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Posted: July 20, 2023

According to Baidu Baike, Ode to Joy season 5 has been announced for later in 2023. The exact dates for the broadcast has not been announced. The series continues from season 4 which aired earlier this year, with the same cast of characters that started in season 3. Jiang Shu Ying performs in a main role. Aside from the two previous seasons of Ode to Joy, she was in the legal drama, Lady of Law in 2022.

Also as part of the Ode to Joy cast is Yang Cai Yu, who will also be in the upcoming Like a Flowing River 3. The Like a Flowing River series is about a time of economic reform in China that began with season one in the late 1970s. Like a Flowing River 3 opens in 1993. Seasons 1 and 2 are available on YouTube.

There is indication that the Ode to Joy series has gone downhill from some commentators. With a season 5, popularity for the franchise must remain high, which focuses on women-centric stories. The series is from Tencent and CCTV. Seasons 1 and 3 are available on Viki.

Be Your Own Light – Chinese Drama Updates

Posted: July 17, 2023

Since I have only access to YouTube, I have been watching one episode a day of the Legend of Anle. There appears to be a triangle that has formed with Ren Anle, the Crown Prince, and Luo Ming Xi, who plays Anle’s mentor. The show has fun banter between characters and political intrigue to keep me interested enough to continue watching the 40 episode series.

The actor who plays Luo Ming Xi is the actor and singer Liu Yu Ning, whose music I have enjoyed recently.

On Monday, after logging on to YouTube, the folks behind Legend of Anle at Youku, started to release a new contemporary series called Be Your Own Light. Liu Yu Ning is in the lead role with Liu Tao.

In Be Your Own Light, Liu Tao plays He Huan, a woman whose husband has left and she has many debts. She has experienced many setbacks in her career, and she must care for her mother who is ill. She is also working in the changing television and media industry where she is determined to make her mark.

Earlier this year I started watching the first season of Ode to Joy (2016), which has been called the Chinese answer to Sex in the City.

Liu Tao plays a character I find compelling, An Di, an executive at a corporation, who is one of four women who find friendship with each other living in the same building complex. The series follows the ups and downs of the careers and love lives of the main characters.

Legend of Anle – A Chinese Drama Update

Posted: July 14, 2023

I have posted enough about Chinese dramas to now get regular updates on Facebook. When I glanced at my phone this morning, I was surprised to see Legend of Anle, a new drama had started releasing episodes the day before. The first episode is now available on Youtube and is released by Youku.

The story follows Di Zi Yuan with Dilraba Dimurat in the role. Ten years prior to when the drama is set, her family lost the battle against the Han, with her being the only survivor. She takes on a new name Ren Anle to be Consort to the crown prince Han Ye played by Gong Jun. While feelings begin to set in, there remains an enmity between the two families.

After seeing a bit of publicity before, I wasn’t really anticipating any news soon. I am not very attuned to the drama industry in China, so I find out about shows along with pretty much everyone else watches the shows overseas.

I have followed Dilraba Dimurat’s career since The Flames’ Daughter, a xianxia drama from 2018. Currently, I am in the middle of watching a contemporary drama, Love Designer where Dilraba is a fashion designer. I wonder if I should jump onto the new thing any time soon.

French Exit – A Review

Frances is getting older. Her husband has recently passed away. Her adult son still lives with her. She has spent a lot of time being married to a rich man. Now she decides to go away to Paris, and she takes Malcolm with her along with a cat.

The book has a distant tone throughout. Even with tragedy in the family, there is a sense that nothing is worth crying over. Bad things happen, but they quickly pass by and it is perfectly normal to keep going without even a chance to stop and mourn.

That seems to be the attitude Frances takes. She has been cheated on in her marriage, but she also has lots of money, so things don’t seem too bad from the outsider point-of-view.

With dry humour, wit, and life seeming to be permanently stuck at one speed when members of a family don’t feel they need to improve because of their wealth, it creates a sense of distance between the reader and the events on the page.

There is a matter-of-fact tone to the writing that doesn’t allow for emotional investment with the main characters, and their aloof and pretentious lives.

This allows the conclusion to feel like a punch to the gut that is surprising even when there are clues along the way on how the story unfolds.

French Exit
by Patrick deWitt
House of Anansi Press
2018

It is Canada Day long weekend. I was busy helping to put on a Canada Day event on Saturday and ended up spending most of the day downtown helping out with various events.

For some reason, I am feeling the passage of time more keenly. Perhaps it is the age I am at, or because I have been paying more attention to the news lately and the war in Ukraine. There is much to worry about, even when I try to act cool and as if the rest of the world doesn’t affect me. Even with the connection to the world that computer technology allows, I still like to think I live in my own little world surrounded by what I like: books, family and friends.

For the month of July, I have a stack of books I would like to read. Many of the titles are for the Booktube at War readathon, which is taking place throughout the month. The objective is to read about war. Books can be fiction or nonfiction.

I have 10 titles all together:

1. Mona Lisa Overdrive
   by William Gibson
2. Our Man in Havana
   by Graham Greene
3. French Exit
   by Patrick deWitt
4. The Best Kind of People
   by Zoe Whittall
5. Dail A for Aunties
   by Jesse Q. Sutanto
6. Art of War (孫子兵法, 孫臏兵法, 三十六計)
7. The Song of Achilles
   by Madeline Miller
8. The Good German
   by Joseph Kanon
9. Descent into Chaos: The U.S. and the Disaster in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia
   by Ahmed Rashid
10. The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman

Bitter Medicine – A Review

Elle is a descendant of the Chinese god of medicine. Luc is a half-elven warrior. While she is working menial tasks and writing enchanted Chinese calligraphy for change, he is out capturing outlaw magical beings.

Elle uses her magic to help Luc on cases, but there is beginning to be something between them.

She is also doing all she can to protect her younger brother, but at what cost will that be to her? While there is action and adventure, the book has a significant romantic element.

Reading the book gave me a sense of calm and soothing feeling. There is a jumble of elements that pulls from Western faerie lore as well as Chinese legends. Much of the book gave vibes of a high-flying cdrama, with locales in the U.S., France, and Egypt.

It is a debut novel that packs in a lot in one volume, and asks what heroes are willing to give up for a good life?

Bitter Medicine
by Mia Tsai
Tachyon
2023

The Vanishing Half – A Review

Twin sisters Desiree and Stella go their separate ways after leaving their small town.

Mallard is located in Louisiana and is home to light-skinned black people. It is the 1960s. It is the civil rights era, and it is a time of social change. Stella makes the decision to pass as white. At first it is to get a job, then it becomes her whole life.Desiree goes to D.C. to find work and marries an accomplished Black man. They have a child together.

The story follows as the twins live separate lives while as adults and how one lie affects them and their children over the next 20-30 years. The story hits many interesting and complicated notes, offers a glimpse into an American family as the world is changing, and what it means for the subsequent generations.

Some of the characters could have had more interesting back stories. The book is a solid second novel, and I would like to go back to read the debut novel by the author, The Mothers.

The Vanishing Half
by Brit Bennett
Riverhead Books
2020

Nora Roberts’s Dark Witch – A Review

The Dark Witch guards her young family and home while her husband is away at battle. She is attacked and defeated. Centuries later her descendant Iona Sheehan hears the call and travels from the United States to Ireland where she unites with long lost cousins, and she begins her training to use her magic and to defeat the enemy that has returned.

The book is an enjoyable fantasy romance, where Iona is supposed to fight an ancient evil, but there seems to be more attention on making a new home with long lost relatives in the Irish countryside and finding the love of her life.

The book seems to have been easily put together with enough atmosphere and references to past political upheavals, but not enough for the reader to dwell on.

It is a romantic and cozy time to visit with Iona for the rest of the trilogy over a cup of tea.

Despite the intense start to the novel, much of the time is spent getting ready for the battle, which does not occur until the end, when the excitement is turned up again.

Dark Witch
by Nora Roberts
Berkley
2013

June TBR 2023

I am excited to start June with the TBR that I have selected for the month. I made some progress already with the books for the month. I feel more competitive with myself in a way I haven’t really felt all year. I have a hunger I have not felt in ages, and I think it is a good thing because I am feeling a sense of ambition I have not felt before. I am finally ready to tackle the second half of the year and I think it will be a grand time. Cheers to you and happy reading!

1. Dark Witch
   by Nora Roberts
2. On Sal Mal Lane
   by Ru Freeman
3. Mango and Peppercorns: A Memoir of Food, an Unlikely Family, and the American Dream
   by Tung Nguyen, Lyn Nguyen, Katherine Manning, Michelle Bernstein, Elisa Ung
4. The Tempest
   by William Shakespeare
5. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
   by C.S. Lewis
6. Bitter Medicine
   Mia Tsai
7. Dial A For Aunties
   by Jessie Q. Sutanto
8. Underground Railroad
   by Colson Whitehead
9. Five Little Indians
   by Michelle Good
10. The Paper Menagerie
    by Ken Liu
11. The City of Brass
    by S.A. Chakraborty
12. Anything Goes: A History of American Musical Theatre
    by Ethan Mordden

Date Posted: Wednesday, May 17, 2023

After over 20 years as singer and songwriter, Ellen Braun is turning to a new chapter in her career. Starting Thursday night with Each & Every Song, she brings a new one-woman 90-minute theatrical production to Calgary audiences. With music incorporated throughout the set, there is bound to be a good time out.

“I have always been a songwriter. I started calling myself one in my 20s. Now I am in my late 40s,” Braun says. “It is a journey I’ve been on my whole life.”

Ellen Braun is a Canmore-based singer and songwriter who performs as a solo act as well as in the band Trundled.

Braun did not have a goal of ever writing a play. According to her, it just happened.  “One day I felt compelled to write a one-woman show. I sat down over a weekend and wrote it,” she says.

She had always enjoyed seeing musicals and theatre.

The music and monologue put together for the piece are a way of accessing and a way to connect to the audience.

“The play is based on my life,” Braun says. “They are in snippets and follow a trajectory from knowing my purpose to losing slightly of it. It is about having obstacles get in the way, and living with purpose for what we’re meant to do.”

Each & Every Song is presented by DIY Theatre in Calgary and will be performed May 18 to May 21 at the Work Nicer Railroad Yard location at 1206 20 Ave SE. For tickets and more information, visit www.diytheatre.org

Downstage’s Stage It Festival
Date posted: Wednesday, May 10, 2023

The last few days leading to Stage It Festival have been spent on finalizing the schedule and the technical aspects of live theatre. The weekend festival to highlight the work of emerging artists starts Thursday, May 11 and goes until Sunday, May 14.

Downstage Theatre has been working with the theatre artists all season to creating the concepts and writing the scripts. Along with the four main theatrical performances, there will also be musical performances interspersed throughout the 4-day festival.

Kindling is a play by University of Calgary theatre students. Stephanie Alexandre and Keith Beniol are the co-creators of the play. They perform in it along with Kat who performs as Lyla, and Joyce Kabengele who performs as Shawn. The play is about two strangers who meet and end up being roommates.

“I play a character who is hard-working and driven, but doesn’t deal with the roots of an issue,” Kabengele says. “It was great getting to perform together and it was nice to give creative perspective.”

Working with a director helped bring the show together.

“It was good to have a directorial eye to see what makes sense,” Kabengele says,

The last week of preparation for the Kindling ensemble involved walking through the show in the performance space, and taking inventory of the props and how they will be used throughout the production.

“It is creating meaning and motive to the actions we take,” Kabengele says.

Islay Mckechnie and Ciarán Volke are co-creators and performers in Secret Saloon. It is an improvised show where each night will be different. They are queer artists who will be bringing music in their performance including a banjo.

Good Grief! Is a performance where Dana Prather and Rosemary Morrison explore grief. The performers and creators are at a funeral, and they must find a way to move on from their loss. There will be sardonic humour throughout the play.

Finally, in Ride or Die, Tara Beagan has created an audio play where Win and his grandmother are camping out, dealing with climate change and how to keep going through hard times. She recently directed a play which she wrote, The Ministry of Grace, presented by Making Treaty 7 at the Grand in Calgary.

Additional artists who have performed at other stages and venues in town include drag performers, as well as Sinzere, a rap and funk artist, as well as the improv troupe The Kinkonauts. All the performances will be at Motel Theatre in Arts Commons. For more information and tickets visit www.downstage.ca

Director Tom Huang made the film after his own father went through depression. He had to figure out what the mental illness and get his parents to understand what it is.

“I had to get my parents to understand that depression is a disease, and not just a feeling,” Huang says. “It is hard to get parents to got to the hospital for the flu or a broken arm, so it was difficult to talk to them about getting treatment for mental illness.”

A writer and director for film and television, Huang wrote the dramatic film Find Me, as well as the supernatural web series Unusual Targets.

When casting for Dealing With Dad, it was important to find a good female main lead.

“Ally Maki is terrifically funny and is good for doing dramatic roles.” Huang says.

He looked at funny Asian actresses and wanted someone who were funny and be able to emotional dramatic scenes.

Ally Maki can be seen in the Wrecked television series, and the 2009 television version of 10 Things I hate About You.

Huang says Maki understands dysfunctional families because her brother got into a fistfight during a holiday visit with her family.

The filming process was intense that took place in 14 days.

“I had experience doing independent film,” Huang says. “It was shot during Covid just as people were going through it If anyone had tested positive, it would have been over.”

Someone was given the task of looking after Covid protocols. The cast and crew ended up staying at an Airbnb for the duration of the filming of the movie.

So far, the film has travelled to 35 film festivals across the United States. It will be shown for the first time in Canada during the FascinAsian Film Festival, which continues with Calgary dates this weekend.

Dealing With Dad will the shown at the Central Public Library on May 13 at 7 pm followed by a dessert afterparty. The Calgary portion of the FascinAsian Film Festival takes place May 11 to May 14. For more information for this and other films in the festival, visit www.fascinasian.ca

The concern over the future of Chinatown has been felt in Calgary, as well as Chinatowns across Canada and the United States.

With a protest in 2016 over the proposal of a new building complex, community members in Calgary, along with the city itself made a concentrated effort with the Tomorrow’s Chinatown Advisory Group that over a two-year period put together a new Area Redevelopment Plan (ARP) and Cultural Plan that will serve to guide development in the neighbourhood going forward.

(Full disclosure: I served as a member of the Tomorrow’s Chinatown Advisory Group and continue to be active in Calgary Chinatown)

While local efforts are being made for preserving Chinatown, similar forces are being felt in Chinatowns across North America, which the film Big Fight in Little Chinatown by director Karen Cho addresses for a wider audience.

“The idea for the film started about 20 years ago when I made the film In the Shadow of Gold Mountain,” says Cho. “I filmed in Vancouver and Montreal, so I knew the communities quite well.”

“Twenty-years later, Chinatowns are in a period of decline, so I wanted to explore disappearing Chinatowns.”

Cho’s family on her Chinese side dates back 5 generations to the early arrivals from China.

Filmed if 5 different Chinatowns, New York, Montreal, Vancouver, Toronto and San Francisco, the Chinatowns are facing gentrification, and various pressures from developers and urban renewal projects. The past few years of the Covid pandemic have been hard for all the Chinatowns.

In New York City, there is currently a fight against the building of a 39-storey jail in Manhattan Chinatown.

Cho spoke to owners of legacy businesses, such as the Wing On Wo & Co porcelain shop who is the 5^th generation owner of the store.

In Vancouver Chinatown, William Liu gave up a career as an opera singer to takeover business Kai Wai Dim Sum that is affordable to the seniors and community who live nearby and are low-income.

By capturing the stories of Chinatown, it is to preserve in film memories of Chinatown, what is happening in the current times, and the work put into making the places of residence and business viable to newcomers and younger generations of the Chinese and Asian diaspora.

Big Fight in Little Chinatown will be playing as part of the Fascinasian Film Festival which will be in two cities in Winnipeg and Calgary in May. The film will screen in Winnipeg on May 6^th at 5:30 pm CDT at the Winnipeg Chinese Cultural & Community Centre.

When in Calgary, the film will be shown at two locations: Calgary Central Library on May 14 at 3:30 pm MST, and at Bù Vintage Shoppe on May 16 at 6 pm.

For more information on the festival visit www.fascinasian.ca

May Reading Plans – Asian Readathon TBR

Happy Asian Heritage Month in Canada, and AAPI month in the United States. I want to read as many books by Asian authors as possible.

A new book by Kevin Chong was released in April. I have his book, The Plague (2018), as part of my TBR for May.

Here’s the list:

1. Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner
2. The Plague by Kevin Chong
3. A Million to One by Adiba Jaigirdar
4. The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
5. Mansions of the Moon by Shyam Selvadurai

There could be more titles I could gravitate towards. Let’s hope I can stick to these.

We’re Gonna Die

The idea of death can be fleeting or rarely thought about. It can also be more constant for some who must deal with it as medical professionals, or something personal that occurs to loved ones.

We’re Gonna Die is a solo performance by Elena Belyea that is being presented in Calgary by Verb Theatre. A play by Young Jean Lee, Belyea is a playwright and performer who has been drawn to the work of Young Jean Lee.

“She is one of my favourite playwrights,” Belyea says. “I started reading her plays a decade ago and I watched one of her shows – The Shipment. It blew me away.”

Working with the director Kathryn Smith, Belyea says she/they ended up loving the script,

After working on plays as a playwright, and running a theatre company that toured throughout Canada, Belyea is happy to just act in a show.

When asked if the show is a musical, Belyea says it is an interesting question. “Die-hard musical fans would say it is not a musical. It is a concert with storytelling.”

“The performance tells of being in moments of immense aloneness or pain. I hope people who see it will leave feeling better. I hope when they are in a hard place, they can return to a place of solace,” Belyea says.

While on the page Belyea is a solo performer in the piece, she will not be alone on stage. She will have musicians on stage while she is the one telling the story.

“It feels like an ensemble to bring the emotional highs,” Belyea says. “I will not be alone on stage. I will have the band.”

Caleigh Crow and Sacha Crow will be one stage playing bass.

We’re Gonna Die runs from April 28 to May 6^th at Theatre 1308. For more information and tickets visit www.verbtheatre.com

Makambe Speaks

After her travels, Makambe K. Simamba returns to Calgary with the World Premiere of a new solo show, Makambe Speaks.

A co-creation with Eric Rose and the team at Ghost River Theatre, Simamba sets off to answer the question: where are you from?

“As someone who has lived in Zambia, Guyana, Virgin Islands, Calgary and Ontario, the idea of identity is fluid and very interesting to me,” Simamba says. “There is not an easy way for me to define.”

Ghost River Theatre is known for their experimental and non-traditional use of narrative for telling stories.

Through the collaboration, Simamba says she was able to explore immigration and identity with humour.

“There is a lightness to the show,” she says. “I can joke about lived identity and what to offer as part of the journey.”

The work with Ghost River Theatre has been a good fit for Simamba.

“I get help to work to capture the different things that go off in my mind,” she says. “The work is representative of how my brain works and felt like a good match.”

Simamba can be seen in recent television projects, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, and True Dating Stories.

Some recent theatre productions include, ”Our Fathers, Songs, Lovers and Little Brothers,” also a solo performance that is a prayer for Black life.

Makambe Speaks runs from April 25 to May 6 at West Village Theatre. For more information and tickets visit www.ghostrivertheatre.com