People's Artist Tu Long: Born under the stage, prevented by parents from pursuing art

Recently, at the Weekend Appointment program, People's Artist Tu Long emotionally confided about his childhood and his journey to the stage.

My parents were artists, so from the moment I was born, I slept under the stage waiting for my parents to perform. When I was 9 months old, my parents sent me to live with my grandmother. From then until I was 15, I only lived with my grandmother so my parents could pursue their artistic activities.

People's Artist Tu Long.

My hometown is poor, my grandmother is also very poor. Every day she has to go to the market to sell goods, I always stand at the entrance of the village waiting for her to come home. Only children like me can fully understand the meaning of the phrase "waiting for mother to come home from the market".

I look forward to her because every time she comes back, she buys me gifts, sometimes rice cakes, sometimes rice paper, sometimes fried cakes. Everything is still intact in me until now. She is like my mother, raising me up.

When I was a child, I wanted to drive a tractor because I wanted to grow up and drive my grandmother to the market. I also told her: "When I grow up, I will buy a car to take her to the market and build a house for her to live in."

I remember very clearly the image of the palm-leaf roof where I lived, on rainy nights my grandmother had to bring out a basin to catch water. Once my house was on fire, my grandmother ran with two grandchildren in her arms, falling down all over the place.

My grandmother passed away in 2012. Luckily, I was able to fulfill my promise to build her a decent house. I built it in the style of an old 5-room wooden house. I even bought a car to take her out for a ride.

Later, I even bought her a mahogany bed for her to lie on. Before, she had to sleep on a bamboo bed in a house with a dirt floor. When she died, she was still lying on the mahogany bed I made.

Tu Long when he was young.

Quan ho family but follow cheo

I was born into a family with a tradition of Quan Ho, but I did not follow Quan Ho. The reason for this is because next to my father's Quan Ho troupe was a Cheo troupe.

When I was young, every time I went to visit my father, I was taken to interact with the artists from the Cheo troupe. They often competed in Cheo performances. I sat and watched with great interest, learning little by little to perform for my friends when I got home. Just like that, Cheo became ingrained in my blood without me knowing.

Later, my parents did not support me in pursuing art. They even forbade me from studying art. My father said: "This profession is like squeezing a lemon and throwing away the peel, why follow it?"

Our generation of 7x back then had a trend of going to work abroad. Everyone went to construction schools to study so they could go work abroad.

I saw that and also went to a construction college. I still remember clearly when I took the exam, they made me stand and carry a sandbag for a certain amount of time to pass the health check. After that, I went to school and graduated with a 3/7 civil carpentry degree. That was the first degree I held in my hand. I was proficient in carpentry.

But perhaps because I was too small, I waited forever and still no one called me to go work abroad. My uncle at home saw that I had too much free time so he told me to go to the Bac Giang Cheo troupe to practice and study at the province's Intermediate School of Culture and Arts.

In 1995, I decided to pack up and go to Hanoi to study Cheo at the School of Theatre and Cinema. After graduating in 1999, I joined the Cheo troupe of the General Department of Logistics and performed. My main job was probably intermediate, I studied intermediate all the time. It was not until 2009 that I went to university.

The person who influenced me the most when I transferred to the Drama School was my mother. My mother sings very well.