RED BOAT TROUPES AND CANTONESE ... - University of Georgia

Theater manager said that four male troupes were not as good as one female troupe [from a
business point of view]. 140
My grandmother was a good source of information regarding social issues. Like many
other people who left China, my grandmother came to Hong Kong to attend a wedding in 1949
and did not return until after President Nixon went to China in 1972. 141 Grandma loved to tell
stories when I was in bed. The stories, as I later found out, were all from opera; she loves opera.
She said that her family would buy a zong (bed), meaning packaged tickets for a few people to
sit on. I later found out that it is a gua fei zong (concubine bed) that can accommodate about
four to five people. It is a bench like a Western day-bed, which has only one longer side open
without a frame. Well-to-do foot-bound ladies were carried on backs of servants to the
performance halls (poor women did not have their feet bound). Relatives, serfs, and servants sat
on the “bed” to watch opera performance when Troupes came to the otherwise quiet town. My
father saw the Red Boats when he was a child. He still called the red boats that park at the docks
dai hung sun (big red boats). Father said that a make-shift big hall in his village was built on the
part of the beach normally used for drying fish and laying out fishing nets. I could imagine
140 Ibid., 372.
141 My paternal grandmother was born in the estuary in 1892 during the Qing Dynasty. She received three months of
formal education, but she was able to read newspaper and letters sent to her by relatives. In those days, there was a
saying, “women without talent are good women.” A good wife should not receive much education. My
grandmother learned to read through mok yu shu (wooden fish books), a popular narrative song genre in her days.
Volumes of printed poems may be read and recite softly in certain melodic and rhythmic contour. When she was a
teenager, she was once travelled with girl friends and girl cousins by foot. They went into a tea house for dim sum
when they got tired, only to be seen by an older male cousin. The girls were admonished by the family when they
returned home. Girls in the Qing Dynasty were not supposed to go to public places.
She was married to my grandfather at the age of nineteen in the year the Chinese Republic was established.
Grandfather had his braid cut. Grandma had ceased the foot-bounding turmoil long before that, about the age of
seven. She told me that it was Dr Sun Yat Sen who advocated stopping the inhumane practice and ‘released’ her
feet; otherwise the front part of her feet would be bent. Unlike the older ladies who had “successfully” gone through
the entire foot bounding process, her feet look normal, except for the size. They grew to the size of an eight-yearold.
With a tradition to wear a new pair of shoes on New Year day to “step on the bad people,” I remember
accompanying her into numerous shoe-stores on Nathan Road before New Year in Hong Kong looking for adult
style that fitted her, a non-Mary-Jane type that did not look like a pair of child shoes. It was challenging.
65