Berlin Philharmonic’s first musician of Chinese descent, violinist Stanley Dodds, also has a Hong Kong connection
Dodds’ mother is a Guangzhou native, who lived in Hong Kong in the 1950s before going to the United States and marrying his Australian father
A perennial question of local fans of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, on when it would have its first player of Chinese ancestry, has been answered by celebrated violinist Stanley Dodds telling his story.
Dodds’ middle name is Chia-ming, as his mother is Chinese and his father is Australian. His mother lived in Hong Kong for a while in the 1950s and still has relatives here.
While he does not speak Mandarin, Cantonese is familiar to the 47-year-old musician, who is married with three children.
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“Cantonese sounds like a language I understand because it’s a language that has always been in my household,” Dodds told the Post last week, before he and the world-renowned orchestra left for the mainland after two sell-out concerts in the city.
“My mother’s name is Theresa Chou Kee-yu and she was born in Guangzhou but moved as a 10-year-old child to Hong Kong and then on to Taiwan where she grew up.
“She went to America to study mathematics and met my Australian father, also a mathematician, at Caltech [California Institute of Technology], and the family moved to Adelaide in Australia where I went to school,” he said.
With his mother being part of the Chinese diaspora, “you could certainly say my ancestry is southern Chinese from the Pearl River Delta,” he added.