Cat Country

I am honored to have received a grant from 4Culture to work on the next iteration of Cat Country. Currently working on developing music and mounting a reading in 2026. Thanks to the amazing support of artists in King County. It has increased the vibrancy of our artistic community when we need it most.

Grace Luke, a Chinese-American woman, uses a cat’s paw strategy with her white male mentor, to rise up in the racist and sexist 1980s post-Vietnam, New York City, corporate world. Put Grace’s story together with Cantopop songs styled after Anita Mui, the Cantopop superstar (also known as the Asian Madonna) and you have Cat Country.

A Reading of the musical Cat Country was presented on Saturday, June 10, 2023 sponsored by Bellevue College Theater Arts at Bellevue College Stop Gap Theater.

Here is the recording:

Act 1: https://youtu.be/A6oXg5WKjoE (1:05)

Act 2: https://youtu.be/N78Mgmj6Jd4 (42 minutes)

Read the article published in the International Examiner.

Cat Country

The novel Cat Country was written by Lao She in 1932, one of the most prominent writers in modern China, when China was undergoing turmoil from the fall of the Qing dynasty and the threat of Western and Japanese imperialism. It is considered a significant Chinese dystopian and early speculative fiction work. The story takes place on Mars where a community of cat-people live a decadent life doomed for decay because of their laziness and corruption. Their end comes when they are invaded by foreigners. Lao She takes aim at traditional Confucian scholars and Westernized elite. This pessimistic depiction of Chinese people, as averse to science and technology and unable to find solutions to their problems, has led to criticism of internalized Orientalism.

Cantopop

Hong Kong was leased by the British for 99 years at the end of the Second Opium War in 1860, occupied by the Japanese in the 1940s, under British rule from 1950 to 1997, and handed over to the Chinese after that. The term Cantopop came into existence in the 1970s when Hong Kong, governed by the British, focused on economic growth. This was a time when young Hong Kongnese were developing their own local culture and consciousness. The sentimental love songs with Cantonese lyrics backed by Western-style pop music expressed complex feelings in their age of innocence. Cantopop’s renditions of European, Japanese, American, and Mandarin songs made it a hybrid of different music cultures. In the 1980s, Cantopop reached its Age of Glory when cross-media synergy with film and television spread its influence throughout Asia and to the Chinese diaspora of 37 million around the world. It made Hong Kong the largest center of Chinese popular music worldwide. This coincided with a crisis of confidence when the British and Chinese reached agreement in 1984 to hand over the British colony to China in 1997. Cantopop met its demise in the late 1990s and early 2000s. James Wong, the godfather of Cantopop, surmised that its death may be attributed to the handover of Hong Kong in 1997 or the death of its two international superstars, Leslie Cheung and Anita Mui, in 2003.

Anita Mui

A Cantopop superstar,  梅艷芳 Anita Mui, dubbed the Asian Madonna (after the American singer), embodied the classic rag-to-riches Hong Kong story. Born to a poor family and raised by a single mother, she entered show business at the age of four and received her break when she won the first Hong Kong New Talent Singing Award in 1982 over 3,000 contestants. She went on to a meteoric rise as a singer and actress. She is recognized as a chameleon (Mui Yim-Fong of a hundred changes) which included personas of fetishized Asian women and gender bending. The early signature song  “Bad Girl” (about sexual desire) was banned on the Chinese mainland. Her singing the song resulted in the cancelation of a concert series. She raised money for the pro-democracy Tiananmen.

Some attribute the end of Cantopop to the deaths of Leslie Cheung and Anita Mui. Leslie Cheung jumped to his death on April 1, 2003 at age 46 and Anita Mui died of complications from cervical cancer on December 30, 2003 at age 40.

Hong Kong

The topic of migration, in particular the “refugee crisis” in Europe and the American immigration crisis, has been politicized and represented in media as an invasion and threat to the nations that receive migrants. Natives are characterized as capable and good while migrants are linked to crime, danger, inability, resource drain and exploitation. Colonial hierarchies are reproduced which divide people into superior and inferior with the great replacement theory touting that white Americans are being replaced by other inferior races.

More than 10.7 million Chinese migrated, the highest figure of migration out of any country. With their descendants, the Chinese diaspora numbers 60 million. The first wave went mostly to other Asian countries. The second wave, most relevant to migration to America, occurred when Britain and France forced the Qing government to authorize a massive exodus of Chinese laborers to western countries and their colonies, to replace black slaves. This was the beginning of the dispersion of the Chinese across the world – from Southeast Asia to America, Africa, Europe, and Australia. The migrants, mostly men from southern China, left to keep their families alive. Between 1856 and 1908, the counties of Toisan (where most early Chinese migrants hailed from) experienced 14 floods, 7 typhoons, 5 famines, 4 earthquakes, 4 plagues, and 2 long droughts. This was in addition to the two opium wars, the Taiping Rebellion (a Chinese civil war that coincided with the US Civil War), the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty, the establishment of the Republic of China, the Sino-Japanese War, and the civil war between the Chinese Nationalists and Communists.

Hong Kong, under British rule from 1840 to 1997, was the port from which these migrants set sail. Hong Kong shifted from the city of migrants to the city of refugees when the Chinese Communists took power. The entrepreneurs who established themselves in Hong Kong drove astounding economic growth in a colonized city that had the benefit of stability. In the 1980s, when the Chinese residents on Hong Kong began to establish their own identity, separate from the mainland Chinese, Cantopop thrived.

To understand the true long-term impact of migration (on migrants and their host countries), the stories of the Chinese American immigrants, some families which have passed through five generations in America, are vitally important.