Text for Grover and Friends; Alarm

Grover and Friends

Alarm

For soprano and solo percussion

LO

NL Y

Two operatic scenes based on a true story

RU SA

Music by Vivian Fung (2021)

PE

Text by Royce Vavrek (2021)

Commissioned by Edmonton Opera

Duration: 8 minutes Instrumentation

Soprano solo

NL Y

Percussion (one player)

Porcelain Bowls - C# D D# E F# G G# A A# B

Metal Chimes - B C# D D# F# G G#

Glass Bowls - E F# B

Gongs - B C# D F#

Small tam-tam

Wooden Planks - B C# D F#

Brake Drum

Tenor Drum

Kick Drum

LO

Program Note

Grover and Friends and Alarm are two scenes based on family oral history I gathered during the spring of 2021.

PE

RU SA

My extended family–including my maternal grandmother, uncles, aunts, and cousins–lived in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in the 1970s as part of the overseas Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia. They were there quite happily, in fact, until shortly before the Khmer Rouge stormed the capital in April 1975 and drove everyone out. My family miraculously survived an arduous journey – over a month on foot in the countryside of Cambodia, and then in Vietnam.

Ultimately, they ended up in Paris and Canada, but those events changed the course of my family forever. I also was born in 1975, and even though I was born and raised in Canada, my birth and childhood were deeply affected by omnipresent anxiety and uncertainty over my family’s situation and safety.

Only recently have I been able to piece together more completely my family history and how it affected my family members' subsequent lives. I went to visit Cambodia for the first time in 2019 with my family–parents, son, and husband–and with some detective work, we were able to find my family’s former home and the hospital that my aunt ran, still standing all these years later but now abandoned. I look forward to returning and to continuing to understand more about their past.

Many thanks to Royce Vavrek for his wonderful text and his intuitive grasp of what my family went through.

For a related project, please see (Un)Wandering Souls (2020) for percussion quartet.

Text

Grover and Friends

My brother and I

Are glued to the television,

Learning from The Count

To count.

Learning from other monsters

The fundamentals of English.

Canada is a world away

From the Khmer Rouge.

But somehow it is also there,

On the other side of the screen,

Inches away from our noses.

LO RU SA

PE

Alarm

(An) alarm.

I run to the bathtub

Laying myself flat

On the porcelain,

Still wet from my

Father’s shower.

NL Y

Every tick tock squeak thud click

I worry I hear marching through

The channels,

A route through the inner tubes.

The regime come to collect us,

A family that got away.

When I close my eyes,

A cinema results.

The back of my eyelids,

A screen with projected recollections

Of my childhood:

Yams.

Scouring the field for yams.

The smell of yams cooking.

The taste of rice and yams.

Sleeping, full-bellied

On the dirt outside,

Dreaming of yams.

Jungle.

Always walking.

My little hands grip My mother’s skirt.

No noise.

The jungle doesn’t like noise…

Let the panthers sleep.

Walking and more walking.

Deeper and deeper, Into the wet heat.

LO

I open my eyes, And the showerhead Glares down.

The incessant alarm Invading my ears, Spreading through the circuitry of my nerves.

RU SA

PE

False alarm.

False alarm.

False alarm.

But my body doesn’t listen.

NL Y

The boat.

My father throwing me.

A stranger catching me.

Fleeing on floating wood, My little hands in a deathgrip, Clinging.