The Chinese Opera at the Temple in Bandar Seri Begawan has been over for nearly a month.
On the two shows that we attended, we sat very close to the stage and there my children remain fixated on every movements, dialogues and songs of the actors and actresses (despite not understanding one bit of Hokkien).
So it did not surprised me when soon after, they began to re-enact bits of the play at home.
There was that slow drawl and high-pitched voices of the female characters, the dance-like fighting movements of the warriors and the trademark “Tiinnnggggggg!”, which was some kind of an instrument to mark the end of a scene – all in their own dialogues which was either made-up Mandarin words or a mish-mash of actual Mandarin words strung together to form pretend sentences – not that I know the difference!
They enjoyed this opera so much that there are talks of recovering some old recordings of Chinese Opera that used to belong to their late great-grandmother…
I can already see myself slowly going mad from having to listen to this on the 15 mins to and 15 mins back drive from school – if they have their way.
