Long-distance call
'I remember rain and I remember watermelons,' says Tony Ayres, attempting to recall his life before he migrated to Perth, Australia in the 1960s. 'I was three years old when I left, so I don't have many memories of Macau but I recall the vivid colours - the most amazing greens. And I remember the ferry.
'My mother worked in Hong Kong three days a week and she would come back to Macau the rest of the time. I remember running to meet her at the ferry.'
Ayres' recollections of his mother and his childhood are the subject of his award-winning second feature film, The Home Song Stories. It tells the story of Tom (played by actor Joel Lok), his sister and their mother, a glamorous but emotionally fragile nightclub singer.
They leave Hong Kong when Tom's mother (played by Joan Chen) marries an Australian sailor, 'Uncle Bill', only to leave him within a week of arriving in Perth. She drags the siblings around Australia, from one dingy set of digs to the next, while she works as a singer in Chinese restaurants. The children cope remarkably well with the ever-changing scenery and their increasingly deranged mother.
It's an intelligent, sensitive and engaging film. 'Many of the major events from my child-hood are in the film,' says Ayres, 'but my life was more melodramatic and chaotic than that. I had to tone down some of the drama.
'[My mother] was very unstable ... a difficult character but she was also very compelling. The film helped me meditate upon her and, with the help of Joan Chen - who's such an amazing actress - I came to understand my mother better. When I talked to Joan about what motivated her characterisation and how she perceived my mother, it helped me contextualise my mother's psychology.
'When you lose a parent at an early age, your memory of them and your emotional responses remain those of a child for a long time. Now, I can understand she had her own dilemmas that we didn't know about and wouldn't have understood anyway.'
Ayres' mother committed suicide when he was 11. It wasn't the only tragedy he and his sister had to deal with.
'Uncle Bill retired early to look after us. I had a girlfriend in high school and her mother and Bill began a romance and decided to marry. Sadly he died just two nights before the wedding was due to take place.'
Ayres moved in with his late stepfather's fiancee, who, he says, turned out to be 'a total fruit loop'. Then his history teacher took them in. But the teacher was an alcoholic and his wife had a nervous breakdown and left him.
'My sister and I survived and have had relatively sane and normal lives since,' says Ayres. 'We grew up resilient.'
Like the best feel-good films, Ayres says there is a happy ending. 'My sister is happily married to her second husband and has two beautiful children. And I've been with my partner, Michael, who is the producer of Home Song Stories, for nearly 30 years.'
'I would love to trace my family in Macau but I wouldn't know how. Once, when I was visiting Hong Kong, I tried to get my birth certificate (in the family name Kwok). I went to the hospitals but there was no record of me.
'Hong Kong [gives me] a sense of, 'this is where I come from'. It's like the Chinese saying: 'A tree may grow very high but its leaves always fall back to the roots'.'
