Homecomings can be emotion-filled with warm reunions and even some joyful tears shed for dear ones not seen in many a year.
That’s what Simon Choa-Johnston, the artistic director emeritus of Gateway Theatre, is expecting to experience Thursday night (May 12) when he re-connects with friends and acquaintances at a special event to help launch his new book, The House of Wive.
“I certainly consider the Gateway as my home,” Choa-Johnston said. “It’s been very good to me. And I feel like I have an extended family in Richmond where I spent some of the best years of my career.”
But this time he returns as a writer, not an artistic director, a role he had from 2000 to 2012.
The House of Wivesis based on the life and times of his great grandfather, a young Jew from Calcutta named Emanuel Belilios and researching for the book allowed Choa-Johnson to delve deep into his family history and connect with the long forgotten past of some colourful ancestors.
Choa-Johnston picks up the story as Belilios leaves his dutiful wife, Semah, and makes for Hong Kong to strike his fortune in the then legal opium trade, eventually becoming a prosperous and respectable merchant.
During his rise, Belilios falls in love with his Chinese business partner’s daughter, Pearl, who is 20 years his junior. And as a wedding present, he builds her a 114,000-square-foot mansion.
But things take a dramatic turn when Belilios’ previous wife, Semah, arrives in Hong Kong unannounced to take her place as mistress of the house.
“My great grandfather was actually born in Calcutta. His family fled Europe because of persecution. Many Jewish families settled in India where there was no racism at all,” Choa-Johnston explained. “The family became very prominent and influential in the community, trading silks, insurance and real estate. And, of course, opium was legal in the 1860s. So, he took it and sold it in China which, in those days, was wide open for trade. And he made a lot of money.”
Plenty of research went into the book as Choa-Johnston delved through records in both Hong Kong and India to trace his family’s history.
“I spent about 10 years, on and off,” he said. “But the interesting thing was that I knew nothing of my ancestors because my parents would never talk about them.”
It was only when his mother moved into a seniors’ home and he was clearing out her previous residence that Choa-Johnston came across a box packed with photographs, diary entries and letters relating to his family.
“That really piqued my curiosity and laid the foundation of several trips to India, Hong Kong and China, tracing my great grandfather’s movements from one city to another,” Choa-Johnston said. “I was looking at archives in synagogues, library archives, and because Emanuel eventually became the chairman of the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank in the 1870s I was able to go to their archives and that was very helpful.”
The advent of reliable and more accessible Internet searches in the 2000s also helped open up the sphere of geneology for Choa-Johnston, allowing him to trace other family lines.
“But research of that nature can only tell you the facts, in terms of when someone was born, arrived in a certain city, what kind of businesses they had and when they were buried,” he said. “It doesn’t get onto your head. And what I do in the novel is go behind closed doors to see what ‘actually’ happened. That’s why it’s a work of fiction.”
Despite that, Choa-Johnston said he feels he gleaned enough information about his great grandfather to give him, and other characters in the story, a genuine voice.
“I got a glimpse as to who he was. There were also some newspaper articles that showed what his voice would have sounded like. And his actions speak to his motivations.”
All of the research and writing was a journey of great discovery for Choa-Johnston.
“I became obsessed with finding out more and more details,” he said, adding the quest for more information led to his decision to leave Gateway Theatre in 2012 in order to write the book, which he finished two years later. “It was important enough for me to say to myself that I needed to devote time for doing this. And you can’t run a large organization and be a writer at the same time.”
Choa-Johnston’s book launch for The House of Wives at Gateway Theatre on May 12 begins at 7 p.m.
