Family secrets are almost always on a collision course with advancing years and impending mortality.
Unless such mysteries are carried, unrecorded and unwhispered, to the grave, they will likely leave some residue of intriguing – sometimes downright provocative – artifacts to surviving family members.
It’s evidence of that kind that inspired Simon Choa-Johnston – retired artistic director of Richmond’s Gateway Theatre, – to investigate his own, singularly-convoluted, family background.
And it should come as no surprise that the playwright (author of such acclaimed plays as Sisters, Rice Rockets & Yacht People, and Running Dog Paper Tiger and a Peninsula resident, with his wife Sheila, for the last two years), should end up using his research to create a work of dramatic fiction inspired by historic fact.
Just published by Penguin Random House Canada, Choa-Johnston’s novel The House of Wives,, will be launched this Sunday, May 15, at 2 p.m. at a free-admission tea hosted by Peninsula Productions at their studio venue adjacent to the arena at Centennial Park (copies of the book, carried by Black Bond Books, will be available for sale and signing at the event).
The House of Wives is an exotic and compelling tale tracing the rivalry of two women for the affections of their husband – an opium merchant in colonial Hong Kong – in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
That man was Emmanuel Belilios (Choa-Johnston’s own great-grandfather) a young Jew from Calcutta who came to Hong Kong in 1862 to make his fortune, at a time when the opium trade was entirely legal.
While his dutiful wife Semah remained in Calcutta, Emmanuel established himself as a prosperous and respectable merchant in the city that became his new home, eventually falling for, and marrying Pearl Li, daughter of his business partner, and twenty years his junior.
In Choa-Johnston’s richly-evocative story, Emmanuel’s life with Pearl is shaken up by the unannounced arrival of Semah in Hong Kong – and her determination to take her place as the mistress of his huge mansion, Kingsclere.
While he has taken obvious artistic license to imagine events, conversations and motivations – the basic facts are a matter of historic record and family history, Choa-Johnston says.
It was a story from which he was sternly excluded for a long time, he said.
Born post-Second World War in Hong Kong, he was descended from Emmanuel through his mother, Pauline Choa, who had married Thomas Johnston, a merchant from Shanghai.
“When I was eight or 10 years old I asked my mother who her grandparents were. She told me, but the look she gave me told me to never ask that question again,” he said.
That’s where the matter rested, he said, until much later on, when he was moving his mother (now deceased) from her residence to a care home.
“I discovered a box containing letters, diary entries and photographs, related to those times, that I had never seen before.”
Fascinated, he launched into a decade of research, including trips to Calcutta and Hong Kong, where Choa-Johnston was granted access to documents in the archive of the bank Emmanuel helped found, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, which has evolved into the current HSBC.
Hospitals and schools founded there by Emmanuel also still attest to his later life as a highly-respected and influential philanthropist.
But he confesses that imagining the behind-closed-doors scenes of Emmanuel, Semah and Pearl’s complicated domestic milieu drove his involvement with the story, as the walls of his writing office becoming literally “festooned” with photos, documents and notes.
“As a storyteller, this is gold,” he said.
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime story – there are so many cultures, so many levels, so many taboos.
“It was difficult to decide where to ‘aim the camera’ and how to be respectful and still explore the drama,” he added.
“There was some oral tradition that they all lived together in Emmanuel’s mansion and another oral tradition that says that they never lived together,” he said.
He acknowledges that he did some soul-searching in attempting to reach a dramatic ‘truth’ for the novel, particularly since the characters he is giving voice also happen to be his own ancestors.
Even though he admits he took some license with facts, he said he feels that his diligent research gave him a fundamental understanding of the characters.
“I feel that I lived with these people for 10 years before I started writing,” he said. And he believes the work – which he began as a play during a period when he was playwright-in residence at the Stratford Festival in Ontario – ultimately reached the right form in The House of Wives.
“I realized the canvas was going to be larger than could be contained in 90 pages of dialogue,” he said.
“So they never got their play, but they did give the universe a novel,” he added, laughing.
“And there has been some interest in a play adaptation of the book – having written it, now, I’d be better able to to turn it into a play.
“It might still get there.”
The Peninsula Productions studio venue is at 14600 North Bluff Rd.
“They’ve been the sweetest most supportive people,” Choa-Johnston said of the production company, noting that he directed their staged reading of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the space last year.
“They felt that, since I live here, it would be silly not to have some kind of book launch locally,” he said.
