Sneak Peek
Dreamboy: Tony Eusoff
In our July Meaning of Life Issue - in newsstands now - we sit down and chat with Tony Eusoff, star of the Istana Budaya musical adaptation Dreamgirls, which is opening in nine days time. Having seen rehearsals from early on, the cast are ultra-focused on meeting expectations of a local audience. In an excerpt from our article, Tony tells us about his life growing up in the middle of a padi field in Sarawak.
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“Love or money?”
We’re at a cafe in Bangsar on a desert-hot Sunday afternoon. Tony has a cigarette in one hand, a mug of beer in the other, and in a rare moment this week, time on his side. Choosing to spend it with Esquire means I’m cutting into his siesta. So we play a game of “this-or-that”. It’s something journalists do to get clear-cut, interesting answers from their interviewees. Most times, it doesn’t work. Some days, however...
“Money.”
Pause. “I love the honesty.”
“Wait! Can I elaborate?”
Tony laughs. You’d remember it if you were there. He squints his eyes, and grins like a five-year-old boy with his first ang pow in his virgin hands. He guffaws, lets every “huh” and “hah” rattle in his throat. His limbs don’t thrash around the way some do when they find something funny; instead, he stays still, lets the laughter wash over his face. Life’s simple, every chuckle says. Savour the journey.
At heart, Anthony Joseph is a boy who lives on a farm. When he turned ten, Mum moved him and his adopted brother, Andrew, into a shack built in the middle of a paddy field in Siburan, a small town twenty-five kilometres from Kuching. Walk down memory lane, and you’ll see images of a four-year-old kid riding a goat. Over there, a gleeful child brushing his teeth in the river. A student carrying his whitened shoes, carefully treading through muddy footpaths to avoid the snakes. A skinny high-schooler who helps his mum harvest corn and rice at 5.30 every evening, like clockwork. The stuff childhoods are made of.
“When it rains in Kuching, it really f****** rains. It rains non-stop for hours, I tell you.” He’s on his second pint of beer, regaling me with story after story of a simpler world, one beyond political and racial infatuations. “I went to a Chinese school that was fifty per cent non-Chinese. But the non-Chinese kids weren’t treated any different. One of my classmates, Abdul Khalid, he pursued high school in Chinese. He didn’t need a scholarship. But the Chinese community admired the non-Chinese kids who went to Chinese schools so much, they gave him a scholarship to go to Taiwan to pursue a tertiary education. Just brilliant, man.”
He has no problems being one with the crowd. As a Bidayuh—a Dayak ethnic group from Sarawak—Anthony chose to assimilate, learnt Mandarin. Instinctively it feels like a loss of identity and of courage. I tell him that some would look at that as a negative. He smiles. He knows something I don’t. “I was put in a situation where I had no choice but to blend.” He snuffs out his cigarette and leans in closer. “The best time is when you are kids. You’re not corrupted then, you don’t think you’re any different from the rest. Even those who didn’t grow up in a Chinese school lived life plurally. How can you not compromise and tolerate given such an atmosphere? That’s one thing the West can learn from the East.” And he’s not talking about America.
Read more about Tony - the pressure of being in Dreamgirls, and why he changed his name - in our July Meaning of Life Issue, out now in newsstands. Words by Jon Chew. Dreamgirls will be showing at Istana Budaya from July 14-24. To purchase tickets for Dreamgirls and for more information, visit AirAsiaRedTix here.
July 5th, 2011