I recently had the honour of working with poet, novelist, and educator Fred Wah to create a radio play/podcast for my local community radio station, Kootenay Co-op Radio.
A Door to be Kicked is a radio play in three-acts set in a small-town Chinese-Canadian cafe in interior British Columbia in the 1950s. Fred wrote the script, adapting it from his 1996 semi-fictional biography, Diamond Grill.
The play explores themes of place, identity, history, and culture, focusing on the Chinese heritage that was such an important (and often overlooked) aspect of the settlement period of the Columbia Basin.
The Diamond Grill Cafe was owned by Fred’s father and his business partner Shu-Ling Marr, one of many businesses run by Chinese Canadians in Nelson’s Chinatown. It was open from 1952 to 1976.
While Nelson’s Chinatown no longer exists, in 2016, the B.C. government recognized its only surviving commercial building, which now houses Kootenay Co-op Radio, as a significant Chinese Canadian historic site. The building was built in 1901 and was, for many years, the Sing Chong Laundry.
The door mentioned in the title refers to the cafe’s large swinging doors between the kitchen and the dining room, doors that separated the mostly Chinese kitchen staff and the mostly white customers. These doors are a metaphor for Fred’s heritage, which is mixed Swedish and Chinese.
In an interview with a local journalist, Bill Metcalfe, published in our local newspaper, the Nelson Star, Fred explains:
“The door represents that space between being Asian and being white, being mixed, and I’ve played around with that notion of the door as an in-between space. The doorway is the place that I can stand in and not go through, so I have a better view of both rooms.”
Fred Wah lives in Vancouver, but he was born in Swift Current, Saskatchewan and spent much of his younger life in Nelson, BC. He won the Governor General’s Literary Award in 1985, became Canada’s fifth parliamentary poet laureate in 2011, and was made an officer of the Order of Canada in 2013. This is his first radio play.
Catherine Fisher, blogger
Photo: A Door to be Kicked cast at a live reading, photo by Bessie Wapp
