STRAITS TIMES
Aug 11, 2007


Big Fool Lee made its points well


BIG IMPACT: Jeffrey Low plays iconic Cantonese radio storyteller Lee Dai Soh. -- PHOTO: TOY FACTORY


I WATCHED Toy Factory's Big Fool Lee the same day I read Hong Xinyi's review of the play (Big Fool Was No Fool, Life!, Aug 4).
I came out of the Drama Centre pondering how a play with a fairly straightforward delivery could garner a rather contentious review.

Hong pondered the logic of having Justice Bao and the Monkey God as the alter-egos of Lee.

Perhaps she could not identify with the fact that the imagination of Lee, coupled with his gift of gab, captivated thousands of audiences.

By portraying his inner mental state with such dramatic manifestations, the play showed the audience what made the man tick.

Needless to say, by pulling two characters from his stories to demonstrate his thoughts, the play closes the theatrical device loop pretty well too.

The reviewer also dismissed the play's portrayal of the Speak Mandarin Campaign as heavy-handed. She lamented that the comparison of the campaign with the Cultural Revolution in China was somewhat ridiculous.

I think she had missed the point by looking for such a simplistic link. It was plain that the play was trying to draw comparisons between the campaign and the revolution.

Both came about from political directives, both disgorged entire generations of people, and both left an indelible mark on the citizens of the countries.

To Lee, the campaign took away his livelihood and his passion in life. That he refused to use Mandarin to tell his stories speaks volumes of how the campaign must have alienated people in his generation.

Ridiculous or not, what we know for a fact is that families in Singapore grew stratified, with an entire generation of grandparents not understanding their grandchildren.

The reviewer ends by stating her estrangement from the play as she was born after the Speak Mandarin Campaign. I think this is salient as it explains why she could not relate to the ideas in it.


Steve Tan Peng Hoe

Coincidence ...

By sheer coincidence, it was exactly 364 days since I last stepped into the Drama Centre. On 9 August 2006, I went with my friends and colleagues to watch The Campaign to Confer the Public Service Award on JBJ. On 8 August 2007, I went alone to watch Big Fool Lee. Given that I had no idea where Drama Centre was prior to the day of the play itself, and given that I had no idea that Big Fool Lee was a social commentary (I can't really miss that point with The Campaign), I have to conclude that it was sheer coincidence that saw me spending the evening of National Day in 2006, and the eve thereof in 2007, in the Drama Centre watching plays that are actually social commentaries.

Memories ...

A child of the 80s, I had heard the voice of Big Fool Lee on Rediffusion. My maternal grandmother, and my next door neighbours had subscriptions, and his melodious voice, rolling out words I don't understand, formed the background of many memories - be it noisily trading dinosaur stickers with my neighbours in their flat, or idling, half-dozing on my mother's lap at my grandmother's house. But I never knew the name of the speaker, or who he was. I just knew that the older generation had their own radio channel, that communicates in a language that we kids do not understand - the Speak Mandarin Campaign in those days was to encourage Singaporeans to speak Mandarin, instead of dialect. My parents actively discouraged me from speaking Teochew, the language of my elders.

I remembered in my secondary school days, I picked up a book by Chee Soon Juan (then infamous for his hunger strike) - I believe it is Dare to Change. I read the first couple of chapters and dismissed him as not worthy of my time (a conclusion that I still retained by the way) - one of the things he wrote was that Singapore of old had, in the wild fusion of Chinese dialects, Malay dialects etc, all the necessary ingredients of a unique and rich culture, but the Singapore (PAP) government had obliterated that by embarking on the Speak Mandarin Campaign and the imposition of English as the working language of the races. I pointed out that passage to my friend who was at MPH (Parkway) with me at that time, and we mocked his crazy sentimentalism - if the Singapore government had not taken steps to ensure that all Chinese Singaporeans speak Mandarin, how on earth is Singapore as a society going to function with so much fragmentation? The brashness of youth - looking only to the future and oblivious to the price that is paid for that future...

Last Evening ....

Last evening at the Drama Centre - these half-forgotten memories revived in my mind. Before this, I never thought that the Speak Mandarin Campaign was in anyway equivalent to the Cultural Revolution. Thinking back though, were the dialect speakers not forced to put on metaphorical dunce caps during the Speak Mandarin Campaigns of the 1980s? If I am honest with myself, is it not true that a part of me that believes that Hokkien, Cantonese, Teochew etc are bastardisation of Mandarin? That only the uneducated speak dialects? When the young manager fired Big Fool Lee from his job at the radio station, his language and mannerisms were uncomfortably real - did I not use such language, such mannerisms when I speak to my Teochew and Mandarin-speaking parents and relatives from time to time?

An Uncomfortable Disconnect ...

During the play, I was unable to pay full attention to the stage as I had to keep looking at the written English translations on both side of the stages since a large part of the dialogue was in Cantonese and the other dialects. It resulted in a perculiar disconnect - when I watch plays, I usually immerse myself into the world created on stage. This time round, I was curiously unable to do so. And it is not just me - the audience around me were similarly torn between the translations and the stage actions. Is this disconnect part of the message the play is trying to transmit? It was a powerful demonstration of the generation gap - we literally cannot communicate anymore.

And yet, this is more serious than what we usually consider to be the generation gap - it is a complete break in the transmission of cultural values and heritage. My grandparents spoke Teochew, and my father told me a long time ago when I was still a child, that had my grandfather been alive, he would have told me stories from Hong Lou Meng, Shui Hu Chuan, San Guo Yan Yi, all in Teochew of course. My father told me bedtime stories in Mandarin of the Three Little Pigs, Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella. He did so in the belief that an English education, Western culture is the route to success in Singapore. Events have proved him right (thus far) but what was the price that was paid for that sucess? A family living in two distinct worlds, each generation looking on as the play of the other generation goes on - unable to understand or comprehend what is happening without the aid of clumsy translations by the side. Can a nation exist or even start to form where there is no transmission of memory, no common language to reach across generations?

A Singapore Culture...

A foreign director from China came to Singapore, with dreams of directing a masterpiece of a play about the great poet Li Bai. Mocking Singapore arts scene, Singapore talent, Singapore history, derisively asking if all that Singapore can present is this Big Fool Lee. A Westernised marketing manager, who pours scorn on the idea that a play about an almost forgotten Singapore icon can be commercially successful, using statistics and numbers to back up her claims. We have our history, we have our heritage, stretching beyond 1965 or even 1918 - but do we remember this history, do we respect this heritage? Do we care enough to discuss the impact of our break-neck pursuit of economic success, to debate different versions or different viewpoints of historical events? Or do we, in typical pragmatic style, ruthlessly discard everything that has become irrelevant, deemed unimportant, economically no longer viable, irregardless of their earlier contribution, whether economically, socially or culturally? Do we just look forward, and forget that the past holds the keys to our present and our future? Until we manage to achieve a balance between a historical consciousness and the pursuit of progress, can an authentic Singapore culture, one that every succeeding generation of Singaporeans will inherit from their precedessor and build on and pass on to their successor, ever really crystallise?