Existential resonance

“Are you Chinese?” a client asked me while we were waiting for the hearing officer to arrive.

“No, I’m not,” I answered.

“But your eyes are small!” she insisted.

“That’s because I didn’t get enough sleep,” I snapped. Awkward silence. She was Chinese. On hindsight, she probably got annoyed or worse, insulted, by my answer.

That was not the only time I was identified as Chinese. In Korea, shopkeepers at a night market said “Ni hao” and bowed when I entered their shops. While waiting for a table at Chinese restaurants, I’d have people come up to me and speak to me in Chinese.

Those incidents had me wondering if I would have given another answer had my great grandmother not lost her parents when she was a child. I have heard of family stories saying that her grandfather was a stowaway from China. I have no idea what that ancestor’s name was, which part of China he came from, and what he did in Cebu. I don’t think my great grandmother knew the answers to those questions either. If she did, I can’t even ask her because she passed away in 1981.

I thought of my Chinese ancestor when I saw the staging by Tanghalang Pilipino of David Henry Hwang’s “The Golden Child” at the Cultural Center of the Philippines over the weekend.

Hwang is best-known for being the writer of “M. Butterfly.” I was surprised to learn that the he got material for “The Golden Child” from interviewing his grandmother, whom he visited and interviewed in Cebu when he was ten years old.

The play opens with Andrew Kong, a Chinese-American, who is visited by the ghost of his grandmother, Ahn, who insists on telling him the story of her father to guide him in his own life.

Eng Tieng Bin returns to China after years of doing business in the Philippines. His three wives are concerned that his interest in Western ways would disrupt the household where ancestor worship and traditional rituals were still practiced. He orders the unbinding of his daughter’s feet. He invites a British missionary and his wives worry because his conversion to Christianity could mean that he would choose only one woman to be his wife.

According to my teacher, art is a template of being. Its purpose is to create what he calls “existential resonance” or the mirroring of a person’s feelings, thoughts, and state of being in a work of art. He explained that art answers a soul’s need to be affirmed of its own existence. For art to be good, it has to have many levels of meaning so it can resonate at different levels with different persons.

Watching “The Golden Child” let me understand what my teacher was talking about. I enjoyed the crisp dialogue of the play. I caught the Filipino version (translated by Dennis Marasigan) and was happy to note that the words used were easy on my Cebuano ears. The acting was superb. The predominantly student audience laughed loudly.

More importantly, the play reflected my own yearning to understand my Chinese heritage. Except for miki, the homemade noodle dish that is a staple at my mother’s family gatherings, and the fair skin and almond-shaped eyes that I and a lot of my relatives have, I don’t really have any idea what it is. I think it’s about time I learn more.

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