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

A Chinese instrumental orchestra, stationed in the New Territories, was to perform, and the
conductor helped me to contact Mr. Liu and Ms. Chan’s Cantonese Opera group. At the concert,
I recognized Mr. Liu, who had given a talk at the Symposium “200 years Footprints of
Cantonese Opera” organized by the Opera Information Center at the Chinese University of Hong
Kong in 2007. He had recounted how he concealed his Chinese musical instrument in a bag as
he travelled to rehearsals in his youth in the 1960s. He was afraid passers-by or friends would
consider him a low brow musician who played at the low class entertainment venues (daai daat
dei), or Temple Street (I can infer that young people of those days did not need to hide a Western
guitar in a bag).
Mr Liu is the organizer of Siu Nga Ork Hin, an amateur Cantonese opera performing
group in Hong Kong. He was born in the New Territories. The New Territory is on the outskirts
of the city. It is not as densely populated as in the city center. People who live there tend to be
more conservative than those who live on Hong Kong Island and in Kowloon. Mr Liu is a “real”
native of Hong Kong. All his extended family lives nearby. Many performers, especially from
the New Territories have studied with Mr Liu. Mr Liu plays many instruments; he was the
violinist in the ensemble when I attended the group’s performance earlier. He plays, among
others, the goh hu, the je hu, the yang kum, the gongs, the drums, and the cello. He is a
composer, an instrumentalist, a librettist, a coordinator, an education, a painter, a calligrapher,
and a preserver of opera scripts as well as recordings. Upon being informed that a building with
many opera manuscript was about to be demolished, he and his group scrambled to take the
scripts home in a heavy rain. When I last called him, he said that he had saved old phonograph
records in a building that were about to be taken down. He intended to donate the discs to a
University.
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