破地獄與白菊花 My Grandmother's Funeral

Local playwright and actress Wong Wing-sze wrote and acted a one-person show called 破地獄與白菊花 (My Grandmother's Funeral; the Chinese literally means "breaking through hell and white flowers"). It's currently re-running (if not yet ended) at the HK Rep's Blackbox Theatre.

Wong has a family even bigger than ours, and they run a family business of carrying out traditional Chinese ritual at funerals.

Starting by telling us why she's called Wong Wing-sze, Wong told us secrets and traditions of these might be superstitious rituals. More importantly, however, she shared with us her memories with her grandma, at different stages of life, till her grandma went to another world. I remember she told us her grandma couldn't remember her name all her life cause she had three granddaughters born on the same year. (Sara, Rose and Belinda, you are lucky!) Nonetheless, despite she's old, she could still spot Wong from a distance even when she's supposed to be a snail at a children's play.

It's the kind of show that made you laughed your head off at the beginning, but went downhill afterwards to leave you a little bit sense of sadness at the end. Wong won the best actress award that year for the show.

These days, from time to time, the last scene when Wong singing the song "the Person on the Moon" to remember her grandma simply comes to my mind.

* 破地獄, Breaking through Hell, is a kind of ritual for people who died young (young as in not over 70 or so); 白菊花, a kind of white flower, is really the flower, not any ritual, I think.