Free AlliterAsian by Allan Cho Page B

backstage. He was quite a helpful person. The only thing is, nobody respected him.”
    Gwan had been dealt a difficult hand in life. He lived in poverty, relying on social assistance and the goodwill of Chinatown community members to help him find places to live and meals to eat. He turned to drinking that sometimes resulted in abusive, polarizing behaviour that alienated him from the people who knew him. “People thought he was a nobody,” Paul’s wife, Rosa, says.
    Working against the odds, Gwan proved himself as a talented singer and performer in the opera community. He eventually earned onstage parts, but he was never able to play the principal male roles typically filled by conventionally attractive male actors.
    â€œIf you are a principal male role, he’s usually the hero of the show. Traditionally, it’s someone who’s good-looking, the prince,” Rosa says. “So he [Kwan] was not in that kind of role.”
    Rosa and Paul became involved with Vancouver’s Cantoneseopera community at the same time in 1993, and they met Gwan in the same year. If Gwan did appear onstage, he played a villain or political leader. He loved it, Rosa said. He shone.
    Gwan was, to Rosa and Paul, a very special, essential player in the traditional Chinese artistic community. “We learned a lot from him,” Rosa says of Gwan’s encyclopedic knowledge of the Cantonese opera art form. The couple is working hard to keep Cantonese opera alive and pass it on to future generations through the Vancouver Cantonese Opera society they founded in 2000, the last year of Gwan’s life.
    â€œIt’s like literature, a poem, when you sing,” Rosa says of Cantonese opera. “The performance technique—the miming, the gestures—is unique. It’s an art form.”
    The Vancouver Cantonese Opera society, Rosa says proudly, has a mission to popularize the art form in English-speaking mainstream society. It’s hard work, she admits. But she and her husband are no strangers to working against the grain in the interest of those on the margins.
    â€œFor me, it’s an art. I want to preserve it, I want to promote it,” Paul says. “We’re not involved in any Chinatown groups anymore. We’re totally different; it’s not for people to hang out after work anymore. We do real production, we do real training.” For his part, eighty-four-year-old Yiucheung Ling continues to share his knowledge of costuming and props work with Rosa, Paul, and the Vancouver Cantonese Opera Society. “As long as I’m healthy, I’ll keep going,” he says, smiling.
    â€œHe’s a gem,” Rosa says of Ling. “He’s the only one left in Vancouver who knows the traditional ways of Cantonese opera costume preparation.”
    It’s rare, special knowledge that Ling and Gwan used to share. Itwas raining on Boxing Day, 2000, when seventy-one-year-old Wah Kwan Gwan died alone in a government-subsidized rooming house on East Hastings Street. His passing was quiet and without fanfare, much like the years he spent in Vancouver’s Chinatown. Gwan was on income assistance when he died, and with no next-of-kin, the provincial government stepped in to sort and do away with his possessions, which included numerous valuable texts on Cantonese opera.
    â€œSuddenly, I got a call that Wah Suk [an affectionate Chinese term of endearment for Gwan] passed away,” Paul recalls. “But by the time I knew, everything was gone.”
    Intent on preserving the memory of a man they respected and admired, Paul and Rosa cobbled together what they knew about Gwan’s life to write an obituary that ran in Vancouver’s Sing Tao Daily newspaper in January 2001.
    The story of Gwan’s life and connection with Vancouver’s Chinatown community should give us pause to reflect on historical relationships between Vancouver’s Chinese and Aboriginal citizens, says