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written and directed by Kevin Matthew Wong

Tarragon Theatre with Why Not Theatre & Broadleaf Creative, Tarragon Theatre Extraspace, Toronto

April 16-May 5, 2025

“Another kid who has lost his culture”

Benevolence is an entertaining and informative autobiographical solo show about the author Kevin Matthew Wong’s journey to discovering his roots. It has nothing to do with a multi-actor play of the same title by Morris Panych that Tarragon staged in 2007. Discovering one’s roots has become the topic of a large subgenre of solo plays recently. What distinguishes Wong’s play from others is its highly theatrical nature and its blending of a wide range of theatrical arts from storytelling to dance, song, video and movement.

Wong is known as a theatre-maker who has produced numerous plays such as Mahabharata for Why Not Theatre and Mr. Shi and His Lover for Music Picnic. His reputation led one day to his receiving a phone call out of the blue to help write a talent show for a local association of Hakka people to be presented at a world Hakka conference.

As Wong notes in the show, he had always known he was not merely a Chinese-Canadian but a Hakka Chinese-Canadian. He knew that his grandmother would have long conversations in Hakka with relatives all over the world. Yet only until he accepted the commission to write a show for the Hakka Canadian Association did he ever think to inquire more deeply into who the Hakka are.

As we learn, Hakka (客家) literally means “guest family”. It is a name applied by others to the Hakka and later accepted by them as their own, rather as the term “Quakers” began as a term of ridicule but was later accepted by Quakers themselves. The Hakka were thought of as guest families in China because they were a migratory people who began migrating south into China comparatively late in Chinese history, i.e., circa 304-316 AD when they fled the violence of the Uprising of the Five Barbarians against the Jin Dynasty. Three subsequent waves of migration brought them to the coast of the South China Sea. Because the lands where they migrated to were already inhabited, the Hakka were regarded as outsiders and had to make do with the generally unproductive land that was still unclaimed.

The Hakka people’s final wave of migration was from China to the rest of the world. The failure of the Hakka-led Taiping Rebellion (1851-1864) against the Qing Dynasty and the Punti-Hakka Clan Wars (1855-1867), which alone resulted in the massacre of more than 500,000 Hakka, led huge numbers of Hakka to flee China altogether. They went all over the globe to such places as Malaysia, Indonesia, India, the US, Jamaica, Suriname and Canada. The woman who first got in touch with Wong was Sonia Chin, a Hakka-Jamaican-Canadian.

Not knowing where to start to educate himself on the Hakka, Wong thinks of interviewing his own maternal grandmother who had just turned 100. Unfortunately, his grandmother could remember almost nothing of the past. Through various tips from Sonia, Wong meets a Hakka man in Vancouver who in turn sends him to visit a Hakka shrine in Victoria. There, in the Tam Kung Temple, built in the 1860s, the oldest Chinese temple in Canada (designated a National Historical Site in 2025), Wong, following the temple guardian’s request, reluctantly prays to the Hakka deity Tam Kung. To his amazement he experiences a revelation and finally feels a sense of oneness with the Hakka people. Wong has thus travelled far from being just “Another kid who has lost his culture” as the temple guardian thought.

Wong’s story is humorous and fascinating. Wong is especially good at taking on at least a dozen different voices representing the various people he meets. Most memorable of all is his impersonation of the quirky, unflappable Sonia Chin with her lovely Jamaican-Canadian accent and proper ladylike behaviour. Wong himself is filled with boundless energy and enthusiasm and is constantly interacting directly with the audience. While he is an excellent storyteller, he is also a fine dancer. The highpoint of the show is probably the wild dance the breaks into to portray the ecstasy of his revelation in the temple.

The set by Echo Zhou (周芷會) consists of five stations on the bare stage where select props stand ready for use. Wong’s eases into the use of video projections on a back screen initially to show us a film of his interview with his grandmother but then moving on to document other people and places like the exterior and interior of the Tam Kung Temple. It is most impressive when Wong allows his shadow to move across the video that plays behind him, a technique he could employ to much more effect. Least impressive, especially in a play with such a deliberately home-made aesthetic, is Wong’s occasional use of animation in the videos.

When in Vancouver Wong reflects on all the prejudice the Hakka suffered at the hands of White people, such as their exclusion from voting or receiving bank loans. Wong does mention that the Hakka also experience prejudice from other non-Hakka Chinese in Canada. Wong tells us how the Hakka travelled slowly from the north of China to the south, but we do wonder what led to the major worldwide Hakka diaspora. It would help Wong’s narrative if he explained more fully how anti-Hakka prejudice within China even led to anti-Hakka genocidal movements.

To fight against prejudice outside Chine, the Hakka created “benevolent societies” to supply financial and spiritual support and relief in times of hardship. This “benevolence” is what provides the title for Wong’s show and it is the feeling that Wong’s show imparts to the audience. Simply seeing Wong’s delightful centenarian grandmother makes us wish Wong had thought to ask her earlier, when her memory was still good, about what she experienced in the past. Indeed, the show leaves us all with the feeling that it really is the duty of the young to learn from our elders and to preserve their stories so that they and the past are not forgotten.

Christopher Hoile

Photo: Kevin Matthew Wong in Benevolence; Kevin Matthew Wong watching video of his grandmother. © 2025 Jae Yang.

For tickets visit: tarragontheatre.com.