Excerpts from CHINATOWN, a new opera by Alice Ping Yee Ho and Madeleine Thien

Composer Alice Ping Yee Ho and writer Madeleine Thien are among Canada’s most acclaimed creators, working powerfully across a wide landscape of genres. Their opera, “Chinatown” – premiering with City Opera Vancouver in September of 2022, with vivid translations by Paul Yee – conjures Vancouver’s Keefer Street in another era, when a generation of new citizens, sacrificing for their descendants, struggled with a racist Canadian political apparatus that sought to exclude them entirely. As racism rises again, their stories remain all too familiar. N.B: music begins at 22:22.