In the past, I wrote a post on the mystery novels of Marty Chan.  Chan is not only a novelist, but also a playwright.  Last year marked the debut of Chan’s play The Forbidden Phoenix at the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton.  The play is about the Monkey King and is performed in a cultural fusion of dramatic styles — namely Western musical theatre and Peking opera.   Billed also as a martial arts musical, the play is colorful and acrobatic, full of lively action with much singing and dancing.  I had the opportunity to see the play with my daughter for the first time at the Manitoba Theatre for Young People this past week and thoroughly enjoyed it.

As Chan mentions in the video on the Citadel Theatre site, the play was inspired by some research he did of the stories of the ‘bachelor men’ — single Chinese men who had come to Canada to work on the railroad but who were unable to bring over their families because of the nefarious head tax put only on the Chinese by the Canadian government to prevent their immigration to the country.   Re-envisioning the story as that of the Monkey King’s, Chan has his principal character banished to the west by the Empress Dowager to a place called Terminal City where he must unleash the Iron Dragon from the mountain at the behest of railway magnate and tyrant Horne.  While attempting to do this, he meets the Phoenix who enlightens the Monkey King on Horne’s real intentions and soon the two become fast friends, and enemies of the exploitative Horne.

Although it was hard to catch everything in this action-packed play, there were some touches I enjoyed like the parodying of Cultural Revolution-era China with the reciting of the Empress Dowager’s Three Laws, and the dance of the Iron Dragon whose head resembled the front of a steam locomotive with wispy trails of metallic steam coming off its face like dragon whiskers.

If you ever get a chance to see this play, I’d certainly recommend it highly.

(Photo credit: Citadel Theatre, Edmonton)

My son’s introduction to mysteries was by way of Canadian writer Marty Chan.  Beginning with The Mystery of the Frozen Brains followed by The Mystery of the Graffiti Ghoul and then finally with The Mystery of the Mad Science Teacher, my son has followed the erstwhile adventures of ten year old Marty in his French Canadian town in Alberta with great interest.  Marty is the only Chinese kid in his prairie town. This makes him very self-aware.  In Graffiti Ghoul, he says:

Being the only Chinese kid at school already made me stand out like a beach ball on a snow bank.  My black hair and darker skin made me different from the rest of the kids, and my classmates teased me almost every day.  They called me a math geek.  They claimed I ate cats.  They said Jackie Chan was my uncle.  None of it was true, but that didn’t stop them from making nasty rumours about me.

One might chuckle now reading this, feeling Marty’s comments to be dated, but in fact, this kind of racial teasing was pretty common-place for many of my generation of Asians growing up in the predominantly white prairie provinces of Canada.  One couldn’t help then but feel like an alien — an idea which Chan makes much of in the first of his series: The Mystery of the Frozen Brains.  Marty feels so conspicuous in his town that he actually begins to believe that he might be a space alien.  He and his new-found friend Remi even go out in search of a space ship.

For my son, Marty Chan’s books are entertaining stories of a boy trying to solve mysteries in his town, but for me as a parent, reading Chan’s books reminded me of what growing up Asian in North America was like.  Thanks, Marty Chan, for rendering an ‘alien’ existence in such a pleasurable way for both parent and child!