Happy Valley

Firehall Arts Centre to June 4, 2023
Tickets from $25 at 604-689-0926 or www.firehallartscentre.ca

Posted May 30, 2023

As well as death and taxes, change is inevitable but it’s not always a good thing. Written and performed by Derek Chan, Happy Valley is about change and the erasure of history as time marches on. Who will remember Hong Kong as it was before the handover from Great Britain to the People’s Republic of China in in 1997 with the promise of “One country, two systems”? Did anyone really believe that would work, that it would last? Certainly not Chan who writes, “One Country, Two Systems seemed a pretty acceptable deal/That only idiots and imbeciles would believe in”.

Happy Valley is billed as a “solo, interdisciplinary performance. Through text, song, multimedia and music, Happy Valley is a new performance piece that dissects the historic, political, and cultural context surrounding Hong Kong’s current democratic struggles.” But the emphasis is definitely on ‘interdisciplinary’ and ‘performance’; the production is a mix of punk rock, spoken word poetry, bluesy/jazzy song (with Chan at the piano), written and spoken Cantonese with English text (projected faster than it’s possible to comprehend).

Somewhere the deeply personal is all but lost – or at least hard to find. I was most moved by Chan’s memories of childhood: “This baby was eleven years old/It was the only time his very strict, stoic teacher of a father/Let him stay up until midnight so that he could watch/And remember/The Handover of Hong Kong on July 1^st, 1997/From Great Britain to the People’s Republic of China.”  Or his sadness as his school friends simply disappeared when their parents, who were not willing to risk a post-handover Hong Kong, pulled up stakes and moved away. How was a child able to process what was going on? Chan, now in his mid-30s and having spent half his life in Canada, is still trying – angrily – to process. Where is the Hong Kong of his childhood? To a much, much lesser extent, we all wonder where the world of our childhood has gone. But when the city of your birth is so radically altered, how do we cope?

Produced jointly by rice & beans theatre and the Firehall, and directed by Anjela Magpantay, anger and frustration pervade Happy Valley. It’s raw and tough. It’s a rage, it’s a rant. As it should be. The 2020 passage of the National Security Law criminalizes secession, subversion, organization and perpetration of terrorist activities and “collusion with a foreign country or with external elements to endanger national security” in relation to the HKSAR [Hong Kong Special Administrative Region]. It flies in the face of the agreement and makes protest or even criticism illegal inside or even outside Hong Kong. Writing and performing a play like Happy Valley in Canada could be seen as a criminal act.

But ultimately Chan’s anger seems directed inward – as if there were something Chan believes he should have done, should be doing. As if he feels guilty writing freely here in a democracy that we take for granted. However sympathetic I am to Chan’s anger and grief, amidst the  video projections (Andie Lloyd), lighting design (Jonathan Kim), songs, poetry and  Uncle Chan’s hard-to-catch monologues, I found myself frequently alienated – and wishing I weren’t.

Ironically, the title, Happy Valley, is itself a historical erasure: before it was a famous race track and upper-income residential area of Hong Kong, Happy Valley was a cemetery created and named by the occupying British whose troops were dropping like flies from malaria in 1840. Before that, the area was known as Wong Nai Chung Valley – literally yellow mud stream – one that supported acres of rice paddies.  The present-day Happy Valley race course was the site of the massive Concert for Democracy in 1989, believed by many to have precipitated the Tiananmen Massacre one week later.