In the early 1900s, a Saskatchewan law intended to protect the morality of white females forbade Chinese restaurant owners from hiring Caucasian women. Against this backdrop, nine-year-old Yvette Wong helps out in her parents’ café. Her parents are a mixed-race couple – her father Chinese and her mother Cree. Despite being incredibly bright, Yvette finds herself in the slow learners’ class because of her skin colour, and so her mother charges her with a secret: Yvette must never tell anyone she’s part Cree.

Based on the life of Chinese-Canadian neuroscientist and Senator Lillian Eva Quan Dyck, Café Daughter maps the hierarchy of racism in Canada, asking questions that any Canadian of mixed heritage might ask: Who am I? Who are my people? Who can I lean on when times are tough?

Hailing from Yellowknife, NWT, actor Tiffany Ayalik effortlessly inhabits a dozen characters in this one-woman show from celebrated Cree playwright Kenneth T. Williams. By the end of this arresting 90-minute story based on real life, you will know them all.

A Workshop West Playwrights' Theatre production in association with Alberta Aboriginal Performing Arts with the support of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.