GEORGE TOWN, Sept 1 — The closing act for this year’s George Town Festival, which ended yesterday, was the Hokkien play — Hai Ki Xin Lor — which left hardly a dry eye in the house.
To those who understand Penang’s lilting Hokkien, the title of the play is somewhat puzzling because when Hai Ki Xin Lor literally means “a new road by the seaside” but the English title for the play, You Mean The World To Me, pretty much sums up the whole premise of the 45-minute production.
Written, produced and directed by Penangite Saw Teong Hin, the play is the story of his childhood growing up in Hai Ki Xin Lor, which is actually the local name for Victoria Street.
Saw’s family used to live along the narrow street and that’s the neighbourhood where he grew up in back in the 1960s.
“That’s how we finally arrived at the Hokkien title of the play, because our home is what defines us no matter where we eventually move to,” Saw said.
The play starts with a family celebrating Chinese New Year, a common enough scene in Malaysia where they sit down together to enjoy a meal of rice, soup and the quintessential lor bak.
The main character, Sunny, is a little boy who is pampered and doted on by his two aunts and then the scene cuts to the future, on a stage above, where Sunny is all grown up and visiting his older sister on Chinese New Year.
As the story unfolds, the audience is gradually introduced to Ah Boy, the mentally ill elder brother who can do no wrong in their mother’s eyes.
Played convincingly by Singaporean actress, Neo Swee Lin, the mother is seen doting on Ah Boy in all instances which the younger Sunny saw as favouritism.
In one scene, after a nasty altercation between Sunny and his mother where he accuses her of loving only Ah Boy and not him, the mother almost bows under the pressure of her burden and tries to hang herself.
The mother is saved when her daughter, Ah Hoon, and Sunny, walk in and find her standing on a chair with a belt around her neck; both of them calling out to her in distress before she changes her mind.
The scenes between Sunny’s past and the future alternate before things finally come to a head in a scene where the younger Sunny walks in on Ah Boy sexually assaulting their mother.
It is then revealed that the scenes of his past is a film production directed by Sunny which Ah Hoon stumbles onto and is shocked by what she sees.
Ah Hoon takes Sunny to task for revealing the family’s deep dark secret to the public in a film while voicing out her feelings over how she was often overlooked in the family and yet, she had taken it in her stride and dealt with it as her fate, just like how their mother dealt with her fate of having to care for a mentally ill child.
Sunny, who has grown up into a tortured, lonely director, has had a hard time trying to come to terms with his past and the traumatic incident that created such a huge chasm between him and his family.
A particularly haunting scene is when his mother is on her deathbed, she makes him promise to take care of Ah Boy when she’s gone. He asks her instead, “After all that Ah Boy did, why do you still love him so much?”
Her answer: “If I don’t love Ah Boy, who will?”
Sunny does not fulfil his mother’s dying wish but sends Ah Boy to a mental asylum which leads to the latter committing suicide, leaving an even bigger impact on Sunny, who is suddenly filled with regret and begs for forgiveness from his deceased mother.
It all comes to an emotional end as Sunny finally realises the ties that bind him to his remaining family members, his sister and two aunts, and the importance of love and forgiveness.
The play left even the lead actor playing Sunny, Frederick Lee, in tears at the end. He said they were real tears as the whole story about family and love resonates with him too.
As it turns out, the title You Mean The World To Me is Saw’s dedication to his mother and family.
The original Penang Hokkien play, with the characters speaking Penang’s unique Hokkien interspersed with Malay and English, is termed as an “almost autobiography” by Saw but he explained that it is “true and yet not so true” at the same time.
“It is almost autobiographical but I want to create a dramatic piece of work so had to collapse timelines, compact the characters so I used creative license to dramatise some of the events but I have to say it is based on people I know and on certain incidents that happened in my life, that much is true,” Saw said.
Saw wrote the highly personal play back in 2009 but never got the chance for it to be produced as those he approached either found it too toe-curlingly personal and wanted him to tone it down or they wanted it to be in Mandarin which he outright refused.
Since it is set in a time when he was growing up in Penang where Hokkien is the main dialect, he wanted to remain as true to it as possible which was why he had jumped on producing the play in Penang as George Town Festival’s closing act.
The play, set in the atmospheric century-old clan building complex of Khoo Kongi at Cannon Square, ran for five days between August 27 and 31.
Tickets to the play were sold out for all five days, and only 80 people were allowed in for each performance but they had to open up more seats to allow up to 200 people for each night.
Saw is an internationally acclaimed director who is no stranger to George Town Festival as he had directed festival opening shows twice before with Emily of Emerald Hill in 2010 and SILAT in 2012.
George Town Festival ended on August 31 after a whole month filled with arts and cultural programmes in celebration of George Town’s culture, arts and heritage.
