He becomes so infatuated with the blues that the piano teacher his mother forces him to take lessons from, a Russian nun named Sister Petrov, calls him the worst student she’s ever taught, because he makes Tchaikovsky sound like the blues, which she says is like changing Chekhov into an episode of the Golden Girls. Pinky tells us: “And it is at that moment that I know that I need Cannonball to love me.” I only look like I’m Chinese.”Ĭannonball looks up at him from underneath the brim of his fedora: “Egg roll motherfucka, get the fuck out of my face, boy,” he growls, beginning a tirade. I don’t do none of that kung fu with ease. Pinky sees him eating in the restaurant one day, and boldly approaches him: “I may be Asian on the outside but I’m all B.B.

The restaurant is next to a blues club, called the “Chickie Wah Wah Club” (which is the actual name of a famous jazz club in New Orleans) Pinky is intrigued by the sounds coming from the club, and by the guys hanging outside it, including the owner Cornbread, a drunk named Memphis, and especially Cannonball (the nickname of a famous jazz saxophonist), who makes sounds ooze from his guitar like honey. His mother Pei Ling was once a beautiful teenage ballet dancer, but by 1991 she has become an embittered single mother who works at a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, and apparently has put to work her 11-year-old son, whom she named Pinky because she preferred to have a girl. If Cannonball seemed an unlikely character to be quoting Beethoven, his message resonates for “Hong Kong Mississippi.” I have misgivings about choices Du makes in his play, but its passion is unmistakable.ĭu portrays more than a dozen characters in Pinky’s coming of age story, nailing their disparate voices.

At the very end of Wesley Du’s solo play about a Chinese-American boy named Pinky who wants to be a blues guitarist, Pinky reads aloud a letter from Cannonball, the irascible, bigoted Black blues musician who was grudgingly his mentor: “As Beethoven said, ‘To play a wrong note is insignificant to play without passion is inexcusable.’ You got the passion, boy…”

Coming of age in mississippi