David Yip: Sun Yat-sen

Gold Mountain Dept: Gold Mountain, now playing at Aux curies, is a remarkably succinct immigrant odyssey loosely based on the life story of Yip father. But Yip and co-author Wong make it clear from the outset that this elder was not a reliable narrator. In some ways the minimalist Gold Mountain is reminiscent of the Canadian Jewish classic Lies My Father Told Me. A father dreams of financial success in this case, finding a mountain made of gold, or winning at the gambling tables lead to a huge letdown for the entire family, according to Montreal Gazette. In the play, the son played by Eugene Salleh , frequently calls his father played by Yip into account. Following the old man anecdote about meeting Sun Yat-sen, founding father of the Republic of China, the son reminds him that Sun Yat-sen had died before he was born. As for the letters that the father claims to have written to Chairman Mao, telling him how to run his revolution it turns out that they were never mailed. Whether he was actually involved in a seamen strike remains in question as does how he avoided the cruel deportation and repatriation of Chinese seamen from Liverpool in 1945 and Talk about a match made in heaven. The combination of the multimedia expertise of Montreal Les Deux Mondes theatre company and the rare and fascinating tale of a Chinese sailor who settles down in England, written by David Yip and Kevin Wong, co-produced by the Unity Theatre of Liverpool and Les Deux Mondes, makes for inspiring, memorable theatre. Yip has said that it was only in his later years, after taking up Buddhism, that he found the forgiveness and empathy necessary to draw out his father story, through a series of taped interviews. At the time, his father was in the early stages of dementia, so the lines of reality were doubly blurred. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.