Free AlliterAsian by Allan Cho

stand in sharp contrast beside the now-dwindling number of traditional, generations-old grocery stores, bakeries, and butcher shops that were once the main features of the streets. “Chinatown has changed,” says Paul Cheng, who immigrated to Canada from Hong Kong in 1975. “It’s only [busy] in the daytime for tourism, or for people who live close by to get groceries. Historically, it’s nice to have it there. But the real functions, the real developments [that formed Chinatown’s social and economical hubs] are not there anymore. Now, Richmond [BC] is said to be the new Chinatown.” Cheng frequented the neighbourhood during his first twenty years in Canada. He’d regularly pop in to the martial arts clubs, and he was part of a Chinatown musical society that has since moved its headquarters to Richmond. Speaking with me today from his home in Surrey, BC, Cheng rarely finds himself in Chinatown; he’s had little reason to visit in the thirteen years since the death of his friend, Wah Kwan Gwan, who used to live in an East Hastings Street rooming house.
    Gwan was a longstanding member of Chinatown’s Cantonese opera community. His presence and contributions to the community were largely unacknowledged during his lifetime, but hismemory lives on in Vancouver’s present-day Cantonese opera community, powered in large part by Cheng and his wife, Rosa.
    Cheng and Gwan would occasionally meet for dim sum at the Pink Pearl Restaurant on East Hastings Street near Gwan’s apartment. They frequently saw each other when working backstage together on Cantonese opera productions mounted by the Jin Wah Sing Musical Association, which has since moved to Richmond. “I worked with him for almost seven years backstage,” Cheng says of Gwan. “In Cantonese opera, they follow traditional rules. He’s the one who showed me all the rules.”
    Back when Chinatown’s streets were awash with neon lights in the 1950s, 1960s, and part of the 1970s, people packed the afterhours musical societies, gambling clubs, and clan associations that formed the nucleus of Vancouver’s Chinese community. Restaurant workers would drop by late at night after they had finished their shifts to socialize, play games, and make music together. Gwan was a regular fixture in the halls of Chinatown’s musical societies. The neighbourhood’s two oldest were the Jin Wah Sing Musical Association and the Ching Won Musical Society, formed in 1934 and 1935 respectively. Both groups were hubs for practicing, performing, and preserving the art of Cantonese opera.
    This musical art form elevated the lives of Vancouver’s young Chinese men who worked long hours at multiple jobs to make ends meet. Yiucheung Ling, now eighty-four years old, spent his working life in Chinatown restaurant kitchens and at a poultry shop where he would slaughter, de-feather, and butcher chickens for customers. He fondly remembers the lively spirit and camaraderie of the afterhours musical societies.
    â€œEven though we were tired after work, we felt energized once we got there,” Ling says of Chinatown’s musical societies. “When Iheard the gong and cymbals of the opera music, I felt at home.”
    Ling met Gwan when the two frequented the Ching Won Musical Society as young men in their twenties. There, Gwan was a familiar, if unusual, face. When he wasn’t quietly observing the rehearsals and performances, he would provide valuable instruction on costume comportment, props, and performance. He had spent [the] formative years of his life with a Cantonese opera family in China, and he was eager to pass on his knowledge to others.
    This Cantonese opera expert with a mysterious past lived on the margins of both Vancouver’s Chinese- and English-speaking communities; he was, in fact, ethnically Aboriginal but had lost all ties to his birth family. While he was fluent in two dialects of