kairuy

[kairuy]

I REGRET NOTHING I’VE DONE HERE*

A month ago - two weeks after all the theatres closed and every artist friend I have was suddenly out of all the jobs, both artistic and practical, that kept them afloat - my playwright friend Danielle Mohlman messaged me to say that she was mounting a live broadcast of her play NEXUS, performed each time by a different couple in quarantine. Several artists are friends of mine, or people whose work I know, so at first I chose those six performances. At the last minute, I added one couple I didn’t know - there were a number of friends of Danielle’s who are based on the East Coast - as a control, in the interests of interpretation.

NEXUS is about two people who meet at a bus stop, and follows their fractured relationship-or-not-relationship over the three years, weaving across DC - the city comes alive, a third character in their love story - through bars and museums and parks and national monuments. On its own, it is an intimate play, taking us through flirting, fighting, making up, and breaking up. In a normal production you would have two actors who may or may not know each other, guided by a director who may or may not know them. The chemistry is part natural - you hope for it - but mostly manufactured. Here, with two actors who are a couple - some have been together for a decade, some are married, some are engaged, some are new to this living-together-thing - the intimacy of the play is amplified by their physical and emotional closeness. There’s no director (although I think one couple did actually work with a director), there’s no set except for the living room of the home they’ve made together, there’s no sound design except for the preshow playlist cued up on the playwright’s laptop. There is nothing standing between them and both the history they have together and the histories that everyone brings into a relationship, trailing behind like a suitcase on wheels, or a guard dog waiting to bite. These histories are a fourth character in the play. We, the audience, audible on our Zoom mics, are the fifth.

Taking these seven performances as a whole is like peering into a kaleidoscope - the same words shifting into different patterns, highlighting something I didn’t see or hear before. The passage about how a city is built, and then gentrified, echoed with the couple in a new apartment complex in Seattle’s Central District that used to be a block of small, faded houses, and with the couple living in Brooklyn, which the last time I looked was lined with gleaming high-rises along the formerly industrial waterfront, now long gone. The line about living with roommates echoes back at the couple sharing a house with four other people in Greenwood, four pairs of legs on various couches framing the scene. Certain lines land differently, but other things are funny in the same way, and I laugh every time. My heart breaks in the same place for these two people every time. There are movements choreographed in a way that I assume is described in the stage directions, but people touch each other, lean towards, or away, in gestures unique completely to them. One couple wrote scene changes on cards, clearly delineating the shifts in location and tone; another read the scene changes aloud, which emphasized the passage of time. Everyone else slid elliptically through the moments that define a relationship, even if you didn’t realize it at the time.

The thing I love about NEXUS is that it is a love letter to a city, and to art and museums and the things we look for there, and most of all to relationships that maybe did or didn’t work out, but still defined a part of you. Maybe you could have done this thing or the other thing differently, but maybe you wouldn’t. Maybe it would have changed something, or maybe the end result would be the same. At the end you only have that one moment, and then it passes. I love that.

As of this writing, Danielle has extended the play for one more weekend, May 14-17. Information, cast, and tickets here: https://www.daniellemohlman.com/nexus

*this is a line from the play which I now quote all the time

[kairuy]

WHAT CAN ART DO?

You asked what art can do I wanted to write you that it can make a spark flames and a puddle ocean a river tears a room a world a cry song and it can tell a story of a time and it can slow time some love art because it's a really good mirror in which something - a place or an era perhaps - is naked or vivid I mean seen like it wasn't seen before others love the art thing because it brings postcards of the world transformed redrawn or on its head strange or stronger worse or better and people need those kinds of views on what isn't, just as much as they need a good view on what is I meant to write you that art can close a wound and open a legal case that it can stare further than a telescope go faster than Internet and beat like a loved one's heart it can bring people together and of equal and not opposite importance - it can split them up, make them doubt or wonder who they came in with or who they live with sometimes - watching science TV - I think art it's like the large hadron supercollider of the soul, other times it's just making people laugh no shame in that I wanted to tell you that art is loved as a hammer because of how well it breaks lies and speaks truths knocks down obstacles the Incredible Hulk it is or the Superman, a good thing to have on your side it can say something many things any things can say much or little in the best way of things and I think it has value not always bound up with price when I was 22 I first moved to Sheffield and one spring in the high rises near us someone had sprayed on their window, high up I LOVE APRIL and I thought that was art. Very beautiful. Very wise. And in case anyone is wondering, art is not a servant of any government nor of any policy, nor of touristicism nor a servant of money nor an icing on a cake it's more the heart of the matter than the wrapping paper or something to do afterwards and it does not belong to liars Some years back, I went to see a Derek Jarman retrospective at the Serpentine Gallery in London I came out of that all fired up. I was alive again and I hadn't even noticed I might have been dead I was thinking a lot about that special place of both art and reality that he opened up, how valuable that was and I was thinking that in future we might have to be a lot kinder and a lot angrier. That's what art can do. And people should be careful with it. Otherwise they may wake up one day and have to live alone With no hammer of change, no truth, no laughs, No bringing together or wondering apart With no reflections, no possibility to reflect Just living alone with only their ghosts and their ideologies muttering at them.' Tim Etchells, Artist, writer, performance maker, Forced Entertainment

[kairuy]

DIVERSITY IN SEATTLE THEATRE, NOV/DEC 2017

One last look at the year.

1. By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, UW Drama, Lynn Nottage, dir. Timothy Bond. Race-specific and casted accordingly.

2. The Government Inspector, Seattle Shakespeare, Jeffry Hatcher/Nikolai Gogol, dir. Allison Narver. Diversely-cast. This was totally hysterical.

3. Blood Makes Noise (reading), Pork Filled Productions, Kuan Foo, dir. May Nguyen Lee. Diversely-cast.

4. Dawn of the She-Devil of the China Seas (reading), Pork Filled Productions, Roger Tang, dir. Linnea Ingalls.

5. She is Fierce, solo works by female-identifying visual and performing artists, curated by Linnea Ingalls and Cessa Betancourt (I think). Diverse.

6. The Nance, Artswest, Douglas Carter Beane, dir. Mathew Wright. Pretty white, except for Jasmine Jean Sim.

7. Ballad of the White Tiger, NCTC Pipeline, Keiko Green, dir. MJ Sieber. Race-specific, that is, half-Asian. This is deliberate. I note, not for the first time, that Josh Kenji is so ridiculously good-looking it’s almost distracting.

8. It Will Be Now, Wyrd Sisters, Meghan Dolbey and Meme Garcia, dir. Wiley Basho Gorn. Two solo works. There aren’t words for how beautiful this was.

9. The Seagull (filmed), Satirikon Theatre, Anton Chekhov, dir. Yury Butusov. Pretty white. Well, Russians.

10. Every 28 Hours (reading), The Hansberry Project/CD Forum for Arts and Ideas, dir. Valerie Curtis Newton. This is a series of something like 100 one-minute plays about race. Most of the cast is black.

11. Secret and Impossible League of the Noösphere and the Baltimore Plot, Live Girls!, Darian Lindle, dir. Meghan Arnette. Non-race-specific, mostly white. I loved this but I could not for the life of me remember the title, which made it really difficult to recommend it to other people. I think many people had this problem.

12. Monstrosity, UW Drama, Lucy Thurber, dir. Samie Spring Detzer. Diversely-cast. I think, because this is a student production, there is also some gender-swapping, but I can’t be sure. This was wild and electric and totally insane.

13. A Christmas Carol, ACT, Gregory Falls, dir. Emily Penick. This is always diversely-cast, but this is the first time I can recall that a black actor was cast as Scrooge. They always cast two actors as Scrooge, so they had to double-up the casting for Young Scrooge and Even Younger Scrooge, which always works out anyway because you need a lot of young and child actors. Having a Black Scrooge totally pivots that early scene when Scrooge berates his quivering, shivering, overworked and verbally abused sole employee, Bob Cratchit.

14. The Christians (reading), Thalia’s Umbrella, Lucas Hnath, dir. Kathryn Stewart. Diversely-cast.

15. The Humans, Seattle Rep, Stephen Karam, dir. Joe Mantello. As far as I can tell, non-race-specific. Mostly white. One actor wasn’t white. Otherwise it was really white.

16. Buzzfeed IRL, The Horse in Motion, multiple artists and disciplines, diverse.

17. Wonderful Life, 14/48 Projects, dir. Shawn Belyea (plus assistant directors). Diversely-cast. I’ve never seen this before, but the concept is that NOBODY knows who is in the cast except for the directors. Each performer rehearses with the directors alone. They can only tell one person. When it’s their cue, they stand up from wherever they are sitting in the audience, speak their first words, and then join everyone else onstage. It’s amazing.

18. The Flight Before Christmas, SPT, Maggie Lee, dir. Amy Poisson. Diversely-cast.

19. Christmastown, SPT, Wayne Rawley, dir. Kelly Kitchens. I mean, it could be more diversely cast, but then it IS Pilar O’Connell playing the femme fatale in full glory, so I let this one slide.

20. Howl’s Moving Castle, Book-It, Myra Platt (script) and Justin Huertas (music & lyrics), dir. Myra Platt with movement work from Table Flip. Holy shit holy shit holy shit I mean seriously SARA. PORKALOB. Also the cast was diverse as fuck and amazing as hell and I cried and also Michael Feldman is hot like whoa.

21. Artswest Holiday Cast Party, Artswest, Mathew Wright. This was part of a series with each night a different pair of performers coming in to sing a few Christmas carols and talk about themselves and since this was Justin Huertas and Ben Gonio, I totally had to check it out.

22. Ham for the Holidays, ACT, Peggy Platt and Lisa Koch. They have a comedy duo called Dos Fallopia and every year they have a show with about eight skits. It’s pretty white. But funny.

23. Snowflakes, Sandbox Radio/ACT. This is an ongoing radio-style podcast that’s recorded live, with music and sound effects made by actual humans and short plays and works written by various writers. Mostly white.

[kairuy]

DIVERSITY IN SEATTLE THEATRE, SEPT/OCT 2017

Here we go.

1.     The Earth Shakes, HERON Ensemble, Samantha Cooper, dir. Linnea Ingalls. If I remember correctly, this play is loosely based on Antony and Cleopatra; it is diversely-cast, and as is characteristic of this ensemble - they inhabit that word to its fullest definition – the cast switches characters between scenes, like a relay race that crosses all boundaries of race and gender.

2.     The Who and the What, ArtsWest, Ayad Akhtar, dir. Samip Raval. Race-specific. This play is about a Pakistani father and his American-born daughters. I don’t think the actors were necessarily Pakistani; I believe they did a lot of work with Pratidhwani - who co-produced - and with Pakistani consultants to achieve more of a cultural understanding of the characters beyond what is merely in the script.

3.     The Odyssey, Seattle Rep, Todd Almond and Lear deBessonnet, dir. Marya Sea Kaminski. Diversely-cast, across race, across gender, across age, across ability, pulling a cast of a hundred (or so it felt) from all over Seattle, led by a handful of professional actors.

4.     Why We Have A Body, Strawberry Theatre Workshop, Claire Chafee, dir. Rhonda Soikowski. White or white-presenting, as far as I can tell.

5.     Dragon Lady, Intiman, Sara Porkalob, dir. Andrew Russell. Holy mother of god. I have seen this in one form or another at least five times. I could see it another five times. This is about identity, about family, about pride, about strength, about poverty, about pain, about the damage you can do in ways that cross generations, about how you don’t know you’re repeating past mistakes - your own and those of others - until you’ve made them, about how you don’t know what it will take to break a cycle until you’ve broken it.

6.     Teh Internet is Serious Business, WET, Tim Price, dir. Wayne Rawley. As far as I can tell, both race-specific and non-race-specific, and casted accordingly.

7.     Blues for Mister Charlie, The Williams Project, James Baldwin, dir. Ryan Guzzo Purcell. Race-specific, casted accordingly. Flawless. This is one of my favorite plays of all time. James Baldwin’s writing is diamond-sharp and so relevant it makes you feel like you are on fire. Loosely based on the murder of Emmett Till, it is dedicated to Medgar Evers, his widow and children, and “to the memory of the dead children of Birmingham.” It broke my heart every time Richard, the man whose murder at the beginning of the play sets everything in motion, calls his father Meridian “daddy.”

8.     Life: An Adaptation an Adaptation, Filament Collab Lab, Nathan Brockett, dir. Nathan Brockett/choreo. Sophia Franzella. As far as I can tell, white or white-presenting.

9.     Gemini Season (reading), NCTC Pipeline, Nelle Tankus, dir. Emily Harvey. This is a play about a trans woman and most likely should be and was casted accordingly.

10.  I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Book-It, Myra Platt/Malika Oyetimein/Maya Angelou, dir. Malika Oyetimein. Race-specific, casted accordingly. The white characters in this story – there are necessarily white characters in this story – are played by the black ensemble, who drew white gloves over their hands to signify their character’s whiteness. This sent a shiver up my spine.

11.  King of the Yees, ACT, Lauren Yee, dir. Desdemona Chiang. Race-specific – that is, Asian – and casted accordingly. This is a Chinese-American story. Whether the actors are Chinese-American or not isn’t necessarily important to me. They were hilarious as fuck. I cried laughing. Ray Tagavilla is one of my favorite people on the planet.

12.  Journey of the Saint (reading), eSe Teatro, Cesar de Maria, dir. Rose Cano, race-specific and casted accordingly.

13.  Onerus, Café Nordo, Terry Podgorski, dir. Erin Brindley. Diversely-cast, as they usually do.

14.  Julius Caesar, Seattle Shakes, William Shakespeare, dir. George Mount. Diversely-cast.

15.  Burning Doors, OTB/Belarus Free Theatre with Marya Alyokhina, dir. Nicolai Khalezin/Natalia Kaliada. White, or white-presenting, that is, Russian.

16.  Las Mariposas y Los Muertos, Forward Flux, Benjamin Benne, dir. Pilar O’Connell. Race-specific, casted accordingly.

17.  No More Sad Things, Forward Flux, Hansol Jung, dir. Wesley Fruge. Diversely-cast.

18.  Sycorax, 18th/Union, Y York, dir. Mark Lutwak. Race-specific solo work, casted accordingly. I could listen to Demene Hall forever. This is a play that is, on the surface, about Sycorax, the mother of Caliban, who is mentioned in The Tempest but does not appear. Actually this is about the pain of blackness, as a child, as a girl, as a woman, as a lover, as a mother. This is a play about innocence and love and betrayal.

19.  Go Dog Go! SCT, Allison Gregory/Steven Dietz, dir. Allison Gregory/Steven Dietz. Diversely-cast. Well, I mean, they’re playing DOGS. By the way, this show is aimed at small children.

20.  Pride and Prejudice, Seattle Rep, Kate Hamill, dir. Amanda Dehnert. Diversely-cast.

21.  The World of Extreme Happiness, SPT, Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, dir. Desdemona Chiang. Race-specific, that is, Asian, casted accordingly. Again, don’t ask me about whether the actors are Chinese or not, or half-white or not. That’s not something I care about at all. This one hurts my heart, for reasons I have discussed elsewhere, and I love it.

22.  Beware the Terror of Gaylord Manor, ACT, BenDeLaCreme. Diversely-cast. I mean, it’s a drag burlesque cabaret, basically.

23.  Ragtime, 5th Ave, Terrence McNally/Stephen Flaherty/Lynn Ahrens, dir. Peter Rothstein. Race-specific, casted accordingly. I might have side-eyed the Wealthy White Savior Lady plot line a tiny bit.

24.  Coriolanus: Fight Like a Bitch, Rebel Kat, William Shakespeare/Katherine Jett, dir. Emily Penick. All-female Shakespeare, pronouns changed, diversely-cast. Holy crap, this was stunning.

25.  Happy, Happy, Happy, Macha, Jenn Ruzumna/Lisa Every, dir. Amy Poisson. White or white-presenting.

26. The Crucible, ACT, Arthur Miller, dir. John Langs. Diversely-cast. The only race-specific bit was the casting of Tituba, who appears in the beginning and then disappears. I read today that Langs had originally cast Shermona Mitchell as both Tituba and Judge Hathorne, but could not overcome the restrictions of the Miller estate. At the last minute, Reginald André Jackson was added to the cast as Hathorne. This had to be devastating. Also devastating was watching the scene where Mary Warren confronts Abigail Williams in court. To watch a room of people believe a lying white girl (Abigail) over a trying-to-do-the-right-thing black girl (Mary) reminded me of a line from James Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie: “You can’t call a white woman a liar, even if you’re a white man.”

27.  Last Stop on Lilac Street, Annex, Kelleen Conway Blanchard, dir. Keira McDonald. Mostly white or white-presenting, except for Alaji. Maybe I should stop calling plays “diversely-cast” if they have only one actor of color. Argh, do I need to scroll back through the last 10 months and re-edit everything?

28.  Burn This, Theatre22, Lanford Wilson, dir. Corey McDaniel. Diversely-cast. Well, I mean, again that thing where you have one actor of color and everyone else white or white-presenting. What should my cutoff be? 25%? 40%? 10%? 

29.  Mirror-Mirror (reading), Pork-Filled Productions, Lamar Legend, dir. Aaron Jin. Diversely-cast. This is part of a weeklong series of readings of new plays by playwrights of color, dramaturged and directed and performed mostly by artists of color, presented by Pork-Filled Productions, running at Theatre Off Jackson through Saturday.

30.  Sings the Hits, Theatre22, Scotto Moore, dir. Katie McKellar. Diversely-cast.

[kairuy]

MONKEY QUEEN

Dad told me recently that when I first arrived in the United States, I woke up screaming every night. I had spent the previous year in Shanghai with my mom’s grandmother and aunts, while waiting for my immigration status to clear. The adoption would take another year to finalize. My citizenship would take yet another year, granted two days before my fourth birthday. In the meantime I would wake everyone in the night with an unholy noise, first my Shanghai family, and then my totally unnerved new parents in St. Louis, half a world away. This went on for months. It is some miracle we all survived.

In the opening scene of Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s The World of Extreme Happiness, the newborn Sunny Lee is thrown into a slop bucket and left to die, her parents disappointed that she is yet another useless girl instead of the boy that they had prayed for. And yet she refuses to die, launching herself towards a destiny of her own choosing and her own making, and plunging me into an alternate reality so different from the only life I have ever known. It was like that movie Sliding Doors, when Gwyneth Paltrow’s character’s life takes two wildly different paths depending on whether she catches a train or not. All around me in the darkness my fellow theatregoers sat open-mouthed and silent, unsure of what to make of this story threaded with myth and modern China, while I fell into a distant, parallel universe that I somehow always knew existed. Maybe it was this awareness that woke me screaming in the night when I was too young to remember.

To me, this play describes a world that I recognize, where children believe in the Monkey King, where factory workers are tiny cogs in vast machines, where girls are unwanted when only one child is allowed by the government, where ghosts marry humans, where once upon a time, a powerful emperor was buried with an army of thousands upon thousands of terra-cotta warriors to guard him in the afterlife. Where the artist Ai WeiWei was arrested in Chengdu after a protest, beaten by the police while in custody, and shortly afterwards suffered a cerebral hemorrhage that required surgery. Raised as I was by Taiwanese parents living in America, these stories filtered across oceans and reminded me how whenever I visit China it is like being caught in a tear in the fabric of time, a place both 20 years behind the rest of the world and yet two steps ahead, racing towards a future people can only imagine, but not quite create.

The myth of the Monkey King that runs through The World of Extreme Happiness is one of escape and transformation, and I remember again that I was born in 1980, the Year of the Monkey. And what could be a greater transformation than my own, six months after I was born, from an unwanted fifth daughter to a treasured only child? I am not Sunny and Sunny is not me, and yet like her I am reminded, every day, of a sense of destiny. All of us are here on this earth because of decisions made by other people before we were born, and which we had no part of. This is destiny. Everything else is up to us.

[kairuy]

TAIWAN DIASPORA/LULLABY

I was watching Lauren Yee’s KING OF THE YEES last night, sitting in the front row, thinking of how the Cantonese-speaking mainland Chinese immigrants who arrived a century ago in search of gold - both literal and metaphorical - clustered in cramped Chinatowns whose borders were drawn by racism in cities on both coasts. The Taiwanese who arrived decades later, with degrees in engineering and mathematics and medicine went instead to the suburbs, in New York to Flushing, Queens, or New Jersey, in LA to Arcadia or Cerritos, in Seattle over to Bellevue.

Taiwan is a small island. It has a number of universities - the biggest and best is National Taiwan University in Taipei - and for decades you did not chose what to study, it was chosen for you, based on your university entrance examinations which not only decided which school you would attend but also which course you would follow. Like the Sorting Hat in Harry Potter. This is why the theatre director Desdemona Chiang is named Desdemona; her mother had tested into the drama department. Then you left for America, for graduate school, to raise your American children who may or may not grow up speaking Chinese, depending on your will or theirs. Maybe you would return home every summer; maybe you wouldn’t come home for thirty years.

You took with you connections, names, phone numbers, addresses. In every city there would be another classmate, or a sibling of a classmate, or someone who was at university with you but in a different department. This went on to the second generation; while I was watching KING OF THE YEES I suddenly remembered my friend Gina had messaged me, weeks earlier: “My friend Joe is in that play! His girlfriend is an old friend of mine from UW.” I know Gina because her father had been a college classmate of my father; when she came to Seattle as an undergraduate her parents asked my parents - who had by then moved back to Taiwan - if I, several years older, could keep an eye on her if she ever needed anything. So it goes.

Some years back my mom’s friend was telling me about the daughter of a friend, who lived in New York and was kind of a champagne specialist, or something; shortly afterwards we met by accident, on Twitter - I had recognized her name, and we quickly became friends. She introduced me to another friend, who had grown up in New Jersey, who was Taiwanese like us, who loved all the things we loved. I thought he looked familiar, but I couldn’t be sure, until one day he posted a childhood photo, which I recognized immediately: the same photo was in one of my childhood albums. His grandparents were my mother’s godparents; we had met as children.

The Taiwanese diaspora is a strange one, weirdly connected, weirdly small, if you went to the same school or you had far-flung connections created by multiple marriages or godparents or family friends that you called “auntie” and “uncle.” It means everywhere you go, you can find someone who knows who you are, and you will never be totally alone.

[kairuy]

DIVERSITY IN SEATTLE THEATRE, JULY/AUGUST 2017

In August the Gregory Award nominations went out, and holy crap, I was excited. All five best director nominees were women. All five best new play writers were women. Three of the best production nominees were directed by women, and one of them was the all-female BRING DOWN THE HOUSE, a two-part adaptation of Shakespeare’s HENRY VI. Artists of color dominated, especially black artists, especially black women artists, while Asian and Latinx artists also grew from previous years. There is strength in numbers. People are finding their voices, finding ways to tell the stories that mean something, finding ways to collaborate. This is how you gain power. In that moment, I was so proud that the distant thunder I first heard last year had become a roar: we cannot be silenced.

1. Much Ado About Nothing, William Shakespeare, dir. Jon Kretzu, Seattle Shakespeare Co/Wooden O. As usual, diversely-cast.

2. Please Open Your Mouth, Joanna Garner, dir. Norah Elges Scheyer, Café Nordo. Diversely-cast.

3. Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare, dir. Leah Adcock-Starr, Off-Road Shakespeare Company. Diverse-race-AND-non-gender-specific casting. Everyone learned a bunch of different parts, and they pulled them out of a hat at the beginning of each performance.

4. Downstairs, Theresa Rebeck, dir. Julie Beckman, Theatre22/ACTLab. White or white-presenting.

5. Greensward, R. Hamilton Wright, dir. Richard Ziman, MAP Theatre. Race-specific, cast accordingly.

6. Hoodoo Love, Katori Hall, dir. Malika Oyetimein, Sound Theatre/The Hainsberry Project. Race-specific, all-black cast.

7. The Wong Kids (reading), Lloyd Suh, dir. Harry Todd Jamieson. Almost entirely Asian cast.

8. Pericles, William Shakespeare, dir. Annie Lareau, Seattle Shakespeare Company/Wooden O. Diversely cast.

9. Feed/back, Amelia Wade (devised piece), dir. Megan Brewer, MAP Theatre. Diversely cast.

10. Hamlet, William Shakespeare, dir. Robin Lynn Smith, Freehold Theatre. Diversely-cast.

11. Resistance Cabaret, UMO Ensemble, dir. Elizabeth Klob, UMO Ensemble/ACTLab. White or white-presenting.

12. Sundown at the Devil’s House, Eddie DeHais, dir. Eddie DeHais, Café Nordo. Both race-specific and non-race-specific, diversely-cast.

13. Mud, Maria Irene Fornes, dir./trans. Rose Cano, ESE Teatro. They did this in two versions: the original English, and in Spanish. Monica Cortes Viharo, who is in the graduate program at UW, learned Spanish for this role; you could tell, but it wasn’t necessarily a distraction.

14. American Archipelago, multiple writers, dir. Bobbin Ramsay, Pony World Theater, race-specific and cast accordingly.

15. Fool for Love, Sam Shepherd, dir. Alex Bodine, ACTLab. Diversely-cast.

16. 14/48, multiple writers and directors. They made a major change: all the roles come out of a single bucket, not divided by gender. That was pretty cool.

17. Over and Under, Juliet Waller Pruzan and Bret Fetzer, dir. Rachel Katz Carey, Annex Theatre. Diversely-cast.

18. Alex & Aris, Moby Pomerance, dir. John Langs, ACT. Diversely-cast (can you say that a play is diversely-cast if there are only two actors in it?).

19. Madagascar Jr., Kevin Del Aguila, George Noriega and Joel Someillan, dir. Hattie Andres. This was Seattle Children’s Theatre’s summer program performance, so, all little kids. Very diverse.

20. Intiman Emerging Artists Showcase, solo works, multiple directors. This was all about diversity.

21. Building the Wall (reading), Robert Schenkkan, dir. Desdemona Chiang, ACTLab/Azeotrope/Outsider Inn. Race-specific, casted accordingly.

22. The Moors (reading), Jen Silverman, dir. Erin Murray, Forward Flux. Diversely-cast.

23. Fractured. multiple writers/directors, BASH Theatre. White or white-presenting.

24. We Are Pussy Riot, Barbara Hammond, dir. Logan Ellis, Theatre Battery. Diversely-cast.

25. Statements After An Arrest Under the Immorality Act, Athol Fugard, dir. Emily Harvey. Race-specific, casted accordingly.

26. Proof, David Auburn, dir. Arlene Martinez-Vasquez. Latinx cast and company, bilingual English/Spanish adaptation.

27. Nite Skool, created and directed by the Libertinis, Annex Theatre. Race-specific, I think.

28. Okay, Bye (reading), Josh Conkel, dir. Marquicia Domingue, ACTLab. Diversely-cast.

29. Goblin Market, Polly Pen and Peggy Harmon, dir. Teresa Thuman, Sound Theatre. Diversely-cast AND they switched roles back and forth.

30. Persuasion, Harold Taw and Chris Jeffries, dir. Karen Lund, Taproot Theatre. White or white-presenting.

31. 14/48: Nordo, multiple writers/directors, Café Nordo. Diversely-cast.

32. Much Better, Elizabeth Frankel, dir. Henry Nettleton, Really-Really Theatre Group. Diversely-cast.

[kairuy]

YOU STILL FEEL LIKE HOME/WE ARE PEOPLE AND NOT CITIES*

1. YP messages me on FB. He hasn’t lived in Seattle for twenty years, and his friends are visiting next month. Where should they eat? I think about it as I drink my morning tea, and I send him two paragraphs of notes, beginning with my own neighborhood and spiraling out across the city. “Wow, it’s really different now, huh?” “You can’t even imagine.”

2. The other night I ran into J., who moved back two years ago. She and her family are living with her mother up in Shoreline, “because we can’t afford anything in this city.” They haven’t decided what to do yet, but she seems unconcerned. I haven’t seen her since 1998, so we cram two decades into the 5 minutes before her show starts. She is less interested in the things that are gone, the things that have changed, than in the new things to discover. Which is as it should be.

3. A friend who moved away five years ago texts me; she sounds wistful as we talk about her next, rare visit. I tell her it will be like Brigadoon.

4. I am well aware that I have been protected by layers of privilege. I grew up here, I have safety nets upon safety nets. After my parents moved back to Taiwan I bought a condo with family money, before the crash, before the resurrection, before the crazy prices began pushing everyone who doesn’t work for Amazon out of the city. I am not nostalgic for the things I never paid attention to when they mattered to everyone else but me. In 1993 I was a shy, nerdy 8th grader who wore Banana Republic and listened to Broadway musicals and completely missed the grunge era. In 2003 I was lonely and depressed; I had no friends and hung out with my old dog at home and watched CSI and reruns of Charmed while everyone else was out dancing in clubs and making out with the dude who would become their first husband, or at least a one-night stand that lasted a couple of months.

5. Nostalgia is about youth, about privilege, about realizing your own insignificance, about pretending to be cool. The reality is no city has ever been kind to everyone, especially not Seattle, carved up so deeply by racism and redlining that the scars are still there, fifty years later, still visible underneath the gossamer veneer of wealth and gentrification. It has never been easy to be young and poor, although maybe it was a little less impossible, once. For as long as money and dreams have existed people have been divided into those who chase money and those who chase dreams, save for a few for whom both come true. Many more simply choose to survive, and that is enough.

6. Loving someone or something or someplace isn’t always the same thing as loving the idea of someone or something or someplace. We learn this as children, but have to relearn it again and again as adults. Do you see things as they are, or as you wish they were, or as they had been? Do you know love when you find it, or is it only later, once it’s gone?

7. A city is changing all the time. The past falls down, or is torn down, and something new goes up. Nothing stays, not horse-drawn chariots, not telegraph machines, not The Old Spaghetti Factory. Avocado toast will go the way of the Oysters Rockefeller. The ancient Romans would laugh at our reverence for the near past. History matters, but so does the future. If we forget this, there won’t be one.

8. “Only connect.”**

*These lines are from: a painting by No Touching Ground at the Out Of Sight exhibition/a line from Eugene Ionesco’s The Chairs.

**Howards End, E.M. Forster.

[kairuy]

DIVERSITY IN SEATTLE THEATRE, MAY-JUNE 2017.

You know the drill.

1. The People’s Republic of Valerie, Kristen Kosmas, dir. Paul Budraitis, OTB. This is not so much a play as a white woman struggling to make sense of the murders of black men by police officers and men like that piece of shit who murdered Trayvon Martin five years ago last February. It was performed by Kristen Kosmas and an ensemble of actors spread across a range of race and gender, each inhabiting her words with their own voices. The talkback was led by Ijeoma Oluo, and it was interesting and thoughtful and also a bit constrained inside the white echo chamber that is OTB’s audience most nights.

2. Midsummer’s Night Dream, Shakespeare, dir. George Mount, Seattle Shakes. They often cast across race and gender, as they should. I will add that I had a little trouble telling the actors who played Demetrius and Lysander apart. Sheesh. White guys.

3. The Wolves (staged reading), Sarah DeLappe, dir. Keiko Green, NCTC/Pipeline. All-female characters, diversely cast, although one girl is specifically Armenian, I think. This was spectacular, I hope someone in Seattle produces it soon, and properly, with a female director, preferably Keiko Green.

4. Chitrangada, Rabindranath Tagore, dir. Moumita Bhattacharya, Prathidhwani/ACTLab. This is a classical Indian dance epic by Tagore about Chitrangada, a warrior princess who is raised as a man, but reinvents herself as a woman when she falls in love with the hunter Arjuna. He falls in love with her womanly beauty (the two Chitrangadas are played by two different dancers) but eventually falls in love with her warrior side as well.

5. Pilgrims (workshop production), Claire Kiechel, dir. Emily Penick, Forward Flux. As far as I can tell, not written to be race-specific. Diverse casting.

6. Money & Run, Wayne Rawley, dir. Wayne Rawley, Theater Schmeater. This is actually three separate plays (”episodes”) with three completely different casts, and diverse as fuck. This was a deliberate choice, and thoughtfully done.

7. Acme, Andrew Shanks, dir. Mary Hubert, Annex Theatre. As far as I can tell, non-race-specific. Diversely cast.

8. Grand Concourse, Heidi Schreck, dir. Annie Lareau, SPT. I suspect this play is race-specific, and cast accordingly. It’s also site-specific -  the “Grand Concourse” is the main thoroughfare that runs through the Bronx. ETA a friend just corrected me, the play is not race-specific. Casting a black actress as the lead is a deliberate choice, and it worked beautifully.

9. Hanford Invasion! (staged reading), Matt Smith, dir. Ryan Higgins, Macha Monkey. I remember this as being a pretty white cast.

10. Lydia, Octavio Solis, dir. Sheila Daniels, Strawshop. Race-specific, casted accordingly. Site specific, set in El Paso. There was one cast member who seemed slightly less fluent than everyone else during the Spanish-language bits of the script, but this was flawless. Unbelievable. This is a tricky play, because five of the characters are teenagers; Sheila Daniels came to the play with a cast already in place, current and former students from Cornish. The amount of love and trust between the actors and their director was something palpable. This is a play about borders - between countries, between cultures, between six members of a single family, between the living and those who have come back from the dead.

11. The Realistic Joneses, Will Eno, dir. Paul Budraitis. Non-race-specific. Interjection: as an obviously Asian woman, I rarely comment on whether an actor looks half-Asian or not, I don’t think it’s up to me to define how they see themselves.  I don’t want to say that someone has been cast as “white” or “Asian” or if they can “pass” as either. That’s up to them and their sense of identity.

12. Sueño, José Rivera, dir. Jane Jones, UW Drama. This is based on Calderón’s Life is a Dream, set in 17th century Spain, and diversely cast as often happens with UW Drama productions. In college you get to do shit like cast two black grad students as the king and his best friend/advisor/enabler and the white undergrads get to play the servants. I live for this kind of stuff.

13. Barbecue, Robert O’Hara, Malika Oyetimein, Intiman. This is race-specific and cast accordingly and that is all I can say about this play because it was so good you had to be there. And if you weren’t there too bad.

14. Sweeney Todd, Stephen Sondheim, dir. Mathew Wright and Eric Ankrim. I mean, it’s Sondheim, and they fucking went to TOWN. They cast a black man as the Beggar Woman. They cast a mixed-race girl - I think she’s still in high school - as Johanna, her frizzy curls bleached blond, the song with the line about her ‘golden hair’ sending a shiver down my spine. I think a number of cast members are Filipino, including Ben Gonio, who was gloriously terrifying as Sweeney Todd.

15. String (workshop production), Sarah Hammond/Adam Gwon, dir. Brandon Ivie, Village Theatre. Probably not race-specific, diversely cast.

16. Welcome to Braggsville, Daemond Arrindell/Josh Aaseng from the novel by T. Geronimo Johnson, dir. Josh Aaseng. Race-specific, place-specific. Oh, this one hurt.

17. LAAFF Fest, SIS Productions, multiple plays by Asian-American women, directed by Asian-American women, starring basically all the Asian actors in Seattle right now. That was awesome.

18. Blackbird (staged reading), David Harrower, dir. Danielle Franich, NCTC/Pipeline. Non-race-specific, white.

19. The Legend of Georgia McBride, Matthew Lopez, dir. David Bennett. I don’t think this play is race-specific and it is often cast diversely from what I can tell by looking at other productions (when I say diversely, I usually mean they cast black actors because actors only come in white or black *eyeroll*). Matthew Lopez is best known for The Whipping Man, whose publisher sent a cease-and-desist order to the creators of THATSWHATSHESAID, performed by Erin Pike, written by Courtney Meaker, and directed by HATLO. The Whipping Man was represented in THATSWHATSHESAID by a sound that I could not at first identify, until I realized it was the sound of pages flipping over. Because, there WERE. NO. WOMEN. IN. THIS. PLAY. So, Georgia McBridge has one woman in it. Progress!

20. Somebody Else’s Hoi Polloi (staged reading), Y York, dir. Mark Lutwak, dramaturg Andrew Lee Creech, Seattle Rep Writers Group. This is a play about blackness without being a play about blackness. The characters’ blackness is essential to the language of the play, but it is not essential to the story. There is a specificity to it. Note: the playwright is white, her director is white, her dramaturg is black.

21. Angel Fat (staged reading), Trista Baldwin, dir. Anita Montgomery, Seattle Rep Writers Group. As far as I can tell, not race-specific.

22. O Cascadia! (staged reading), Ramon Esquivel, dir. HATLO, Seattle Rep Writers Group. Race-specific, cast accordingly.

23. Gorgeous (staged reading), Keiko Green, dir. Timothy McCuen Piggee. Race-specific, cast accordingly.

[kairuy]

The first question in a play-reading talkback is nearly always, “what sticks out in your mind?” This is what stands out clearly in the sea of memory, nearly five months and almost seventy plays later: the first act distinguishing all the separate characters and their storylines, loose threads waving in the air like seaweed, until the floating ends draw together and pull tight, a seemingly tangled mess falling into the sharp web of a Cat’s Cradle. The spare precision and fluidity of the language is matched by Jeffrey Frace’s balletic grace; tall and broad-shouldered, he moves like a dancer, no wasted motion. A single line of dialogue spoken, Seneca to Nero, is repeated six hours later, in reverse, the student to the master, Michael Place holding the beat, as in music. Porscha Shaw’s maternal ambition is like an axe-blade, without warmth or tenderness, only steel. I’m sitting next to Rachel; I can see Brett and Pamala across from me; I can see John Coons, impressively alert after just coming off a weekend of 14/48. When it ends, I wish it could begin all over again…

[kairuy]

DIVERSITY IN SEATTLE THEATRE, MARCH-APRIL 2017

1. Milk Like Sugar, Kirsten Greenridge, dir. Malika Oyetimein, ArtsWest. Race-specific. This play is set in a poor black neighborhood in an unnamed city, written by a black woman, directed by a black woman. Malika is a stunning powerhouse of a director, finishing her MFA at UW. Her thesis presentation last winter was Suzan-Lori Parks’s Fucking A, which is about abortion, poverty, race, and the prison pipeline of young black men in America. 

2. Tribes, Nina Raines, dir. John Langs, ACT. Non-race-specific. White. Very white. I will note that the central character is a young deaf man and they cast a wonderful young actor who is deaf, Joshua Castille. 

3. Cuddling With Strippers, Nik Doner, dir. Hannah Victoria Franklin, Fringe Fest. Nik is pretty white. This was a one-man show. With backup dancers, Hannah Ruwe and Hannah Mootz.

4. Dragon Baby, Sara Porkalob. Fringe Fest. Again, one-woman show. But you don’t get more diverse and intersectional than Sara Porkalob.

5. Carry We Openly, Nick Stokes, dir. Jose Amador, Fringe Fest. Race-specific, diverse. This is about the shooting of innocent black men by the police.

6. Sex With Strangers, Laura Eason, dir. David Hsieh, ReAct. Non-race-specific. ReAct’s whole ethos is that they produce plays with racially-diverse casts whether the plays are race-specific or not (usually not). Does it count if I can’t tell? The thing about identity is that you don’t get to tell people how to identify themselves.

7. Black! Michael Washington Brown, Fringe Fest. Race-specific. This is a one-man show talking about blackness and what it means to all the different characters, played by a black British actor/creator.

8. The Perfect Arrangement, Topher Payne, dir. Rachel Rene Auracto, ReAct. Non-race-specific, diverse cast.

9. Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, John Patrick Shanley, dir. Linnea Ingalls, Heron. Non-race-specific. I can’t tell if they would describe themselves as diverse or not.

10. Dry Powder, Sarah Burgess, dir. Marya Sea Kaminski, Seattle Rep. Non-race-specific, diverse. Two of the actors are half-Asian - one, Hana Lass, you wouldn’t necessarily know that unless someone told you. The other is Richard Nguyen Sloniker, who, like Hana, is almost always cast as “white.” But the “Nguyen” in his name is a statement of identity, an open declaration.

11. Grounded, George Brant, dir. Kelly Kitchens, Seattle Public Theater. Non-race-specific, one-woman-show. White or white-presenting.

12. The Fog Machine Play, Brendan Mack/Chelsea Madsen/Rachel Tyrrel, Copious Love. Non-race-specific, diverse.

13. Murder for Two, Joe Kinosian/Kellen Blair, dir. Don Knecgtes. Non-race-specific, white or white-presenting.

14. Nadeshiko, Keiko Green, dir. Kaytlin McIntire, Sound Theatre. Race-specific, diverse. The cast is almost all Asian except for one actor who is a white dude (character is a white dude).

15. Harvest (reading), Samuel D. Hunter, New Century Theatre Company. Non-race-specific as far as I can tell, diverse casting.

16. Wellesley Girl, Brendan Pelsue, dir. Bobbin Ramsey, The Horse in Motion. Non-race-specific, diverse cast.

17. Lost Falls, Terry Podgorski, dir. Erin Brindley, Café Nordo. Non-race-specific, diverse casting.

18. Frozen, Bryony Lavery, dir. Mathew Wright, ArtsWest. Non-race-specific, white.

19. Sheathed (reading), Maggie Lee, dir. Pamala Mijatov, Macha Monkey. Non-race-specific, almost all-Asian cast.

20. The Secret Garden, Marcia Norman/Lucy Simon, dir. David Armstrong, 5th Ave. Race-specific and diverse where necessary. Seriously, a snake-charmer? Did we really need to go there?

21. Eugene Onegin (filmed presentation), Alexander Pushkin/Rimas Tuminas, dir. Rimas Tuminas, Vakhtangov Theatre, Moscow.

22. Here Lies Love, Fatboy Slim/David Byrne, dir. Alex Timbers, Seattle Rep. ALL-ASIAN CAST, YO. This is the SECOND all-Asian play that Seattle Rep has produced this season. Damn, you guys. That’s a high bar.

23. Orlando, Virginia Woolf/Sarah Ruhl, dir. L. Zane Jones, UW Drama. Non-race-specific, diversely cast. This was the UW Drama department’s undergrad production. They almost always cast diversely, and this was no exception.

[kairuy]

DIVERSITY IN SEATTLE THEATRE, JAN-FEB 2017

Seattle is a pretty white city. This is reflected in its theatre scene. I’ve always paid attention to people who cast a diverse range of actors, but now I’m taking notes. I’m no longer giving credit for racially-specific plays. These continue to be necessary stories, and they should be told - but the endgame is a stage that accurately reflects the world we live in. If your world is totally white, then you should maybe get out more. This is an ongoing list. I do the best I can based on my memory and what I know about the performers. Sometimes I am wrong.

1. 14/48, Part 1&2, The 14/48 Projects & ACTLab. Non-race-specific. Some actors of color, but not a ton. They could probably work on that.

2. The Octavia (reading), UW Drama. Non-race-specific. I’d call this a 50/50 split, but of course, the main characters are white dudes.

3. By Heart: OTB. Non-race-specific, but it’s a solo show by a Portuguese guy.

4. Every Five Minutes: WET. Non-race-specific. One black actor, five white actors, I would add the visual comedy of the two kidnappers being played by one extremely tall black actor and one shorter white actor worked for me.

5. Dragon Lady, Cafe Nordo. Sara Porkalob, ‘nuf said.

6. The Trojan Women, Civic Rep. Non-race-specific, diverse cast. I don’t know if the play is written that way or not, but it was extremely effective.

7. Mothers and Sons, ArtsWest. Non-race-specific. Every other production that I could find photos for cast all white actors; Makaela Pollock cast Jason Sanford and Isaac Spence as father and son, which is a stunning choice since the play, written for white actors, makes no mention of race.

8. Guards at the Taj, ACTLab. Race-specific, set at the Taj Mahal. I will note that I happened to see the casting call on FB several months ago and it did note the race-specificity of the roles, if not the actors. In the end they cast Moises Castro and Arjun Pande, who were amazing.

9. The Liar, SPT. Non-race-specific, with a multi-racial cast. I was going to side-eye the casting of Pilar O’Connell as the maid, but since she was playing an outrageously over-the-top-French-maid I let that one go. This was so great.

10. Woody Sez, Seattle Rep. Non-race-specific, all-white. This is a traveling production, they’ve been performing it for a decade.

11. Proof, Strawshop. Pretty white, as far as I could tell.

12. The Cherry Orchard, The Seagull Project/ACTLab. Non-race-specific, sort of diverse. This worked because it added all these layers of meaning beneath Chekhov’s original words; the scene where Brandon J. Simmons’ Lopakhin says “I bought the estate where my father and grandfather were slaves,” it goes through you like a knife.

13. The Curious Case of the Watson Intelligence, Ghostlight. Non-race-specific, diverse. Kevin Lin is everything.

14. Let the Right One In, National Theatre of Scotland. Non-race-specific, very white. Well, Scottish.

15. Bring Down the House, Part 1 & 2, Seattle Shakespeare. Non-race-specific, all female, diverse cast. This was riveting.

16. Scary Mary and the Nightmare Nine, Annex. Non-race-specific, diverse cast. I can count on one hand the number of times a Seattle theatre has cast an Asian-American actress in a main role that wasn’t written that way, so this was awesome.

17. The Glas Nocturne, Akropolis Lab. Non-race-specific, well, it’s basically a one-man show.

18. Top Gun, Brown Derby. Well, it’s Top Gun. So, white.

19. Well, Seattle Rep. Race-specific. The two best moments (ok, aside from all the bits with Barbara Dirickson, one of my favorite people ever) were when Emma Blessing’s character - a nine-year-old black girl - makes fun of Sarah Rudinoff’s character’s “white-girl hair,” and when Chantal DeGroat tells Liz McCarthy, “Do we have to do the scene where the white woman comes in and saves the black neighborhood,” and Liz says “Oh, I don’t think she meant it that way,” and Chantal snaps back, “Well, you wouldn’t [as a white woman yourself], would you now?“ I laughed so hard at that.

20. As You Like It, UW Drama. Non-race-specific. This was amazing - the scenes when Porscha, Bria, and Allen (Rosalind, Celia, and Orlando) were onstage together - seldom do you get to see three black actors who are allowed to exist in their blackness in a play that isn’t even remotely about their blackness. I loved that. I did not love that Hazel Lozano was the only Asian actor and was completely covered in mime-face. That was an interesting artistic choice.

21. Portugal (reading), NCTC. Race-specific - one character is specifically a Hispanic worker at the Hanford nuclear waste site. I can’t remember if this is relevant to the story. Prior readings cast Alex Matthews as one character, but for this reading the character was read by Ray Tagavilla.

22. A Moveable Feast, Book-It/Café Nordo. White. It’s Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, so…

23. Awaiting Oblivion, OTB. Non-race-specific, diverse. Tim Smith-Stewart does poke at his white male privilege.

24. The Pajama Game, 5th Ave. Non-race-specific. Extremely diverse cast, although the leads are white.

25. Bright Half Life, NCTC. Race-specific, casted accordingly. The part that got me is when the two women are fighting, and one of them says to the other, “You can look ‘not gay.’ But I can never not look black” or something like that, and it’s just gutting.

[kairuy]

THE CITY IN WHICH YOU ARE A GROWNUP

The other day, Rebekah made a comment about feeling divided over whether she should try to see HAMILTON in New York City next summer, or see it in Seattle. “Am I crazy to think HAMILTON Seattle won’t be as amazing?” she asked, and of course, the answer is no, it won’t be as amazing. At least, it won’t be amazing in the same way. The question is, how much is that worth to you?

I average about 12 plays a month - productions, readings, workshops. If I’m lucky, I’ll see one or two plays a year in London or New York, but everything else takes place in Seattle. I could save my money and see 10 plays a year in London or New York, or I could see 150 here at home. You could make a joke about quantity over quality, but it’s not funny. Because you have to ask yourself what you want from the experience - the spectacle that bursts across your consciousness like fireworks, fleetingly, or the longtime relationship that you have with your city? I have lived in Seattle for a long time, 30 years. I remember nearly all the young actors who come out of Cornish and UW; I pay attention. We have grown up together. I know the way your bodies move, the sound of your laughter in the dark, the way your shoulders curve over that one last cigarette on the sidewalk outside of the theatre, when it's 10 minutes before showtime and you aren’t even in costume yet.

I can’t pretend that I don’t enjoy the grand spectacle of Broadway or the hushed glamour of the East End; I still remember seeing MY FAVORITE YEAR with Tim Curry as Alan Swann, 25 years ago. The sets of HAMLET at the Barbican last fall were the most amazing I’ve ever seen - we don’t have the resources, the audience, the money, the space to produce something of that scale. Maybe you were lucky to be in the right place at the right time, in London for the premiere of ARCADIA or New York for the first run of ANGELS IN AMERICA. Maybe you were lucky last summer to see Lin-Manuel Miranda in HAMILTON knowing that history was being made. And that’s grand. It’s a moment of magic that will never happen again.

But I go to the theatre in Seattle because I am a grownup in the city of my childhood. To live in a city, to really love it, you have to inhabit all its spaces. You go to baseball games and eat in all the restaurants and check out the museums and ride the ferries and yes, go to the theatre. To weave yourself into the fabric of the city you have to accept all the knots and tangles, and then step back to appreciate the wealth and beauty that is offered to you, inherent flaws and all. Going to HAMILTON on Broadway is like going to dinner at 11 Madison Park. You can’t do that at home. Home it will be something different, but precious in the way that only something that belongs to you is precious. It is not perfect, nothing is, but it is yours. So you ask yourself, again, what’s it worth to you?

[kairuy]

the laughing heart

your life is your life don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission. be on the watch. there are ways out. there is light somewhere. it may not be much light but it beats the darkness. be on the watch. the gods will offer you chances. know them. take them. you can’t beat death but you can beat death in life, sometimes. and the more often you learn to do it, the more light there will be. your life is your life. know it while you have it. you are marvelous the gods wait to delight in you. 

- CHARLES BUKOWSKI

[kairuy]

"I don't think/I'm allowed/To kill something/Because I am/Frightened" - NIKKI GIOVANNI, "Allowables." CHASING UTOPIA, 2013. Via @sfn8tiv.

[kairuy]

It me.

my life

[kairuy]

CITY OF LOST CHILDREN (CODA)

This is the Year of the Monkey, and the gates to the City of Lost Children have swung open once again.

I was nearly two when I arrived in St. Louis in 1982, but my adoption had been arranged soon after my birth, in 1980, the Year of the Monkey. It didn’t happen in the manner of most origin myths. Nobody left me in a basket on the doorstep of an orphanage. Nobody picked me out of a crowd of babies. Someone knew someone who had a child they couldn’t keep; someone knew someone who wanted a child. I have always known that I was adopted; I preferred not to talk about it. I refused to be defined by decisions made by other people, which I had no control over. You might as well ask someone how they felt about being born. And unlike most adoptions that take place between China and the US, my parents are Taiwanese. My upbringing, divided between America and Taiwan, gave me a sense of identity that could not be shaken. For my entire life this has been both armor and weapon against the casual racism of the playground and later, everyday life.

A few years ago my mom asked me if I wanted to search for my biological family. I shrugged and said no. It’s too late to give me back, I thought, half-jokingly, but the words didn’t come out. Think about it, she said. Before the people who know anything are dead, and all the answers are gone forever. But I shoved the thoughts to the back of my mind. What was the point? I had no questions. I’ve never needed to know anything about where I was born or where I had come from. My biological parents were vague, indistinct figures; I already had parents, so I never spared a thought for the people who had given birth to me and then let me go. But I had been told of four older sisters - the fourth one had also been given up for adoption - and as an only child I had always wanted sisters. I thought of the two of us youngest girls as both belonging to a city of lost children. In my dreams I walked through this city and found her again.

When I was young, I spoke Chinese at home, which stopped when I was about 10. Stubbornly, I began only speaking English to my parents, although equally stubbornly, I never forgot my Chinese entirely. I kept my parents’ clear-cut Taiwanese accent, with American inflections. Even now, when I switch languages, my voice goes higher and more hesitant, pausing to find unfamiliar words. I knew even then that I would regret completely losing it, and I knew I could never let it go. And now I know why: it’s the Year of the Monkey again, and I will be 36 this summer. The great-aunt who arranged my adoption thirty-six years ago has called my mother to tell her: my sisters are looking for me. The threads that pulled my life in one direction in the year of my birth are circling back again, to the beginning, in a far-off place. And somehow I always knew this day would come.

I don’t know what happens next. None of us does. But I am ready for it.