(photo by Sam Heath)
Gold Mountain: flat storytelling with visual punch
Liverpool and Montreal collaboration finally comes home
by Sarah Deshaies
Gold Mountain weaves a tale that many are familiar with: trying to understand a parent’s past in their home country, to rewrite chapters of a book one has not witnessed.
For David Yee, it means deciphering his father’s haphazard stories and gambling addiction to piece together a complete image of someone forced to leave his home country at a young age.
Fleeing Communist China, Yee Lui seeks out “Gold Mountain”, the land of promise beyond China’s borders, like many young men at the time. He works on ships before settling in Liverpool, the site of Europe’s oldest expat Chinese community. He marries an English woman, has a bundle of kids and runs a laundry. David, or “Dabey” as he calls his son, witnesses his father’s decline and predilection to gamble.
