Eat more cake Life is too short not to eat cake.

I was reading a speech made by the playwright Dennis Kelly this morning, which left me stunned by its clarity. I must confess I am not familiar with his work, but his words kept running through my head all day long. It opens with this: “…political theatre is a complete fucking waste of time.” This isn’t really true, at least in my mind. The idea of art as political protest goes back thousands of years, starting with the Ancient Greeks. It has existed for as long as we have had anything to protest, often shrouded in hidden symbols or cloaked with history. Think of the Soviets, of Mikhail Bulgakov’s play The Days of the Turbins, or Nikolai Erdman’s The Suicide. Skip ahead a few generations to Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine, which leaps from Victorian colonialism in Africa and its collapse, to sexual repression and its release in 1970’s London. Think of Pinter in his last few decades, like the roaring of a lion who cannot rest.

Kelly mentions the AIDS plays of twenty years ago - like Angels in America, specifically, or the ones I knew from the mid-90’s - Love! Valour! Compassion! and Lonely Planet. The latter, written specifically for its two actors by a local playwright, had a quiet wistfulness that reminds me of Adam Mars-Jones’ short stories from the height of the AIDS crisis. These plays were all born out of a wild grief and anger at this scourge that was cutting a wide swath through the gay community - I am just barely old enough to remember this - but I wonder how they will play out for the next generation, or the one after, or a hundred years from now. Will they take their places next to Shakespeare as something eternal?

The thing about a political play, like any other art of protest, is that is can’t just be about the protest. If you strip away the skin and the flesh of political rhetoric, there has to be something of substance beneath it, the bones of story and emotions. It has to stand on its own merits as a work of art. It has to connect with the audience, move them, open their heart and their minds to what’s being said. For one night a sea of strangers are waiting to spend two hours inside your head. It has to be beautiful. No, beautiful is the wrong word. It has to mean something.

This is a true story.

Facts and fictions are different truths.*

I was born in China in the summer of 1980 and adopted shortly thereafter by a young Taiwanese couple. They were living in St. Louis at this time, newly American citizens, and it took a few years for all the red tape to be sorted out so I could join them. It is entirely possible that I was the first international adoption in the state of Missouri. Meanwhile I lived in Shanghai with my maternal great-grandmother and various aunts and cousins. I learned to speak Shanghainese, my first language, which I quickly forgot in exchange for Mandarin Chinese and then English.

I have no memories of the time before I came to St. Louis at the age of two. No memories before the American government placed a stamp on a piece of paper that erased the name given to me at birth. No memories before the night I found myself sitting on a blanket on the banks of the Mississippi River, watching fireworks explode over the St. Louis Arch as I held my mother’s hand. I wore glow-in-the-dark necklaces bought from a park vendor and stuffed earplugs like soft marshmallows into my ears against the booming fireworks.

The passport and birth certificate issued by the state of Missouri with my new name and my new parents gives my place of birth as China, but the country where I was born will not claim me. Nor will Taiwan, where my parents were born and raised and where they returned after three decades in America. A birth certificate recently reissued came back from Jefferson City stating my place of birth as “REST OF WORLD.” I am American by citizenship and education but the rest is and always will be a bit of a muddle. I remember my mother telling me, years ago, “You were born without a country.” Later I realized: I would have to be my own country.

Sometimes I see middle-aged Caucasian couples with young Asian daughters and I feel my heart crack a little along fault lines I didn’t realize existed. I turn and look at families with children that are miniature replicas, or distinct combinations, of their parents, and feel that same sharp crack going in a different direction. And yet my parents and our family is all I can remember, all I have ever known. Any other thoughts and questions and doubts lay tucked away somewhere and forgotten, like the monsters in the closet you hid from as a child.

What they don’t tell you is that all of us are thrown into our families like castaways on a foreign shore, by birth or by chance. You have to learn this on your own. We are all the same. The first journey we take is finding the way to our place in our family, and then onwards into the outside world. This longing, this search, it stays with us all our lives. This is the beauty and the pain of existence.

*This line comes from The Facts and Fictions of Minna Pratt, by Patricia MacLachlan. I read this when I was about 10 years old, and it is one of my favorite books of all time. I know it by heart. Everyone should read it.

It was about ten minutes into the first act of The Pitmen Painters when I started crying and I didn’t stop until the intermission. I don’t mean full-on sorrowful, heartbroken weeping, or tears of laughter, although it is a funny play and I did cry tears of laughter. I mean the kind of tears that well up when you see something that sweeps a wave of recognition over your heart and mind as the drama plays out across the stage. Like Red at Seattle Rep a few months ago, it’s a play about art, the meaning of art, how and why we create it, and why it matters. “Art isn’t about answers,” says Mr. Lyons, the art lecturer, “it’s about asking questions.” It’s about creating something that wasn’t there before, something that only you can see or imagine, and then share with the rest of the world. It doesn’t matter than none of these men have ever seen a painting before, spending their days as they do in the dark pits of the coal mines. They paint what they see - the houses of the town, the darkness of the pits, the people in the streets walking against a deluge of rain, a vase of flowers on a table - and it becomes art. This is one side of the play.

The other side of the play is about identity and longing. These men, they know who they are, absolutely. They’re miners, except for the one who was gassed in the Somme twenty years before and is now a dental assistant, and another one who is unemployed. Their life is difficult and painful, leaving school at the age of 11 or thereabouts, spending ten hours or more a day crammed deep into the mines, always the fear that a beam will crush you or the earth will suffocate you. In the morning they put on their one-and-only striped suits and walk to work, strip down for the heat of the underground, come back up hours later to shower and put their suits back on and then spend an evening at the pub or perhaps learning about art. The art changes everything. They could be something different besides the identity they were born into, and it opens a world of possibility and at the same time a fear of the unknown. This is the inescapable human condition: our never-ending search for who we are and what we might become. 

coda: R. Hamilton Wright has this one line, near the end of the play: “Twenty years, they go by in a flash.” It was twenty years ago this summer I saw him for the first time, in The Revenger’s Comedies at ACT Theatre. It feels like yesterday. I hope to see him again and again, for twenty years more.

I wrote an earlier version of this almost exactly a year ago, for Whit. A year speeded by in a flash. Late last summer I found myself in St. Petersburg again, this time at the end of July. The lilacs were long gone, but the escalators were as endless as I remembered. 

This is version 4.0

I dreamed of lilacs stolen from gardens
the memory of their fragrance
slipping me back in time
to a faraway summer
in St. Petersburg
city of palaces strung along
necklaces of boulevards
floating at the edge of the sea. You are
so far north the horizon seems to stop, there;
you have come to the end of the world.
Babushkas in kerchiefs
sell bunches of lilacs
and lilies-of-the-valley
outside metro stations, and
the scent of flowers trails down endless escalators,
into the subterranean palaces of the metro stations,
leading you back up to sunlight like
Persephone returning to spring and earth.

Он любил три вещи на свете:
За вечерней пенье, белых павлинов
И стертые карты Америки,
Не любил, когда плачут дети,
Не любил чая c малиной
И женской истерики.
…А я была его женой.

And then in English:

He loved three things:
evening vespers, white peacocks,
and faded maps of America.
He couldn’t stand squalling brats,
raspberry jam with his tea,
or womanish hysteria.
…And he was married to me.

ANNA AKHMATOVA

Another one of my favorite poems, which I discovered through Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

I fiumi (The Rivers) (Cotici, August 16, 1916).

I hang on to this mangled tree
abandoned in this sinkhole
that is listless
as a circus
before or after the show
and watch
the quiet passage
of clouds across the moon

This morning I stretched out
in an urn of water
and rested
like a relic

The flowing Isonzo
smoothed me
like one of its stones

I hoisted up
my sack of bones
and got out of there
like an acrobat
over the water

I crouched
beside my grimy
battle clothes
and like a Bedouin
bent to greet
the sun

This is the Isonzo
and here I recognized myself
more clearly
as a pliant fiber
of the universe

My affliction
is when
I don’t believe myself
in harmony

But those hidden
hands
that knead me
freely give
the uncommon
bliss

I went back over
the ages
of my life

These are
my rivers

This is the Serchio
where maybe
two millenia of my farming people
and my father and mother
drew their water

This is the Nile
that saw me
born and raised
and burn with unawareness
on the sweeping flatlands

This is the Seine
whithin whose roiling waters
I was mixed again
and came to know myself

These are my rivers
reckoned in the Isonzo

This is my longing for home
that in each one
shines through me
now that it’s night
that my life seems
a corolla
of darkness

(The Isonzo river now lies in present-day Slovenia. During the first world war, it ran just inside the Austrian border with Italy. Many battles were fought along this river as the Italian army struggled to cross over and push back the Austro-Hungarian forces; many lives were lost).

Ungaretti, Giuseppe. Selected Poems. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. pp 35-39.