February 10, 2018 @ 8pm
Chinese Hill Billies (2018)
Para Site
August 8 | 7:00pm
Chinese Hill Billies
Lecture performance by Alex Yiu
Chinese Hill Billies (2018) is an audiovisual lecture-performance in which the artist traces the biography of a single song — "Red River Valley" — across four historical chapters: its origins in the colonial encounter between Métis communities and Scottish settlers on the Canadian prairies; the Depression-era Chinese immigrant band that made it their own in Vancouver's Chinatown; the International Brigade soldiers who sang it as "Jarama Valley" in the Spanish Civil War; and its final appearance as a Cantonese love song in the 1992 Hong Kong TVB drama The Greed of Man《大時代》. The lecture builds on research begun in Song to Daphnis (2015), extending the question of Asian identity and displacement from the personal to the ethnographic and historical, and was developed through fieldwork in the soundscapes of Vancouver's Chinatown and Richmond.
The historical centre of the lecture is James Ming Wong — possibly second-generation Canadian Chinese, born in Victoria in 1918 — who in the 1930s formed the Chinese Hill Billies Band with a group of young men playing whatever instruments they could find or make: guitar, washboard, harmonica, and a makeshift drum kit of tin cans and steel pails. The band played Gene Autry songs and raised money for Chinatown causes, and their favourite tune was "Red River Valley." There is only one photograph of them, taken around 1939 on the rooftop of WK Gardens Restaurant on East Pender Street. By the early 1940s the band had disbanded; James had enlisted and was selected for Force 136, an elite commando unit trained for operations behind Japanese lines. The man who played "Red River Valley" on a tin-can drum kit became a parachute-trained soldier.
The lecture uses Slavoj Žižek's description of Ode to Joy as an "empty container" — a vessel that delivers whatever meaning its singer pours into it — as its structural thesis. Each chapter fills the same melody with a different community's survival, loss, or longing: the Métis woman lamenting her soldier lover; the Chinese immigrants excluded from citizenship but not from music; the International Brigade volunteers who would never return from Jarama; the Hong Kong television audience for whom Vivian Chow's death scene became collective involuntary memory. By the time the lecture arrives at the Cantonese version, the song has crossed five continents and a hundred years, and has been claimed each time by a group that had no original right to it and no other way to say what they needed to say.
Throughout the lecture, the artist sings the song himself on guitar — imperfectly, by his own admission — in an enactment of the argument rather than merely its illustration. The performance was presented at Gold Saucer Studio, Hong Kong on 10 February 2018, and at Para Site, Hong Kong on 8 August 2018, supported by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council.
This project is fully funded by Hong Kong Development Arts Council
Para Site
8月8日 | 晚上7:00
Chinese Hill Billies
姚少龍演講表演
Chinese Hill Billies (2018) 是一場視聽演講表演，藝術家以一首歌——《紅河谷》(Red River Valley)——為主線，追溯其橫跨四個歷史章節的傳記：從加拿大草原上梅蒂斯族群與蘇格蘭移民殖民相遇時的起源，到大蕭條時期溫哥華唐人街華人移民樂隊將其據為己用；從西班牙內戰國際縱隊士兵以《哈拉馬河谷》(Jarama Valley) 之名傳唱，到1992年香港無線電視劇《大時代》中將其化作粵語情歌的最終身影。這場演講承接前作《子不語之歌》(2015) 的研究脈絡，將亞裔身份認同與離散流徙的問題從個人延伸至民族誌與歷史層面，並以溫哥華唐人街及列治文的聲景田野考察為基礎發展而成。
演講的歷史核心人物是詹姆斯・明・黃（James Ming Wong）——可能是第二代加拿大華裔，1918年生於不列顛哥倫比亞省維多利亞——他在1930年代與一群年輕人組成了「中國山地村民樂隊」(Chinese Hill Billies Band)，用一切能找到或自製的樂器演奏：吉他、洗衣板、口琴，以及用鐵罐和鋼桶拼湊而成的鼓組。樂隊演奏金・奧特里（Gene Autry）的歌曲，為唐人街的慈善活動籌款，而他們最喜歡的曲目，正是《紅河谷》。現存唯一一張樂隊合照攝於約1939年，地點是東邊打街WK花園餐廳的天台。1940年代初，樂隊解散；詹姆斯入伍，並被選入136部隊——一支受訓於日軍防線後方執行突擊任務的精英部隊。那個在鐵罐鼓組上演奏《紅河谷》的人，成了一名受過跳傘訓練的士兵。
演講以斯拉沃熱・齊澤克對《歡樂頌》的描述——「空洞的容器」，一個盛載演唱者所灌注的任何意義的器皿——作為其結構性命題。每一章節都將同一旋律填滿了不同群體的求生、失落或思念：哀嘆士兵情人離去的梅蒂斯女子、被拒於公民身份之外卻無法被排除於音樂之外的華人移民、再也無法從哈拉馬歸來的國際縱隊志願者、以及對鄭裕玲死亡場景形成集體不自覺記憶的香港電視觀眾。當演講抵達粵語版本時，這首歌已跨越五大洲、走過百年歲月，每一次都被一個對它本無原初權利、卻別無他法說出心中所需之語的群體所認領。
在整場演講中，藝術家本人以吉他自彈自唱——以他自己的話說，演唱得並不完美——以身體力行演講的論點，而非僅僅作為其圖解。演出分別於2018年2月10日在香港金碟唱片工作室，以及2018年8月8日在香港Para Site呈現，獲香港藝術發展局全額資助。
本計劃由香港藝術發展局全資資助。
Lecture performance by Alex Yiu from Parasite on Vimeo.
