Review Visceral Dance Chicago revisits a 2018 piece.

THEATER

presumed wealthy, bought for less, exploited, silenced, never enough, hypervisible, invisible—other.

“When other people use you as a way to look at themselves, your own reflection will become blurred and fractured. You may even start to hate that reflection. The image that Moy presented to white Americans about Chinese people (and by extension, all Asians) persists to this day: Quiet and submissive. Foreign and exotic. Dirty and diseased,” writes Diep Tran in an American Theatre article on The Chinese Lady. “Some of those stereotypes were unfairly placed upon Asian Americans. Other stereotypes were performed by Asian Americans as a means of survival.

“For so long, being Asian American meant privileging the American part of that descriptor, subsuming the Eastern parts of yourself for the Western parts, which were deemed superior. It meant separating yourself from your diasporic community, and their pressing concerns around poverty, incarceration, deportation, and healthcare, and entering the upper ladders of society, which were inevitably Western. You give away your community to ascend, and then wonder why there isn’t anyone who looks like you when you get to the top.”

But as the only ethnicity that was deliberately prohibited by law from immigration to the United States by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (which was repealed in name in 1943 and in practice in 1965 with the elimination of quotas that limited Chinese immigrants to 105 visas annually); denied American citizenship until 1952; and is still omitted from most mainstream American narratives—including those on race—is it surprising that Asian Americans have internalized the message of exclusion to the point of diminishing and rejecting Asian and Asian American culture, in order to better perform the role of a proper “American”?

“It goes back to the exoticizing—it’s [white] society’s fault that Asian Americans feel they have to prove they’re American,” notes Wu, who is from Shanghai. “I was talking about the play in an Uber the other day. The driver was Chinese American. I was like, ‘Do you know how unusual it is to have an all-Asian cast?’ And he was like, ‘Girl, I think you’re doing a great job, but have you considered hiring a white actor? That way more people will come to see your show!’”

“The view of Asian immigrants as ‘sojourners’ and European immigrants as ‘settlers’ is both a mistaken notion and a widely held myth,” writes Ronald Takaki in Strangers from a Different Shore. “Coming here from Asia, many of America’s immigrants found they were not allowed to feel at home in the United States and even their grandchildren and great-grandchildren still fi nd they are not viewed and accepted as Americans.”

This sense of homelessness, of loss of place and identity, is the core and the vacancy of the Asian American experience, which recognizes its distance from its presumed homeland yet is not recognized in this one. “I was born in Hong Kong but came here when I was one,” says Young. “I always feel I’m less than Chinese. It would be better if I could say I lived in Hong Kong until I was 15 and can speak Mandarin perfectly, but here I am in America. I have this feeling of inferiority.”

To be less than is the only possible conclusion from a cultural standpoint that expects to see the vastness of China—or even of all of Asia—contained and presented in a single human being. And to be less than is the only possible conclusion from a cultural standpoint that has reduced that vastness to bound feet, vases, chopsticks, and chop suey.

“What is happening is a performance. For my entire life is a performance. These words you hear are not my own. These clothes that I wear are not my own. This Room in which I am seated is intended to be representative of China, just as I am intended to be representative of The Chinese Lady: the fi rst woman from the Orient to ever set foot in America, and yet this Room is unlike any room in China, and I am unlike any lady to ever live,” Afong Moy says in the fi rst minutes of a play written by a contemporary Korean American man from Indianapolis.

“The characters should be played by Asian or Asian American performers,” writes Suh in his notes to the play. “They should speak in their natural and organic speaking voices . . . the characters should simply move the way the actors move.”  v

@IreneCHsiao

SEAGULL

NOW THROUGH JUNE 12

By Anton Chekhov

Translated, adapted, and directed by ensemble member Yasen Peyankov

Featuring ensemble members Sandra Marquez, Caroline Ne , Je Perry, Karen Rodriguez, Eric Simonson and Namir Smallwood

SEE THE SHOW IN OUR STUNNING NEW THEATER-IN-THE-ROUND

Tickets start at $20 | steppenwolf.org | 312-335-1650 | | steppenwolf.org/welcomeback

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