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Happy New Year, in 12 Minutes or Less
by
Ben Fong-Torres
AsianConnections
is proud to present the adventures of Ben Fong-Torres, our Renaissance
man: author, broadcaster, and former senior editor and writer at
Rolling Stone Magazine. This guy's our hero!
Ben
was a featured character in "Almost Famous," the Oscar and Golden
Globe-winning film by Cameron Crowe.
- AC Team
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The room was as bright as any Chinese restaurant.
In the corridors, children played and shouted, while, in this main
room, friends spotted and chatted with each other.
But this was no restaurant. This was a theater�at least for
this one evening in the Japantown neighborhood of San Francisco,
in the midst of the celebration of the new year, 4698.
We were gathered here, in this room at the Japanese Cultural
and Community Center of Northern California, because we were summoned.
What happened was, the Asian American Theater Company put out a
call, just a few weeks before the event, for 12-minute plays�to
be submitted within 12 days. The inspiration? Buddha, of course.
Or, as I could swear I heard in one of the plays: Buddha-bing!
In its call to writers, the AATC reminded: "The Lord Buddha
summoned all the animals to come to him before he departed from
Earth. Only twelve animals came to bid him farewell. As a
reward, he named a year after each one in the order that it arrived."
Inspired by Buddha's summons, the theater company, which
was founded in 1973 as a playwrights' workshop, invited writers
to come up with something about Chinese New Year--anything they
wanted, in fact, as long as they met the deadline: "Before the dragon
gets here."
And so, one week into the Lunar new year observance, five
or six dozen of us gathered to hear eight (a lucky number) readings.
I was there as an observer, there to soak in some New Year
spirit, to support the AATC, and, of course, to watch for material
to steal for my stint as co-anchor of the TV broadcast of the Chinese
New Year Parade the following weekend. In other words, I wasn't
taking notes for a story.
But I couldn't help noting a theme: The young have taken
over. Yes, there were a few dinosaurs, like Charlie Chin, the wonderful
musician/storyteller, and Kelvin Han Yee, an actor who's added directing
to his dossier in recent months, and AATC director Pamela Wu, who
also had her directing hat on this evening. And in the audience
was Marc Hayashi, one of the company's previous directors, back
in the Bay Area after five years in Minnesota.
Chin, a transplant from New York, where he once played guitar
in the rock band, Cat Mother & His All-Night Newsboys, spun
a jazzy piece about a group of buddies who had a Chinese New Year's
Eve ritual of getting together and drinking�and, one year, learning
all about having to pay one's debts, however bloody, by year's end.
Charlie's one-man performance was a standout, in more ways
than one. Before and after him came Generation Next, pairs and groups
of fresh-faced kids, talking the hip-hop talk, questioning the customs
of the old-timers, fighting through the dysfunctions of their families,
trashing each other�verbally and otherwise.
In The Urn by Duy Nguyen, a departed father whines through
the urn that entombs him and that keeps him, in death, at the center
of a crazed Vietnamese family whose grandma takes the form of an
inflatable snake.
I guess you had to be there.
And speaking of the snake, next year's honored star of the
Chinese Zodiac has a face-to-face, such as it is, with the Dragon,
unwinding a reel of complaints about how the dragon is the big star
of the Lunar calendar, and how he, the snake, gets no respect. "Nobody
likes me," he kvetches.
The Dragon tries to chill him out. "Think of all the creatures
who missed that one chance to sit in eternal glory," he says. The
snake just hisses.
In the end, however, there were questions raised and answered;
lessons taught and learned; advice spurned and dispensed: "Feel
good now," the ghost of a father tells his son in "Line Unbroken"
by Michael Golamco. "The past is memories; the future may never
come."
But if these brisk, funny, probing, loving, in-your-face
pieces are any indication, and if we can hear more from the likes
of Nguyen, Golamco, Don Chao, Gordon CC Liao, Dominic Mah, Michelle
Motoyoshi, and Tim Yamamura, then the future is already here.
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Ben Fong-Torres, long-time writer and editor at Rolling Stone
magazine, is the author of four books, including his memoirs, The
Rice Room: Growing Up Chinese-American, and his latest, Not Fade
Away: A Backstage Pass to 20 Years of Rock & Roll. He is Editorial
Director of myplay.com, an Internet music site that offers free
Web space, where users can grab, store, mix, play, and share music
of all kinds.
Click to Ben
Fong-Torres Articles Index
Visit Ben's official site: www.BenFongTorres.com
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