Jeff Ho (he/him) is a theatre actor, playwright, and dramaturge based in Toronto. I met with him in the summer of 2020 at Riverdale Park East. We talked about theatre, about activism, about being Chinese immigrants who grew up in Canada. We talked about the anger over injustice that so often fuels our creativity. We talked about generational trauma and finding a way through the east meets west clashes that so many immigrant children experience.
An Immigrant Kid
I was born in Hong Kong and came to Canada when I was twelve, in 2001. I was pretty naive and innocent, going with the flow. I didn’t really know why we were immigrating and I adapted in the way that kids are able to adapt. I lost my accent, whereas the rest of my family retained it. I didn’t realize how that was potentially changing or transformative in negative and positive ways.
I had a rough time with English at first, and French and adapting to Western culture. But I adapted better when we moved to Markham. We came to Woodbridge first and then immigrated to Markham for high school. There was a larger Chinese community in Markham and I felt more able to adapt with Canadian-born Chinese, CBCs.
Photo credit: Eileen Liu
I remember when I was in grade five, we had English class where there was an incident of blackmailing. Our teacher reprimanded the classroom like, blackmailing is not okay, this is not acceptable. I did not understand the word blackmail. I thought it was black male, like, race. So I raised my hand, being like, sir, I don’t understand, what do you mean, you can’t choose to be a black male. And then like, a lot of laughter. It was hilarious. I can look back at it and laugh, but it’s very humiliating. I should have kept my mouth shut. English is a weird language that way.
They Don’t Accept Asians
When we moved to Markham, it was to move to an arts high school, Unionville High School. All my teachers through grades seven and eight were like, you should audition for this program for piano. I’m a piano player. But I had begun creating friends back in grade seven and eight and I wanted to stay in my local high school in Woodbridge. But my teachers were adamant and my mother was like, might as well try, your teachers are saying so.
So I decided to audition for the drama program instead because I heard a rumour that they didn’t take Asians. I thought if I auditioned for this program that doesn’t take Asians, I won’t get in, and then I get to stay with my friends. And then I got in. So I took the opportunity.
I got brainwashed and became fanatically obsessed with theatre.
Jeff Ho
My mom accepted it at the time. It would be great for me to learn how to be a better public speaker or lawyer or teacher. And so I went to an arts high school for drama. Through that I got brainwashed and fell in love with theatre and became fanatically obsessed with theatre, which proved very difficult with the family.
Sandra Oh Made Me Do It
I ran away from home at seventeen to Montreal to pursue theatre school. Full on family abandonment. Stripped me of my bank account. It was in the middle of April. On a midnight bus on a Greyhound.
I’d watched Sandra Oh in Double Happiness. It’s one of the first films she did after she graduated from the National Theatre School. In it she plays a Chinese woman wanting to be an actress. At the end of the movie, she runs away from home to pursue her dreams. It was in watching that film that I got the idea [to run away myself].
Photo credit: Eileen Liu
It was so stupid, looking back. It was so brave and so stupid. I would not have done it any other way, but it was so difficult. In Montreal, I had really bad French. I learned French within a year so that I could work at Chapters, Ben and Jerry’s, all the retail stores, just so I could survive. Amongst other stuff, like eating tomatoes and sleeping on floors.
But it was also so freeing. It was the happiest days. Because I was independent. However difficult it was, I chose the path. I got to re-forge my own identity and I made friends that are lifelong friends now. It was wild.
Since then, there’s been different sorts of healing and recovery with the family. Things evolve. You understand why your parents are so tough on you. But I’ve always maintained that having that first gigantic “no” from my mother has prepared me for any rejection in the industry. If the person who loves you the most can say no to you, and you still go after your goals, it doesn’t really matter what anyone else says or thinks.
Tracing My History
I wrote a play called trace. That was about my great-grandmother, my grandmother, and my mother through different journeys of their lives. It capped off with my mother disowning me. There are many parallels of how my great-grandmother ran, during World War Two, from China to Hong Kong with two sons, eventually leaving one son behind. And how that echoes the modern-day exodus of my mother, leaving Hong Kong to Canada as a single mom. The women in my family are the ones that keep us all alive. Our family would not be possible if not for the matriarchs.
The women in my family are the ones that keep us all alive. Our family would not be possible if not for the matriarchs.
Jeff Ho
I wrote this piece to honour and to also write from [my mother’s] perspective, to try to understand what she’s inherited and why she’s so against the instability of the arts. It was a love letter to her, challenging her to see what I’m capable of now, because I performed the play as well.
I wrote it so that I performed all the women. There were two pianos on stage that spoke for all the men. There were multiple times where I would be playing piano behind my back while speaking roles of women and switching roles. It was a challenge to perform it. But she came to see it, and I think she got to understand a lot and she could see what theatre is capable of.
She always attributed theatre to Shakespeare or stories that are not accessible to her. To see a Canadian play that was so specific to our cultural identity and to her specifically, meant that she could see that storytelling has power. She could see audience’s responses around her, other Chinese members coming in to witness this story and relating to it.
Then it toured to the National Art Centre in Ottawa, where she got to see it remounted in a much more professional or prestigious platform, where she could be like, oh, my son did something, even though it’s a play about me being a tough assed mother. She got to understand that a career is possible and that the arts are valid.
Photo credit: Eileen Liu
I’m the Cool Uncle
I’ve learned that parents just want their kids to be happy and stable. Stability is often attributed happiness, but we know that it’s not. For immigrant parents, that idea is so much more aligned, I think, because of generational values. Immigrant values. The difficulty of immigrating to Canada as a single mother. I’m so grateful for everything my mom has given me. Part of that is the tough love. I would not be successful if not for her resistance.
My brother just had a baby daughter last year, my baby niece, Juju. She’s a year old now. I think a lot about generational trauma. I’m a lot more westernized, I’ve moved out on my own and live with a white partner in downtown Toronto. My brother still lives at home with my mom. It’s a three generation household, very traditional, and my sister-in-law is also very traditional.
I think a lot about how my niece will be raised, with what values. I’ll be there as an uncle to be like, you can be independent, or you can paint or dance or play the piano and have fun.
Jeff Ho
I think a lot about how my niece be raised, with what values. She’ll grow up as the first Canadian-born Chinese in our family, so there’s going to be some cultural tensions there. I’ll be there as an uncle to be like, you can be independent, or you can paint or dance or play the piano and have fun. But I also think there’s so much beauty in the immigrant experience. We do work harder, as much as it’s a stereotype. We’ve got to work ten times harder than white folks to get anywhere. That sort of work ethic is instilled in us, and that’s not a bad thing.
Anger Igniting Activism
I went to Concordia University first for two years before the National Theatre School. I remember vividly we were doing a play study class, where one of the white classmate raised a question about diversity. I remember getting so angry and livid, and basically had a mic drop moment where I shut down this white peer.
That was not the way forward, looking back, because it ended the conversation. There was a lot of righteous, naive anger on my part. It had a lot to do with being the only Asian in this university program. From that moment, I recognized that my path forward will simply be different. That I have to advocate for my own rights and for the rights of my fellow artists of colour within the program. And then, as I got older, within the ecology, within the industry.
Photo credit: Eileen Liu
Even at my time in the National Theatre School, I was known to be a shit-disturber because I would not let white teachers get by without acknowledging colonialism or stuff like that. I got a lot of talking to from artistic leaders. They were very generous. I didn’t feel a resistance of, you need to shut up. There was a lot of okay, so something went wrong, talk to us. I was very angry, and I get angry very easily. It’s a lot to do with how I came to the theatre.
I’m a lot softer these days and a lot more tactful, but back then I would just rage. That rage was a form of activism against injustice. There was a time in second year at NTS, where the school flew us to Newfoundland to work with the National Art Centre around Ipsen, a Norwegian playwright from the 15th century, 18th century… I don’t remember, an old dead white guy. We were asked, how did we feel at the end of this project? A classmate was like, it was so great to get the 15th century—old century—worldview.
I’m a lot softer these days and a lot more tactful, but back then I would just rage. That rage was a form of activism against injustice.
Jeff Ho
I raised my hand and was like, shut the fuck up. That’s colonialism, not the 15th century worldview, that’s the Norwegian worldview. This playwright that we’ve been studying for three weeks has nothing to do with the rest of the world. You can try to relate it all you damn want. I remember being shunned by the entire class, living together in Newfoundland, away from our Montreal supports and friends.
I had two classmates of colour in this class. They were so angry at me, too. It was only a while later that we had a chat, where they were like, Jeff, you had to remind us that in our professional lives, we will actually never play these roles. Ipsen is still done at Shaw, at the Terragon, at all these white institutions, and they’re often for white actors. So why are we studying them? My classmates were so angry that I reminded them of it. Now we are still really great friends, these classmates of colour. Now all of us are actively involved in equality and diverse issues in the theatre in different ways.
Change Comes When We Do the Work
There’s so much discourse these days around equity representation. All so necessary, but artists, especially from BIPOC communities, can be swept up or tokenized or asked to speak for their communities. It’s not our jobs to educate or to constantly be involved in the discussion when we also just want to do the work.
Only within the last few years have there been more artistic directors of Asian descent. Nina Lee Aquino being one of them, Marjorie Chan now at Passe Muraille, David Yee at fu-Gen. But that’s about it. As we have more leaders in administrative capacities who seek Asian talent, then the Asian artists who just want to be actors or writers or any other roles will have more platforms. That’s part of my job as a dramaturge, working with Asian playwrights to broaden those stories.
My Mentors
Mentorship is so key to any sort of artistic relationship. I’m very grateful and lucky that I had quite a few mentors right out of school who really took me under their wing and nurtured me. trace was written because I reached out to Nina Lee Aquino, who’s the artistic director of Factory now. She was a teacher at my theatre school. I took her aside one day and was like, I have something to read to you. I read the beginnings of trace.
From then on, she nurtured it up until its premiere at Factory Theatre. She mentored me throughout in different capacities as a playwright. She was one of the first to say to me, you are a writer. Because I trained in acting, she was one of the first to say, you need to pursue playwriting. She launched my playwriting career and gave me so many opportunities.
Iris Turcott, who was the company dramaturge at Factory. She is one of our great dramaturges of the country. She’s since passed. But she was also the first dramaturge to take me aside and instill the confidence that I could write. She’s still a legendary figure, in that a she’s crass, old lady who would swear at you, and those were the notes you got. She would be constantly smoking a cigarette, constantly. And she would be like, Fuckhead, what are you doing? To be blessed with a curse word as a nickname was a blessing. She taught me the bricks of dramaturgy and what’s possible in inspiring other storytellers.
Lastly, Paul Wong, who’s a visual artist out in Vancouver. He was one of the first video artists in Canada and is a Governor General award winner. But his way toward that has been full of controversy, including being censored at the Vancouver Art Gallery. One of his first pieces was taking his partner’s blood and injecting it in himself and then videoing it. Because their blood wasn’t compatible, it bruised. Very controversial.
It was my first experience meeting a queer Asian man who shunned everything, all societal norms, to pursue a life in the arts. He would dismiss all the noise and forge his own way.
Jeff Ho
I met him in Vancouver, while I was doing a play where I played him. He was so direct, visceral, once again crass, but full of love and generosity. It was my first experience meeting a queer Asian man who shunned everything, all societal norms, to pursue a life in the arts. He would dismiss all the noise and forge his own way. I have taken that beacon as a way to pursue a life in the arts.
Helping Others See the Way Forward
I love listening to stories. I love working with people to hone the best version of a story that they envision. I was at a recent meeting where there were a lot of offers and suggestions on how to dramaturge. There were questions around who should step in to edit stories, who should go in to give a structure and a form, to fit [the stories] within a preconceived notion of structure. I was very resistant in a generous way around the possibilities of enabling artists to feel empowered, and to teach them the skills to edit for themselves.
Why does anyone need to go in to impose a form or a structure for a story, when the storytellers themselves know full well when it’s ready to be shared? To be a dramaturge, it’s to be the person to ask the questions, offer prompts, but never to get in the way of a creator creating what they need to create. That is very foreign to white institutions that have an artistic director that says, this is how things are done, this is the mandate. But the more that we can empower BIPOC artists to do what they need to do, and redefine excellence through their own eyes, rather than telling them what excellence should look like, the better we are for it.
Why does anyone need to go in to impose a form or a structure for a story, when the storytellers themselves know full well when it’s ready to be shared?
Jeff Ho
All the dramaturges I’ve ever worked with as a playwright have been white, and all in varying degrees of understanding around different forms of cultural storytelling. I come in with that natural basis. I know full well that upbringing and cultural inheritance of stories will inform how stories come out. Different storytellers of different cultural backgrounds will tell stories differently. So why don’t we enable and empower that? I love that in dramaturgy my job is to empower and to still be creative, but not make any artistic choices. To help see the way forward when it feels murky for the writers.
Coming Out in Car Rides
It’s one of my great, great gratitudes in life that I came out very effortlessly. They all occurred in cars. My brother told me that he knew, and that he was okay with it, in a car ride. I told my mom in a car ride on the way to piano lesson. She just said, oh, and then in the next few days, I noticed she began borrowing LGBTQ books from the library. It was really sweet. They didn’t make a fuss about it.
I wrote an article some days later about being queer and Chinese, being triple minority status. My mom shared that article to my father, who then also said, okay. It was so effortless.
Introducing my partner to my family, which is one of the great anxieties for a lot of LGBTQ folk, was again, effortless. We had lunch, and they took it day by day and learned what it meant to have a queer son-in-law. Now they treat my partner as part of the family. My mom loves my partner more than me sometimes. They get along better, is what I mean. It’s one of my privileges. It’s something I’m so lucky and grateful for.
The Sounds of Mahjong
My great-grandmother was associated with mahjong. Every story I’ve ever heard of my great-grandmother was tied to mahjong. It’s such a game of our culture. It’s such a cornerstone. If I think of grandparents or older people, I think of mahjong. It’s something we associate with the Chinese elderly, and it’s because the game has lived forever.
It’s promoted to be good for Alzheimer’s and like, all the health benefits of memory and everything. But it’s also just straight up gambling. It really is just a fun game. I think we use it [in storytelling] because it naturally involves lots of people, four people at the very minimum. We’re playing the game and other people are witnessing or on other tables. So it’s a great vessel to tell stories with because there’s always multiple people.
Mahjong is active, there are sounds. I use it because there’s that clicking that’s so unforgettable. The imagery on the actual tiles itself, the rules of it, the history of mahjong. It’s its own story. I think it’s so rich as a symbol that putting it into any piece of art, it recalls memories and recalls nostalgia, it recalls heritage, it recalls fun, like mischievousness and drama, because those games are heated.
My Mother and My Partner
My mother is the person I love the most, but also have the most resistance to in life. We are so opposite. We have a lot of fucking fights over politics, especially now. It’s maddening to try to engage in a conversation with her. But I also love her because she’s the one who’s provided everything for life to be possible.
I have a huge contested relationship to filial piety. My brother is the loyal son. He still lives at home, and I do my own damn thing. I tried to be filial, but it’s one of those traditions where it feels like a prison, but also something that’s worthy of celebration.
Photo credit: Eileen Liu
My partner, he’s really my man. We’ve been together for eight, entering our ninth year, and we’ve been through so much together. Even through all of this pandemic, there’s no other human I could spend this amount of time with. We are literally tied to the hip. There’s so much about not being dependent on your partner and all those things, and I totally get that. But we’re tied together in a way that—I don’t understand how I can articulate it other than it’s a deep love.
I would not be successful if not for him either. He believed in me. I moved in with him immediately after theatre school, so a lot of my initial stepping into theatre was possible because he supported me financially, too. And we work together artistically. I’m his writer for all of his project applications, for all his budgets, for all the plaques that are around his public art. I’m his dramaturge. That’s how I stepped into dramaturgy, dealing with a visual artist who is not good with words, asking the questions to get him to an idea.
Every play I ever write, I do a solo show version of it for him first. He’s always my first ear. Whether it’s good or bad, he’ll love it anyway. He’s my biggest cheerleader and I’m his. I can’t envision life without him. I’m very grateful. Because the pandemic has really put a spotlight on loneliness, and I’m really grateful that I’m not. He’s my best friend.
Path of Least Resistance
I did not decide to become a playwright or dramaturge. These were roles that only revealed themselves as I entered a career in the arts and listened to what came to me. Very, like Buddhist, Taoist, like path of least resistance.
Acting is something I’m slowly stepping back from. I still get roles, I tour, I do TV gigs when they come up. But the resistance of being a queer actor of colour in this industry has posed obstacles that make me question my worth in a way that writing and dramaturgy has not. I write and I’m able to put my activism where I see it. I write for people of colour. I write for female-identifying characters and actors. I can actually create the change I want to see that way.
But acting is at the mercy of so many people—casting directors, directors, companies. It’s so much more replaceable and disposable. But there’s an agency as a writer that the role itself allows. Directors listen to you more, because you’re a writer, they can’t make that piece of theatre without the words. As an actor, if you’re sick or whatever, they’ll just replace you.
I write and I’m able to put my activism where I see it. I write for people of colour. I write for female-identifying characters and actors. I can actually create the change I want to see that way.
Jeff Ho
My rage and anger finds a space in writing much easier than as an actor. If you become angry in a rehearsal hall for whatever reason, you get labeled as a problematic actor, then work sort of disappears. I’ve been known to be a little problematic as an actor, because I don’t let things go by if it’s problematic. But as a writer, it’s almost invited. Yeah, so path of least resistance. If the acting evaporates, I’m okay with that, because I’m happy to continue being a writer.
