Reviving traditional lyrics of ‘wooden fish’ songs
Last year, Winnie Cheung helped to host a Cantonese opera troupe from Hong Kong, taking it to Vancouver and Toronto and reminding audiences that the art form, with its spectacular costumes and acrobatics, has been performed in Canada going back to the early 1900s.
Now, she will be shining the spotlight on another historically rich, but fleeting cultural treasure — “muk’yu” (literally “wooden fish”) songs.
These were brought to B.C. and elsewhere in North America not by organized tours and well-known performers the way Cantonese opera was, but by peasants from southern China who came to work along gold trails and railway tracks.
“There’s ‘muk’yu’ and ‘naam yum,’ meaning ‘southern sound,’” Cheung says. There were also dragon boat songs.
“They were all different types of oral storytelling with lyrics or simple percussion. This is really grassroots. For many generations, it was the way people who were illiterate transmitted their feelings and values from one generation to another,” Cheung says.
Little by little, she is collecting strands of this history, recording verses sung by elders in Vancouver’s Chinatown, and digging out artifacts related to muk’yu songs among her own family’s belongings.
The conserving of traditional practices and ways of life, as opposed to only physical structures, will be at the core of Vancouver Chinatown’s bid for UNESCO World Heritage status.
Cheung is organizing workshops and hoping some participants, especially elders with ties to southern China, might bring their own old muk’yu lyric books.
“One who came to get tickets said, ‘Oh yeah, I might have some,’” Cheung says.
Her own mother-in-law, who is 99 years old, told her she “never sang the songs, but she listened to them being sung.”
She directed Cheung to look among her deceased husband’s belongings for something he might have left her. And she found one book, “smaller than my palm,” with text “printed off from wooden blocks on thin, thin paper. Mine is from 1919. I am wondering if anyone can beat mine by age.”
She has also been coaxing elders in Chinatown into singing for her and recording their voices as part of a collection of soundscapes.
One told her: “’We were all uneducated, and peasants, and we would hear people sing these songs in the fields.’”
“He started explaining the verses with so much sensitivity to the beauty of the language. He said, ‘Sometimes life is not easy,’ but he would sing about things that resonated using the lyrics to express himself.”
There will be two sessions of “Indigenous Music, Opera and People from South Guangdong ” including one in Cantonese on Wednesday, Oct. 10 from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. at the Dr. Sun Yat-sen Classical Chinese Garden, and another in English on Friday, Oct. 12 from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. at the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre at the University of B.C.