THE story of the 'discovery' of Chinese immigrant Hao Zhou singing Western opera as he washed the dishes in the kitchen of Melbourne's Arts Centre has become an Australian legend. Now a new legend is in the making and, with two opera-singing Chinese migrants, 32-year-old Changsha-born Hao is centre stage again.
Move over Pavarotti, Domingo and Carreras. Here come the other three tenors: Hao Zhou, Beijing pop star William Xing, saved from cleaning supermarkets and launched on his Australian singing career by an anonymous good samaritan, and Xie Kun, who got his break when an Australian friend mistakenly thought she saw him on television, being beaten during the Tiananmen Square crackdown.
When the three were plucked from the chorus of the Victorian State Opera (VSO) in 1992 to sing together at Melbourne's Asian Food Festival the tag 'The Three Tenors' was a marketing ploy - and a joke. But it stuck.
Now they're veterans of major concerts, including a 1993 Australia Day performance for 250,000 Sydney-siders at the city's Darling Harbor, and with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra for tens of thousands of delegates to last year's Rotary International conference.
The frustrations of relegation to the chorus after successful music careers in China have given way to a very full dance card: a 12-concert private national tour for a leading Australian company later this year and a concert for an OECD conference in November, for instance.
Invitations to perform in Hong Kong this year did not fit Hao's schedule - 'they almost hate me so I hope there is another opportunity for us to go so they will love me again,' he says as the others beam.