The Far Country

In The Far Country Lloyd Suh asserts the power of one’s name, with attention to the familial, material, and even metaphysical burdens of being forced to cast it off. Yale Repertory Theatre’s production, through the inspired direction of Ralph B. Peña, leans into Suh’s imaginative dramatic language, which combines longitudinal storytelling (spanning 1909–30) with dreamy, pensive sequences that animate concepts like memory, translation, and transformation as they characterized the Chinese immigrant experience in the early era of American empire.The play begins in the dour setting of an administrative hearing room in 1909, when the Chinese Exclusion Act was amended to require Chinese people living in the US to carry government-issued Certificates of Identity. Dim, shadowy side-lighting (designer Yichen Zhou) creates a conspiratorial air as Han Sang Gee (David Shih), claiming his papers had burned in the 1906 San Francisco fire, attempts to authenticate his American birth to an incredulous white administrator (Joe Osherhoff). A gigantic portrait of then-president William Howard Taft looms imperiously in the background.Taking place entirely at a single desk, and lasting around twenty minutes, the opening is challenging for its stasis. But the patient, inventive staging proves not to be plodding, but rather, a slow burn. It unfolds like a strange game of telephone, using repetition to foreground the act of translation: each query from the white official gets repeated, verbatim and in the same English, by Gee’s translator (Jesse Cao Long), with the process occurring in reverse for Gee’s answers. Though we are meant to understand that Gee and his translator would be speaking in their vernacular, the repetition in English operates as a gestus that brings critical attention to the verbiage being used. The audience chuckles as they recognize the potential for incomprehension when legalese questions like “Do you recall the specific date of disembarkation?” get spoken twice. As the administrator asserts his charge to “ferret out deception” in the immigration process, we recognize systemic tactics of expulsion at work in a hearing that is stacked against Gee.Equally fascinating is how David Shih’s code-switching performance as Gee brings our attention to the potential for resistant trickery within the act of translation. When addressing his translator he uses a clear American accent, only to instantly pivot to a thick and stereotyped Asian accent when speaking directly to the white official. The shifts in vocal register highlight Gee’s tactical performance of supplication, playing on the white imaginary of Chineseness; grinning proclamations like “I’m funny guy!” come off as comically wry to the audience, but seem to get taken in earnest by the authority. As a stenographer taps in the background, we are led to wonder which layers of meaning actually make it into the archive.The opening’s complex dramaturgy forces our awareness to questions of authenticity and immigrant subjectivity, which form the basis for The Far Country’s exploration of precarity, exploitation, and survival within transnational migration. The next scene shifts to Taishan, Guongdong, where Gee has returned to recruit a youth to accompany him back to the United States—the Far Country—under an assumed identity. This is not a benevolent mission; Gee requires someone willing to wholly abandon his sense of self in order to achieve a painstaking knowledge of the new identity’s details. In return, Gee can only promise a kind of indentured status in backbreaking laundry work after passage into the United States.He targets the canny but desperate Low (Tina Chilip), whose debts to a local gangster Gee will clear in exchange for passing her son Moon Gyet (Hao Feng) into his service. Moon Gyet must doff his name and resign himself to a new identity and uncertain future, the stakes of which get hammered home in a touching, resolute moment where he bows and bids farewell to his mother. He will not see her again for years. Suh confronts the uneasy moralities created by the colonial condition, complex circumstances in which suffering created by the application of Western power in the East (Low singles out the Treaty of Nanking in the conversation) also create circumscribed privileges for those like Gee who have the savvy to capitalize on cracks in the emerging administrative state.The Faustian stakes of such bargains become clearer when Moon Gyet arrives at California’s Angel Island Immigration Station in 1911, where he is detained under cramped, squalid conditions for over seventeen months. Approximately 175,000 Chinese would come through Angel Island over the next thirty years, with lengths of detention that ranged from two weeks to two years.1Here, Suh returns to dramatizing the immigration hearing using the mode of repetition, this time with Moon Gyet working through a white interpreter while being interrogated by an antagonistic and crafty inspector (Haskell King). He gets subjected to increasingly threatening attempts to flummox him on details of arbitrary minutiae, like the number of steps at the entrance to his childhood home and primary school. Though we know that Moon Gyet is lying, his plight demands sympathy, and his sturdy and studied commitment to the new identity cannot help but impress.Act I ends with a particularly imaginative dreamlike sequence, a theatrical coup that shifts the narrative from the storyline of Gee and Moon Gyet to a more expansive exploration of immigrant internment and memory at Angel Island. As lights dim and haze fills the stage, actors flood in, walking as if on a grid (à la Viewpoints) as they recount individual stories of expulsion and dehumanization—each prefaced by the statement: “This is how they got me,” and punctuated by a large case-file binder being thrown to the ground and landing with a sharp thwap! Accompanied by a rumbling, disquieting soundscape (Joe Krempetz), it is a haunting capstone to the act’s exploration of how psychic violence and cultural erasure characterize the American immigration system.But the showstopping sequence pushes beyond a simple critique of power, forcing our attention to how those consigned to lose their given names, like Moon Gyet, still found secretive ways to assert their presence when detection meant certain expulsion. We hear the inspiring true story of poetry being etched into the barrack walls of Angel Island by the interned, which remains legible today despite a fire and attempts to plaster over it. Suh describes these etchings as “sacred codes,” as palimpsests “imperceptible to an eye that does not look for [them].” They evade or outlast the power that seeks to eliminate such traces. As this gets recounted, Hanzi characters appear on floating walls that overhang the staging area, glowing like holy glyphs (scenic designer Kim Zhou, projections by Hana S. Kim).The sequence brought to mind Odai Johnson’s scholarly project of recovering a history of silence. It paralleled his discussion of curse tablets etched by slaves in Ancient Rome, which were buried underground to avoid detection: “a thin but enduring subterranean stratum of anger . . . an articulate subsoil littered with the silent and irrepressible rage of [empire’s] victims.”2The second act of The Far Country is less aesthetically daring than the first, operating primarily in a realist vein. But it displays Suh’s ability to create intimate moments and generational story arcs, helping to maintain our focus on the human consequences of migration over the longue durée. It begins with Moon Gyet returning to China years after his ordeal at Angel Island, in a moving scene in which he reunites with Low. For this one night, Moon Gyet takes the risk of casting off his assumed identity so that his mother can call him by his given name.But Low’s sheer joy at seeing her son once again gives way to a recognition that his time in the US has been characterized not by freedom and opportunity, but by an interminable detention and precarious existence in San Francisco. She further realizes that Moon Gyet has returned to recruit another despondent soul to assume a new identity and travel to America, just as he once did. He now takes up the same unscrupulous position as trafficker that Gee had years before.Moon Gyet fixes on a girl named Yuen (Joyce Meimei Zheng) to make the trip. Yuen’s vulnerability as a young woman is belied by an assertiveness and astuteness beyond her years—she bluntly points out that her brother is too dim to be relied on to pass the rigorous entry procedures. Moon Gyet is expecting to bring back a credulous and subservient helpmeet, who will not only pay the fee to cross but also assist with his and Gee’s laundry business and fulfill household labor. Yuen points out that he is effectively asking her to become his wife, with all the gendered labor and even sexual burdens implied. Zheng’s performance of Yuen is starkly assertive, even precocious, with a resoluteness that is unnerving to Moon Gyet. Though the play jumps over the years they spend together, we are led to believe she understands the unfortunate terms being offered to her, but has the mettle to hold her own. She does so for the chance to lead a life of adventure and exploration, so that their children can do what her own family cannot.The final scene jumps forward to 1930. Yuen now resides in San Francisco, a mother of four with another on the way. She is caring for a feverish Gee, whose memory is failing him in old age. It is a slow, meditative scene that surprisingly does not include Moon Gyet. It is noteworthy, if a little jarring, that the shift in focus to the tenacious Yuen leaves the viewer with a somewhat optimistic outlook, even as it forces us to confront challenging questions on the gendered dimensions of the immigrant experience. Much of the conversation between she and Gee focuses on the importance of names—like what she will call her unborn child—and the vexed nature of memory. They both struggle to look forward, but lament remembering things better left forgotten.The understated final scene, perhaps frustratingly, leaves several threads of the longer story unspooled. But Peña does provide a brief postscript, a final scenic transition in which the floating walls around the stage get transformed by signage and hanging clotheslines into familiar Chinatown shop fronts that evoke the sense of an immigrant community gaining a toehold. We recognize that the story we have seen is not complete, but rather, forms the terrain upon which future generations will tread.The Far Country continues Suh’s longer-term work creating a textured exploration of the history of Chinese-US immigration, most notably The Chinese Lady (2018). Its multi-decade storyline contemplates the interlocking nature of identity, memory, and resilience through shifting narratives that span multiple generations. Yale Repertory Theatre’s production captures the intricate dance of translation, survival, and transformation through nuanced performances by the ensemble and imaginative aesthetic sequences created by Peña. It surveys tactics of power and the fraught morality that stems from them, the stubborn endurance of cultural identity, and the tenacious spirit that binds immigrant communities together. Framed through the divinity and collective history that names hold, it asserts the human capacity to persist.