China: an alien's story
Despite two enormous screens that stand behind him and a slide show that sometimes blurs like magic into moving images, William Yang acts out one of oldest and simplest forms of performance: storytelling.
In China, presented as part of the ongoing PuSh Festival, Yang, an Australian of Chinese-descent, tells of several journeys he made to China over an extended period of time. Yang is a compelling figure on stage. He is slight, well-dressed and although he is dominated by the screens behind him, still manages to hold ones attention with his stillness and the gentle burr of his Australian accent. He's accompanied by musician Nicholas Ng who plays the erhu (Chinese violin) and pipa (Chinese lute). Ng provides subtle, beautiful accompaniment to the storytelling and, if anything, I would have liked more of it.
Yang illustrates his talk with slides that are projected onto the giant screens. The photographs are surprisingly candid and informal. They have a feeling of holiday snaps, a few containing a younger version of Yang in front of various monuments or with his arm around old or new friends. These are mixed in with occasional shots of famous sites including the Forbidden Palace, Tiananmen Square and the various mountains he climbs as part of a Taoist pilgrimage he goes on (mountain climbing, judging by Yang’s photos, is a far more genteel experience in China than in British Columbia). More compellingly, he focuses on the ordinary people he meets living their messy lives. Appropriate for a show that deals with a stranger in a strange land motif and notions of hospitality, many of these shots are of meals that he shared on his travels (although there is often a sting in the tail when Yang is expected to pay for a number of these meals). Given this informality, I was surprised to learn later that Yang is a professional photographer. Occasionally we get an arty shot but mostly the images are not chosen for their beauty or power but rather to service his story. Wisely, he focuses on the faces of the various characters who make up that story; mostly young men who act as his tour guides across the country. There is often a lovely interplay between the story and the image, for example a shot of a street vendor with various contraptions about him and Yang musing on what exactly the person is selling.
As a host, Yang is a warm with a wry sense of humour. The humour is often directed towards himself and some of the misadventures he experienced of being an openly gay man in China. What Yang does effectively is create a sense of identity for the people in his photographs, they become well-rounded and alive for us. The piece is structured around, I believe, four separate trips. For some reason, these trips became less engaging, for me, as the evening progresses. The first one is the most complex and raw. His guide is a man who can barely speak English and who spent some time in Australia. We are immediately taken into this man’s life and complicated family structure. We catch glimpses of China which are once revealing of the country’s separateness and nearness to our own culture. We also sense the sheer scale of the country and the comfort the Chinese have with building monolithic and soul-destroying housing projects. We also see Yang wander through the part of China that his family originated from although he does not search for any of his extended family.
For the second half of the performance, the stories seem to become less intimate with the lives of the people he encounters. We are thrust less into the real guts of people’s lives and the adventures seem more outward and therefore more travelogue like. We’re on public trails leading up the mountains, we’re in a Chinese theme park, we’re in big cities we’ve never heard of. This could be conscious on the part of Yang or they could simply reflect the experiences as they happened (perhaps he was getting more comfortable with his environment or more comfortable in his modes of travel). However, it slows down the work for me and I found myself becoming a bit restless. This is compounded by the mini-histories he provides of Chinese writing characters and formal gardens. These potted histories did, however, have an interesting resonance here in Vancouver. I suspect the vast majority of the audience had at one time or other visited the Sun Yet-San Garden in Chinatown and would already know this information. It was a reminder of how Asian – and specifically, Chinese – Vancouver is. Even if you’re from the whitest, most British of backgrounds (such as myself) we all have a sense of shared connection with China which means that it does not read as alien a place as it might in Sydney, where Yang lives. This is best illustrated when Yang quotes one of his guides as saying to him that “you wouldn’t understand, you’re foreign.“ And Yang reflects on how he looks less foreign than his audience in the Freddy Wood. While this was true for me personally, it wasn’t true for the collective reality of Vancouver or (in theory) the audience that was present.
The show does end with a beautiful sequence, where a young boy shows Yang how to venerate at a temple. There is a touching moment of human connection here, between the outsider and the insider, the young and the old. Like the photographs, it is candid: we see Yang looking awkward as he tries to follow the boy who easily works through the motions. This moment of candidness made me reflect for a moment on Yang himself. I wonder how much – after 90 minutes – we learned about our host. Even though we caught glimpses of his home in Sydney, of the young man who stayed with him for several weeks, of his disappointment of having the random sexual advances of another being thwarted, Yang still felt elusive to me. Perhaps this was intentional or perhaps I wasn’t listening carefully enough. But while I knew facts about him, I didn’t know why he was a Taoist (family tradition or choice); what compelled him to climb those mountains, wander the streets of his mother’s hometown; to stand in the vastness of Tiananmen Square.
China, presnted by the PuSh Festival in partnership with Theatre at UBC continues until February 6th. For more information, travel here.