The East-West Quartet

by Ping Chong

  Michael was a chameleon in the show; he played different parts. His identity was fluid. In the casting of the show, there was the subtext of identity and the fluidity of identity and the impact of history on identity, so that there we were with the show with this mixed Asian cast. They were, in fact, as a cast, more Dutch than they were Asian.

  VA: Culturally.

  PC: Culturally. I cast them as colonizers and colonized, because of—you understand why.

  VA: Yes. With the idea of showing the fluidity of perception.

  PC: Yes. And also a comment on the effects of colonization. In Deshima, at the end of the ball in honor of the Dutch king, one of the military officers undresses his dancing partner, and underneath her gown you see that she is wearing the Indonesian court dance dress that she wore in an earlier scene. In the same moment, he pulls off her blond wig and her black Asian hair is revealed. This act is symbolically a rape, but at the same time it’s also about that whole colonial relationship and cultural schizophrenia that is the byproduct of colonization.

  VA: Had you worked with Asian casts before?

  PC: There have been Asians in my shows, yes. I’d worked with the Asian American company, Pan Asian Repertory Theatre, on Noiresque, I think in 1988. Noiresque and Deshima were made back to back. And before that, there had been Asians in some of the other casts, but not a show that was about Asia. Except for Fear and Loathing in ’75.

  One thing that was central to Deshima was the use of dance to signify cultural identity. Just the body itself, as a cultural statement of identity, the body itself and the phenomena of each culture’s dance forms.

  VA: Where did that come from, that element?

  PC: When I started Deshima, I didn’t really know, as I often don’t, what kinds of performers I would need, and it so happened that in the auditioning process, the people that I wound up liking all had movement training.

  VA: So even though this wasn’t a company-created piece, it was still informed by who you chose to put in it.

  PC: Yes.

  VA: Did you go into Deshima with the finished text and a finished scenario?

  PC: No, I didn’t. There were some things that I knew would be in there, and then a lot of it was developed during rehearsals. So it was a combination of found texts, texts developed in rehearsal, and texts written by Michael separately, with my input.

  VA: And then what made you decide to keep going with the Asian exploration?

  PC: This was 1990. In 1988, I was invited to Hong Kong for a performing arts conference, and that was the first time that I’d been to my father’s homeland as an adult. I felt really connected to Hong Kong because it’s Cantonese. Everybody speaks my dialect. It’s not even being Chinese; it’s about being Cantonese. It’s just like, am I an American? No, I’m a New Yorker. It’s that specific in terms of the identity. And because I felt this incredible sense of belonging, the ’90s was a time when I went to Asia a lot. I also felt a great connection to Asia in general.

  Actually, the first visit to Japan in ’86 as an adult, was when I really first felt a connection with Asia, just by the fact that I blended in, even in Japan. I was often mistaken for being Japanese in Japan. I didn’t stand out in any way, and that was a great relief. But Hong Kong was a closer connection, and it felt like one giant Chinatown. It also appealed to me because I’m not just Chinese; I’m also Western. I’ve got both those things, and Hong Kong has both those things.

  In ’64, I went to Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore. I went with my father, and I was the only child to go, because there had been a race riot between the Chinese and the Malay at that time. So my family didn’t want to bring the whole family there. This was a memory-lane trip for my father (he died two years later); it was his return to his youth in Singapore, which he loved and where he did theatre work, where my grandfather also did theatre work. I also have a connection with Southeast Asia, because my mother was in Cambodia and in Vietnam, performing Chinese opera in her youth.

  VA: You grew up with the sense of your family having traveled and performed around Asia.

  PC: I had an unconscious awareness of it because whenever a Chinese opera troupe came into town, or Cantonese opera came into town, they would always come and pay their respects to the family, and we would always get good seats at the opera. Chinese opera was the first theatre I ever saw in America.

  VA: And so segueing maybe into Chinoiserie?

  PC: Yes. I made Chinoiserie in 1995. Of course, Hong Kong was going to be returned to China in ’97. And talking to the people in this country, I was just shocked at how little people in this country knew about why Hong Kong was being returned, and what the circumstances were that the British got Hong Kong in the first place. I would hear someone say: “Oh, they should just let the British keep it.” And I felt, Well, here’s an opportunity for me to talk about that. And that’s when I realized that this would probably be a trilogy.

  VA: And why was that?

  PC: Because I just did a documentary about Japan and the West, and now I’m working on a piece about the Opium Wars and China, and the Vincent Chin murder case, and the Chinese-American pioneers’ history is not that well known either. I know there’s probably a paragraph in the textbooks, but there were a lot of unknowns. And in doing Deshima I was aware of how the Japanese Americans lost part of their patrimony on the west coast using the excuse of fear of sabotage to take their land. But in fact, the first incident of that on the west coast was the Chinese losing their land.

  VA: Did you know that already?

  PC: No, I didn’t. But when I researched Chinoiserie it was clear that the whole history of the west coast would have been really more an Asian American dominance if it had been allowed to be. I knew a little bit about it, but not the brutality of it and not the intense unfairness of it. Entire towns of Chinese were marched out of Washington State, put on boats.

  In the researching of that history, it was clear that at least the American pioneer part of it was a history of violence towards Chinese. In Chinoiserie, I gave the example of an English phrase book for Chinese people; this phrase book was eighty percent about violence perpetuated against them. Not: “Where can I get a cup of coffee?” You know: “I was robbed of my money.” Things like that.

  And then at the same time I said: “I don’t want to do a costume show. I don’t want to repeat formally what I did in Deshima.” So Chinoiserie became a documentary concert-theatre work. It was meta-theatre. And the show did not use period costumes until the last minutes when Lord Macartney and Emperor Qianlong met.

  VA: And what about the decision to put yourself in Chinoiserie?

  PC: Well, that would never have happened if my Undesirable Elements series, which uses personal experience as a window on history, hadn’t existed. Deshima was not informed by Undesirable Elements. Chinoiserie was completely influenced by Undesirable Elements.

  I wanted to be a witness, as an American, to racism in America, and I cast Vincent Chin’s mother with Aleta Hayes, a black woman, to continue the linkage of the history of racism—you might say the brotherhood of victims of racism. I felt that that was my responsibility as an American, to include that.

  VA: So was the idea then, related to Undesirable Elements, about telling your own story?

  PC: Yes, in the interview form, or the chronology format. Undesirable Elements is a chronology format, you can see the linkage of chronology, all the way back to Humboldt’s Current. And the idea of geography, or the idea of the larger world, actually began to appear in my work earlier, in Fear and Loathing.

  VA: How much of the text in Chinoiserie is documentary?

  PC: Again, Michael Matthews was involved in the writing of that. In fact, it was the last work that he would complete before he died. Michael and I talked a great deal about the parts he would write and the parts I would write. He did all the writing on Mrs. Chin, the Vincent Chin case. The songs are largely written by him, and they’re based on historical material. I would say that the spoken text w
as all documentary, with the exception of the ending when the emperor appears and he’s being described in the way of a fashion show: “The emperor is wearing three pearls on the top of his . . .” That’s actually what the costume was. I did extensive research on the costume, because the emperor’s costume is very specific.

  VA: So you were using documentary fact, but presenting it in a way that would make a tension between historical reality and contemporary culture?

  PC: Right. Make it more entertaining, because it was interesting. The description of the actual murder of Vincent Chin is taken from the eyewitness account of a black person, which obviously amounted to nothing, because the killers got away with everything, got away with murder. And the Vincent Chin murder case was the first time that the Chinese community rallied politically in an activist way. That had never happened before.

  VA: How much did you go into Chinoiserie knowing exactly how you wanted it to be? How much was explored in rehearsal?

  PC: Well, there was quite a lot in rehearsal, because many of the scenes had to be explored onstage. The through-line of the show, the frame, was Lord Macartney. Will Lord Macartney kowtow nine times to the Emperor of China? Lord Macartney’s journey to China was the frame of the show. It begins with him beginning his voyage, and it ends with him meeting the Emperor of China. But the scenes about Macartney being confined in a beautiful villa, and not allowed to consort with the local people, all of that had to be created and written.

  VA: And you worked on that in rehearsal?

  PC: Yes. And then there was also the first act of a play called The Chinese Must Go, written in the 1870s, and we had to improvise how we would stage that. Once again, this was a combination of theatre and dance and music. Once again, I used dance in the show, except in this case it was largely martial arts, since the show was about the violence perpetuated against China and the Chinese. Martial arts is also a fundamental of Chinese opera. That’s the base, like ballet in Western dance.

  VA: And the casting?

  PC: Mrs. Chin was the most important casting. But once again it was a mixed cast. The emperor was played by Shi-Zheng Chen. That was important, that the emperor be Chinese.

  VA: But otherwise you wanted it to be mixed again.

  PC: Yes.

  VA: That idea of the malleability of roles.

  PC: Yes. And then the composer, Guy Klucevsek, said: “I can’t write Chinese music, because I’m not Chinese. But I’m going to use Chinese modes to write this music.” And I gave him some Chinese music. When the emperor appears at the end of the show, he’s actually riding a horse. He’s got this stick with tufts, tassels on it. In Chinese opera, that’s a horse, and I gave him a recording of processional music that’s used in the Chinese opera. It’s very grand and very loud, processional music. It wasn’t about paraphrasing that but about working with that scale. He worked with that and came up with his own version. But otherwise I left Guy to his own devices.

  VA: And what about Chinese opera in the piece?

  PC: I knew that the dance aspect of the show needed to be martial arts and Chinese opera. Martial arts as a physical metaphor for the physical violence that is at the core of the experience of China and the West, whether it was about the Opium Wars or the Chinese American pioneers. And then when Shi-Zheng Chen came on board, it was great because he knows all that stuff. And he’s trained in Chinese opera.

  I wanted to also, and this would be a carryover from Deshima, I wanted to use body language to designate difference. And so in the scenes between the aristocratic Macartney and the Viceroy of China and their verbal combative encounter, I wanted the physical difference to represent what would never be resolvable. Like two planets meeting. At the end when Macartney in his plumage, and the Emperor Qianlong in his plumage, meet, you know that they’re never going to come to terms. It’s like Mars meeting Jupiter or something, when planets collide.

  VA: Any other key things about Chinoiserie?

  PC: Well, there are projections, of course, but there are always projections. We didn’t talk about projections, but there are always projections in everything.

  VA: And in both Deshima and Chinoiserie, the projections were integral.

  PC: Integral, yes, because they supplemented whatever the show was. The disadvantage of theatre compared to film is that it’s really hard to have an opportunity to see it more than once. It’s too bad, because in a film you can go: “What’s going on in the background there?”

  VA: But you like to have things going on in different layers.

  PC: Yes. Whether you catch it or not, you know.

  VA: So you decided that you’d done two East-West plays, you might as well keep going?

  PC: Well, two doesn’t feel like the right number. So I said: “Three.” Three made sense. So I decided to make a third East-West play, this one about Vietnam. The Vietnam War was the time that I grew up in. And Americans being who they are, or maybe I should say human beings being who they are, they’re rarely interested in something that they have no connection to. We do have a connection to Japan, even if it’s an adversarial one, and the same with China, and the same with Vietnam. But with Vietnam it’s a little different, because there’s a national wound involved with Vietnam in a way that’s different from the other two countries.

  VA: And that was ’96, ’97?

  PC: ’96, yes. That’s when I went to Cambodia and Thailand and Singapore to explore. In the ’90s I spent more time in Asia than I did in Europe. Of course, I’d spent most of the ’70s and ’80s in Europe. The ’70s and ’80s were largely about identity. My whole life has been about figuring out what this identity thing is. But the first two decades, you could say that I was looking more towards Europe for approval. In a sense, that trip to Japan in the late ’80s really started to make me rethink my identity as an artist, and I would say from then on, I didn’t give a damn about European or the white New York avant-garde’s approval.

  VA: Had you been looking for approval?

  PC: Well, in those days you wanted to do your work abroad, right? As the work changed, I realized that I didn’t fit their template or their ideology, and then with the trip to Hong Kong, I also found that the New York avant-garde was too mental, too intellectual, too heartless, largely too much about form. Peter Sellers said: “The First World has all the form, and the Third World has all the content.” It’s a kind of decadence, in a way. And everything was conceptual, conceptual, conceptual. Meanwhile the world’s becoming more and more heartless. I just felt that aesthetic didn’t meet my needs as an artist or a person.

  VA: So how did you approach After Sorrow?

  PC: I went to Vietnam. I wanted to see what this country was that we went to war with. But the history of Vietnam is a French history largely, and the American presence in Vietnam is a blink, it’s like thirty-five years. Vietnam’s history is really a history with foreign forces, a David and Goliath story. It’s always been the David, with every invader, and that included the Chinese, who were there for a thousand years, the Mongols, who came and went. And then it was the French, which was a hundred years, and then the Americans, thirty-five years.

  This was ’96. You have to remember that ’s when the National Endowment for the Arts cut back, and so we were not the only company having problems at that time, but there was no money for a big project. It was a very difficult time. Michael Matthews was going to write the text for the third part of the trilogy, but sadly he died of AIDS, so I had to move ahead alone. And I couldn’t somehow find a handle for this project. Finally, around the time I went to Vietnam, I read this book, After Sorrow, a true story of a Quaker woman who became the head of Quaker Services in Vietnam. She was there during the Vietnam War, when Quakers were having such a hard time in America because of their pacifism. They have a belief, which they refer to as “that of God”: Every human being contains “that of God,” the essence of the divine, so I can’t kill him. After the war, she was one of the first people allowed in during the embargo; she wanted to go
back and meet the women who were such an important part of the Vietnam War.

  Through one of her stories, I decided that the format of this show would be different; it would be a kind of addendum to Chinoiserie and a bridge to Vietnam. The bridge was that my mother had been in Vietnam in her early twenties or late teens.