by Ping Chong
they would have been
the folks from Cathay
or la chinois, or chino
or gaijin which means foreigner in Nippon,
take a slow boat to China, amen.
The things they share.
The full mystery of an Other.
A familiarity with dry, salted fish,
slabs of roast suckling pig,
fermented shrimp paste,
steaming bowls of white rice,
chopsticks rising and rising
again and again,
the likely, unlikely pleasures of fresh-killed poisson
gleaming with peanut oil, speckled with soy sauce,
dressed in an aromatic mess of curling ginger and scallion,
tossed with sesame oil.
Slapping across a kitchen floor
I once ran after a fish with my uncle
when it jumped out of a Chinese newspaper
off a chunky chopping block.
When we caught up with it
he gave the fish a good whack on the
side of its head and
led it to its fate and our stomachs, amen.
The things they share.
Neurons, one thousand billion of them,
sending messages in languages
we could never hope to understand.
Neither rain, nor sleet, nor snow, nor hail
will stay the neurons from their appointed rounds
chattering away in an everlasting cacophony
fierce with life.
The things they share.
Siblings. He has five: (In Cantonese) Li Ping, Gum Ping, Ging Ping, Fung Ping, Gheen Ping.
She has two: (In Cantonese) Kwong Chi, Kwong Yun.
The older brother: (In Cantonese) Kwong Chi,
the brother second to none,
the brother of brothers, she adored.
They were an alliance at the altar of art.
They were a shelter for one another
in a world of parental storms.
The full mystery of an Other.
(Muna stops dancing and strikes a pose.)
MUNA: He was my idol. He was my guru. He was always adventurous and daring. When he was ten years old he held a lit firecracker in his fingers on a dare and blew off the top of his thumb. At sixteen, he was already a gourmand. One of the dishes he created was called “Sole Picasso.” He had an incredible appetite for life. He taught me that there was a bigger world out there and it was there for the taking.
When we went to classical concerts he would show me when to turn the pages of the program so as not to disturb the other audience members. He was a snob, an aesthete, an intellectual, a spoiled-rotten, first-born, number one Chinese son. The pearl in the oyster. The world should worship at his feet. He was impossible, but I loved him. He was my brother.
PING (Voice-over):The full mystery of an Other.
MUNA: In 1978, he decided to be a self-appointed cultural ambassador of China. He dressed appropriately by donning the classic Mao suit and had his picture taken in it, all over the world as a conceptual work of art. In 1978, when my parents came to visit us, they took us to Windows on the World in the World Trade Center. My brother didn’t have a suit and Windows had a dress code, so he wore his Mao suit instead. When we arrived at Windows the maître d’ took one look at him and treated him like a VIP, a gentleman from the East, an emissary from Cathay. My parents were not amused: “We escaped from China because of this. How could you do this to us?”
(Muna resumes dancing.)
PING (Voice-over):The full mystery of an Other.
The things they share.
MUNA:Downy breath in the wintry cold,
PING (Voice-over): a likelihood of feeling pain when pierced,
MUNA:ever beholden to gravity, gravity,
PING (Voice-over):susceptible to the vagaries of existence and colds,
MUNA:warm to the touch,
PING (Voice-over):a constant temperature of 98.6.
PING (Voice-over) AND MUNA:The full mystery of an Other.
PING (Voice-over):The things they share.
Mother, mama, ma mere, her . . .
(Muna stops dancing and strikes a pose.)
MUNA: My mother was part of the first generation of women admitted to St. John’s University in Shanghai. She majored in English literature. My mother would say, “People are still reading Shakespeare because it’s all true: people are mean, violent, cruel and vindictive to one another.” My mother drilled me in Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and all those other nineteenth century wordsmiths.
(Muna resumes dancing.)
PING (Voice-over):The things they share.
My mother joined the Chinese opera when she was thirteen years old. She couldn’t read or write so she learned the libretto by rote. One day, while on the road with an opera company, she learned that her mother had died. The proprietaire in the opera company refused to let her go home to mourn her mother. She cried and cried until she couldn’t cry anymore but it was to no avail. I can still hear her wailing now, on her knees before the proprietaire.
The things they share.
He met her and she met him. He met her and she met him for the first time to discuss what would become this performance. She wanted a solo exactly fifteen minutes long, quinze minutes, exactement. He asked himself: What is a solo? A person alone? Unaccompanied? Is it a cello piece performed by Yo Yo Ma or Charles Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic to a crescendo of praise in Paris? Solitary, isolated, insular, separated, alone, single-handed. Solo, the longest river in Java. Solo, a city in Java.
What if a solo is actually a duet that’s actually a solo? What if our interaction as two artists
MUNA:and two people who barely know each other
PING (Voice-over):is splayed open like a cadaver on a morgue table
MUNA:like the messiness and chaos that making art really is
PING (Voice-over):like the exercise in humility that making art really is? The things they share.
MUNA:Two opposable thumbs, eight digits,
PING (Voice-over):a pair of hearts pounding furiously away
MUNA:keeping both of them alive
PING (Voice-over):and well,
MUNA:flexible joints,
PING (Voice-over):eyes, ears, nose, mouth,
MUNA:the ability to breathe, breath.
PING (Voice-over):Have I said this before already?
MUNA:Homo sapiens, amen.
PING (Voice-over):The things they share.
The full mystery of an Other.
(Muna stops dancing and strikes a pose.)
MUNA: I visited my grandmother on my father’s side in 1979 in Vancouver, Canada, where she had settled. She was born in 1888. She was ninety years old. She used to store her groceries in her dishwasher because she was a very short woman and it was easier for her to reach things there. I remember she never said much, but she liked having me sit on her lap and she would very softly stroke my hand and smile her Bodisattva smile, her sourire sympathetique. On her seventieth birthday she had a huge banquet thrown for her. We had to kowtow to her while she sat, very proud and erect, dripping jade and diamonds on a throne. Grandmother had all her bases covered. Although she was born Buddhist, she also converted to Christianity so that she would be sure to get to heaven.
(Muna resumes dancing.)
PING (Voice-over):The full mystery of an Other.
A year before my mother’s eighty-first birthday she announced to my sister Li Ping that she wanted the banquet of banquets, the repas of repas. She wanted all the relatives there in whatever shape or size, and she wanted a special shark’s fin to be served to one and all. When the August day came we had to kowtow to her as she sat, very proud and erect, the matriarch of matriarchs, dripping jade and gold on a throne. Then she fell asleep at the dinner table surrounded by her children.
The things they share.
She is here this very evening
before you
r very eyes, dancing.
MUNA:He is here too as an afterglow,
a digital hop, skip and jump,
PING (Voice-over):a voice in a room tapping
against the thin membrane of
MUNA:your collective eardrum
rippling across the room,
PING (Voice-over):as undulating sound waves,
dancing with her dancing
MUNA:as a voice would and might
and is doing here and now.
He is a dancing voice against
PING (Voice-over):her dancing body together and apart
and this very moment,
MUNA:this exact moment,
PING (Voice-over):will never be the same again.
MUNA:It is that fragile.
PING (Voice-over):The things they share.
I remember it very well. I was eight or nine years old. I was hovering over my plaster dinosaurs and woolly mammoths (in a world of my own even then), when I heard my sisters and my mother come in.
I remember it very well. My mother was wearing very very red lipstick, there was a dainty curl of her hair symmetrically placed on each side of her forehead. She was wearing a heavy, dark mink coat that was cold to the touch. It must have been winter.
I remember it very well. My mother was wailing inconsolably. She was drunk and she was reeling and she was not to be comforted. She was wailing for the son she had to give away in Vancouver, Canada, so very many years ago. She was wailing for her son, my immediate brother whom I have never met.
I remember it very well. It was then that I understood why I was never close to my older brother. (Says brother’s name in Chinese) It was then that my hands grew cold.
MUNA:The full mystery of an Other.
PING (Voice-over):The things they share.
(Circular lattice lights come up on drum stools. Muna crosses upstage and stops dancing.)
MUNA: On March 10th 1990, in his apartment at 14 Maiden Lane, at four A.M., my brother died of AIDS. The police woke me up in the middle of the night and took me to my brother’s apartment to identify the body. They did not give me a chance to be alone with him one last time. I had been there the day before visiting him. He was full of energy. He was bright and alert. He wanted to eat dim sum and I got it for him. I gave him a shiatsu massage. I didn’t expect him to leave me so soon. I said to my mother, “But he seemed so well. How could he fade so fast?” My mother said, “He died between two and four A.M. The sun could not rise at the darkest hour.” “But he seemed so well.” “It’s like a mirror reflecting the light one last time, flipping over to catch the light, before giving it back to the void,” this is what my mother said.
(Muna returns to downstage right and resumes dancing.)
PING (Voice-over):The things they share.
A solo exactly 15 minutes long, quinze minutes exactement. What is a solo? Her brother dying in the middle of the night on Maiden Lane? My mother’s grief over the loss of her son so many years ago? Her grandmother’s proud recognition of her matriarchal majesty on her seventieth birthday? Being the only Chinese girl with a rice bowl cut, round plastic glasses in ankle socks from the crown colony of Hong Kong who said things like:
(Muna crosses to stage left, stops dancing and curtsies while she speaks.)
MUNA: “Hello, how do you do? My name is Susan Tseng. Would you like to take afternoon tea with me. It gives me great pleasure to play in the orchestra.”
(Muna resumes dancing.)
PING (Voice-over): What is a solo? A fish dashing across the kitchen floor for dear dear life? Recalling the brother I lost and never had?
The things they share.
MUNA:The solace in art as a refuge from pain.
PING (Voice-over):The things we share.
PROJECTION: The things we share
MUNA:The certainty that we enter this world alone
PING (Voice-over):and exit it alone.
MUNA:Holy mortality.
PING (Voice-over):Amen.
(Muna exits. Lights fade to black. “The things we share” fades, becoming:)
PROJECTION: We
(Fade out.)
After Sorrow: An Epilogue
Rows of rice seedlings, evenly spaced, run from upstage to downstage. Two-thirds of them are painted green and one-third are painted orange. A table covered with a red silk cloth stands upstage left. On it is a framed photo of a man, two small plates of oranges, incense, a box of matches, an incense holder with salt, two candles in holders, and a kerosene lantern. It is an altar. The silk cloth blows slightly in the breeze. Downstage left is a crude wooden bench, large enough to seat two people. On it are two small demitasse cups; a straw cone hat hangs off the back of the bench.
The ambient sounds of a Vietnamese village are heard.
The sound of chanting Buddhist monks rises as the house lights dim. This cross-fades into the sound of a stream. Ambient sounds, such as mosquitoes and splashes of water continue throughout.
Darkness.
LADY BORTON (Voice-over): Quakers believe that regardless of race, religion, gender, economic status or politics, there is “That of God” in each person. This is the reason Quakers tend to be pacifists, since it follows that killing another person is equivalent to killing “That of God.”
(The following projection is in red lettering, and is shown at the top of the screen.)
PROJECTION: THAT OF GOD
LADY BORTON (Voice-over): Like my father before me in the Second World War, I joined the Quaker Service and went to Vietnam. Quaker Service is a humanitarian organization which practices a policy of nondiscrimination. We assisted Vietnamese civilians on both sides of the Vietnam War. This included staffing and supplying a rehabilitation center in U.S.-backed South Vietnam, and sending medical equipment to North Vietnam.
In 1987, twelve years after the war, I was granted permission to visit a village of four thousand people, sixty miles southeast of Hanoi. When I arrived in the village, I was greeted by a beating gong, made from an American bomb canister, and a ceremony of tea and speeches.
PROJECTION: A large black-and-white photo of a rice field with mountains in the background
(“THAT OF GOD” remains but turns to black letters. This image remains throughout most of the piece, until indicated.
The lights slowly come up. Mrs. Beautiful becomes visible. She wears a pajama suit and Vietnamese cone hat, all made of bright red vinyl. She wears eyeglasses. Her hat is tipped down so we don’t see her face. She carries a bundle of rice seedling plants in her arms.
She slowly turns in a circle until she begins to plant. Her voice ricochets from one line to another.)
MRS. BEAUTIFUL (Voice-over): How old are you?
How much money do you make?
How many children do you have?
You’re forty-four and don’t have a husband yet?
Where do you come from?
Where is your farm in the beautiful country of the United States?
Where is Ohio?
Do you grow milk fruit in Ohio?
You don’t have a water buffalo?
Do you paddle your canoe to market?
If you don’t grow rice, how do you eat? What do you eat?
Try this milk fruit. This is our first milk fruit since Agent Orange. The coconut fruit died, the banana fruit died, everything died after Agent Orange, the pigs died, even the rice died. You help us celebrate the return of the milk fruit.
Is it true about Americans demonstrating against the war?
(By the end of Mrs. Beautiful’s speech, the lights have come up fully. The stage is now covered in a dense pattern; all the rice appears orange.)
LADY BORTON (Voice-over): I had no idea my arrival was such a sensational event. No foreigner had been allowed to stay in a village, much less with a family. I suspected every member of the well-meaning welcoming committee worried that he or she would be held responsible if a problem occurred during my visit. The easiest way for them to ensure that nothing went wrong
was to see that nothing happened, that nothing occurred, nothing. I was to be cocooned at the provincial guest house in the village and carefully managed, but I was rescued by an unexpected source. After the welcoming ceremonies, while I paused beneath a jackfruit tree, someone grabbed my elbow with an intense grip. I turned to find a woman in her sixties.