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"My journey in creating the music for Chinatown started in the spring of 2020. It has been an intense yet wonderful two years working with the admirable librettist Madeleine Thien and Hoisanese translator Paul Yee, and being supported by many talents from City Opera Vancouver. As a Chinese Canadian composer, it is a huge honour and responsibility to be chosen as the music creator of Chinatown, as this opera represents our roots and history, and embraces the most profound human spirits of love, hope, courage, all happening in the Chinatown communities. In the past I have written two cross-cultural operas: The Lesson of Da Ji and The Monkiest King. These projects based on Chinese legend and fable have prepared me to compose music for Chinatown, which is the first opera in Hoisanese and English and the first to fuse authentic Chinese folk dialects and cultures into the world of English opera. Through the six leading roles of contrasting voice colours, a ghost chorus represents early Chinatown settlers, and with the accompanying ten-piece instrumental ensemble of mixed Chinese and Western instruments, I aspire to create a fresh sound world of unique style and colours. It is my goal to capture the magic, heartbreak, and emotional stretching of the story in a genuine, moving, and communicative music language. I hope Chinatown will bridge the gap of contemporary opera with audiences, as it is intended to be an opera that speaks to everyone. Chinatown, the opera, is a story of found family. It is about intimacy and trust between two men in a world that views them as alien and expendable labour. In creating this opera, we began to imagine a set made of paper. Paper would express the fragile, continuously changing lives of these characters: the photos and deeds they kept, and the promises they honoured in China and Canada. These promises would come to life in paper toys that delight heart and mind, and in keepsakes hidden until the moment they can unfold to comfort an elderly man looking back on the joys and sorrows—the moonlit darkness—of his life. The set would be a defiant reshaping of the paper documents that made Xon Pon, Saihin, and the community to which they belonged, legal or illegal. I have been blessed with the most remarkable co-creators. Paul Yee’s artistry and historical knowledge and Alice Ping Yee Ho’s joyful, moving, and glorious music are the soul of Chinatown. Through Hoisanwa and in music, they have created something unforgettable. Poems from the Book of Songs and by Li Po thread through this work; I drew these from the remarkable translations of David Hinton. In researching Chinatown, I delved into the neighbourhood and the streets where I grew up. I thought I knew this place, but I was startled and amazed at every turn. If events or words strike the listener as sorrowful or surprising, if they defy belief, please know that I have invented nothing. The pressures placed upon these men and families, and the language used against them, is our history. The men forbidden from bringing families and loved ones to Canada during the twenty-four years of the Exclusion Act are the heart of this opera and Chinatowns across the country. Many left behind no children to remember and honour them. I grew up in Vancouver’s Chinatown, and I hope they might recognize some part of their days, and most of all their spirit, in this work." - Alice Ping Yee Ho (Composer)