T. Charles Erickson Photos
Zheng and Shih.
“Sometimes the memory is more sad than the forgetting.” Gee (David Shih) is an ailing man, plagued by forgetting, when he says this to a pregnant woman named Yuen (Joyce Meimei Zheng) in Lloyd Suh’s The Far Country, playing through May 18 at Yale Repertory Theatre, directed by Ralph B. Peña.
The scene is 1930s San Francisco, and Yuen is married to Moon Gyet (Hao Feng), who Gee brought from Hoisan, their native county in China, claiming him as his son for immigration — and exploitation — purposes. The textures of memory and forgetting suggest the vast scope of the hardships, fears, lies, and hopes for the future of Chinese immigrants to the U.S. from 1909 to 1930 in Suh’s ambitious, episodic play.
Coming late in the play, the line has a double poignancy: actual memories have been forgotten for the sake of false memories that these folks, as illegal immigrants, had to create in order to maintain their recorded identities. The memory of all they actually passed through and its sadness is coupled with the sadness of having to forget an ancestral history that might actually unite them. Yuen, mother of four and a fifth on the way, knows that her children have no direct contact with Hoisan, and the people she left behind there do not know her children. Whether in the U.S. or China, the other country is “the far country.”
Gee, when we first meet him, speaks broken English to an interrogator, Harriwell (Joe Osheroff) in 1909. Harriwell must decide, in the wake of the loss of records in the San Francisco earthquake that year, if Gee’s claim of having been born in the U.S. of a father who came to build the railroads and a mother he doesn’t remember are valid. The interrogation scene runs on for some time, showing us that Gee is not only, as he says, “a funny guy,” but also a canny one. His aim to please and to be believably “honest” creates a humble caricature, which is given the lie in the next scene.
Back in Hoisan, he tries to persuade Low (Tina Chillip), a subsistence farmer fallen on hard times, to let him take her son — on a loan she must secure — to the U.S. as his own child. The two scenes let us see the two sides of Gee: as a Chinese businessman predatory on his own people; and as an American who will lie (nothing he said of his background and his family in China was true) and bend in his scrabble for status. As ably enacted by David Shih, Gee is a wheeler-dealer, a man who sees himself as an American and whose rationale for that claim is that he will do a thing so long as it is “lucrative.” Bringing Low’s son Moon Gyet to America will give Gee more or less an indentured servant for a time in his successful laundry business. It’s a fate that Moon Gyet, still quite a boy, accepts readily.
What Moon Gyet — and even Gee — are not prepared for takes up the long middle section of Suh’s play. At Angel’s Island, a harsh detention center, Moon Gyet undergoes a more galling mind game of interrogation, led by an Inspector (Haskell King) who likes to question about trivia, like the number of steps leading to doors, and the name of a visiting farmer’s mule. Moon Gyet is held for 17 months, we learn, never knowing if he’ll set foot in America or go back to China.
The play gets more complex from there. After intermission we delve into the logistics of life at Angel Island. Suh uses the discovery of carved poems in Chinese, puttied and painted over but then preserved as the latter substances eroded, to heighten our sense of the people trapped there. Voiced by four actors — Jesse Cao Long, David Lee Huynh, David Shih, and Joyce Meimei Zheng — the interleaving of the prisoners’ language with bald declarations of how “they” (the warders) “got me” creates a palimpsest of pain and humiliation with the voice of poetry that leaves a lasting impression.
Next, Moon Gyet, following in Gee’s footsteps, visits Low to rediscover a bit of his actual childhood memories, but also, as she soon wheedles out of him, to find a woman to take back to America as a wife, now that he is perceived as an American. This introduces us to Yuen, daughter in a family whose son already failed to enter America; her pert questioning of Moon Gyet elicits his own ambivalence about what he offers her in the far country: “The way we live, the way we … must live, it is crowded but it feels empty. The work is empty, there is a distance between the work and the world, there is a distance between the world and me, it is like … I am in a place but I am not really in that place.”
But even that less than enthusiastic description meets with her approval, over an arranged marriage she would likely face if she stayed. The main point, for Yuen, is to find a man she can have babies with; for her, the point of life is always the future, as a way to honor the sacrifices others made in the past.
As Yuen, Joyce Meimei Zheng speaks with a certain naïve conviction. Her view of things has the appeal of candor and an optimism that, though perhaps forced, is genuine. Her speech at the end of the play seems to signal what Suh wants his history play to manifest: the sense that the past — that “everything we are” — “passes down.” In The Far Country, we watch how interrogations and negotiations and stilted conversations and strong convictions try to map individual truth while what makes for character is much harder to divine. Suh’s play confronts us with the difficult paths taken by persons vulnerable to the harsh logic of capitalism and racism, facing competition, rigid authority, and their own sense of how to achieve an end. For Moon Gyet, that’s the “vengeance” of success. For Gee, it’s security and respect, even as his memory fades. For Yuen, it’s the children who may rise like birds.
And for Low, left behind in China? “Some of us find dignity in knowing we will be buried in the same ground we were born from,” she tells Gee, contemptuous of his “Gold Mountain” in America.
Ralph B. Peña’s production has a modernist flair, with Kim Zhou’s scenic design contributing large hanging slabs that are sometimes windows or paintings, or have projection designer Hana S. Kim’s captivating water images flowing across them. The props not in use stand in the wings, and the presentation seems aimed to keep us aware of the theatrical nature of these characters who are emblems more than persons. At times, the tone is reminiscent of Brechtian theater, with its sense of how situations define us, and how we may yet alter the script — with a chosen name, a different reply, a professed uncertainty about tears as signs of sorrow or joy, or the Chinese characters carved in a wall, able to make the loneliness and heartbreak of one person belong to all.