera, singing on a PA system.

[Music plays Cantonese Opera]