Madelaine Hodges, left, and Bessie Cheng in a scene in Woking Phoenix.Jae Yang/Handout
The play Woking Phoenix starts with one character on stage alone. Ma, the matriarch of a Chinese Canadian family running a restaurant in a small town, is still pregnant and full of hope, coaxing her husband to dance. When he won’t, she turns her formidable charm toward getting him to notice the boombox she found at a garage sale for a “very good deal.”
Ma, played by Phoebe Hu, is the one who thinks up the restaurant name, a pun on woks and a walking phoenix. She’s the one who envisions their future family and how they’ll run the business together. She’s the driver of their Canadian dream.
Immediately, we learn she is strong-willed, funny, loving and above all, resourceful. When her husband walks out, leaving her with the business they were supposed to build together and three children who have their own dreams (which do not include washing dishes by hand every Friday night), the hustle of restaurant life takes over.
Ma is the archetype of a hard-working, immigrant entrepreneur who scrambles every day for slim margins and needs to be tough on her kids to keep it all together. In that first scene, she flips back and forth between Mandarin and English (there are surtitles), and while the presence of her family is all around, she is physically alone. We see her. She deserves to be seen.
Ma is practical and ambitious, a fictional depiction of a long line of small-town Chinese Canadian restaurant workers across the country, who began to arrive with early waves of migration to the west coast during the second half of the 19th century. Restaurant owners developed dishes for Western palates – truly Canadian-made inventions that didn’t exist back home – made by immigrants who worked with what they had, which was often very little (but was locally grown).
Phoebe Hu portrays Ma, who thinks up the name - a pun on woks and a walking phoenix - that is at the centre of the play.Jae Yang/Handout
In her book Chop Suey Nation, Globe and Mail reporter Ann Hui writes that many of these restaurateurs “had only started restaurants because they had no other options … and also because until the mid-twentieth century, they had been barred from other professional occupations.” They improvised, inventing what became called chop suey, or “bits and pieces,” and this ad hoc cuisine became standardized and so popular that customers started asking for it everywhere.
The reality that every small Canadian town has a Chinese restaurant reflects how our fortunes are all linked. It also means restaurant workers somehow built a cuisine together while working in isolation, facing the pressures of being one of only a few Chinese families in town, if not the only one.
In Woking Phoenix, the children are Charlie (Bessie Cheng, also a co-creator, director and producer), an artist who needs a bigger city to find herself, Vince (Richard Lam), an aspiring musician, and Iris (Madalaine Hodges), the youngest, most pliable child, who does everything she can to keep the peace and help her mother.
Like her real-world predecessors, Ma is resourceful. The play is, too. It is scrappy, inventive and fills the holes of a tight budget with ample ingenuity to create something entirely new, at times making something out of nothing. For example, off-stage bells and whistles are used to conjure entire characters who never get one word of dialogue. In other scenes, deep, emotional truths characters can’t express with words get conveyed through movement. The non-verbal elements are particularly poignant in a play about a family that, like so many Canadian families, has internal language barriers. Sound design (Maddie Bautista) and choreography concept (Hanna Kiel, who worked in collaboration with the performers) were brought in much earlier than in standard play development timelines.
I’m not Chinese, nor did I grow up in a restaurant, but for Asian immigrant kids like me, there are wry, shared observations on growing up, including that our parents couldn’t say, “I love you.” In real life, acts of service, asking whether you’ve eaten or sacrificing personal interests and leisure to work, are the ways our immigrant parents embody love but it doesn’t always translate that way to young minds. That’s what makes the choreographed scenes of love and support from Ma to her children so powerful. There’s no question how she feels. Similarly, a conflict scene wrought through dance will break your heart.
The creative minds of Woking Phoenix come from the Silk Bath Collective, which specializes in telling Chinese Canadian stories on stage and developed this play over five years with alternative theatre company Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto.
The result is a play so tender and entertaining, even cozy, if that’s a way to describe theatre. And for anyone who grew up with immigrant parents who silently swallowed daily indignities (immigrant kids, we all knew, right? At a certain point, we knew), I dare you to watch this play without crying.
If she had time and money for frivolous theatre, would Ma laugh as much, and cry, as we did? How would she react if she saw herself as we do? For all the restaurant hustle and hopscotching through time on stage, it was Ma who moved us. Unburdened by the real world and made even more real through fiction, Ma is the heart of this play. The play’s inventiveness, as with Canadian immigrant small-business owners across generations, is what keeps it all afloat.
Woking Phoenix runs to April 27 at the Theatre Passe Muraille
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