“This waiting is a gray rock and / we share a confusion / This confusion is a smell / a smell like fish rot and ashes / and we share a wound,” says one of the characters in “The Far Country,” a handsome and important new play by Lloyd Suh running at the Linda Gross Theater. The young man who speaks these lines from a poem is Moon Gyet (Eric Yang), who travels to San Francisco with the help of a man pretending to be his father. Moon Gyet first sets foot in America in 1909 and will spend a total of 17 months being detained in the Angel Island Immigration Station, a holding center for “undesirable” would-be immigrants to wait while authorities sorted through their cases to see if they met requirements for citizenship or should be deported. It is estimated that between 1910 and 1940, 300,000 individuals were sent to Angel Island for processing; Chinese made up the bulk of the group, which also included Japanese, Russians, Koreans, South Asians, Mexicans, and others. As they waited, some of the detainees etched poems and writings on the walls of the barracks where they were held. The words were later covered with putty and gray paint, intended to erase any trace of the people who wrote them. Years later, the paint having worn off, the poems were discovered by a park ranger, and a movement was born to save the immigration station. Today, Angel Island is recognized as a National Historic Landmark.
Before Moon Gyet encounters the poems carved onto the walls of the detention center, we meet the man who becomes his conduit. Han Sang Gee (Jinn Kim) is seated at a rectangular table in a dimly lit room as an Inspector named Harriwell (Christopher Liam Moore) begins formal proceedings to “ascertain the validity of his claim to birthright citizenship in these United States of America.” With the help of a translator (Whit Lee), Gee answers a battery of questions about his background: he was born in the U.S., works at a laundry, and is now seeking to visit China to see his family and perhaps bring one of his sons back with him to America to assist him with his work. He evinces an obliging, good-humored nature and embroiders his answers with just the right amount of vivid detail to seem as if he’s conjuring an intimate memory.
The next time we see him, though, Gee has exchanged his affable demeanor for a more businesslike one. In place of his black Chinese royal emperor hat and braid, Gee now wears a black fedora and a wide-sleeved linen shirt (Junghyun Georgia Lee designed the costumes). The time is one year after his interrogation and Gee has come to Taishan, a farming village, to bring his “son” back to America. Only Moon Gyet, as we soon learn, is not really his son, but a young man to whom Gee is hoping to sell his name. To become an American citizen, Moon Gyet must commit to memory a fabricated “biography.” Also, as Gee explains to a skeptical Low (Amy Kim Waschke), Moon Gyet’s mother, the price of ferrying Moon to America is $1,600, “to be paid ten percent now and the rest I will recoup from his wages until the debt is fully paid.” Not only will Low have to take out a loan from a moneylender for the down payment and cost of transport, but the time of processing is indeterminate. Low has misgivings about the plan—she thinks that what Gee is doing is dishonorable, calling him “a fake American, only a citizen because of embarrassing lies,” but Gee alludes to her “desperate” circumstances, which are never fully explained. The verbal jousting between Gee and Low make for one of the strongest moments in the play: one senses that if it were not for the chance to make good money, Low would never consent to sending her son to America—a land that “forced commerce upon us until we depended on such commerce, then took that commerce away.” Gee counters her criticisms with eloquence of his own: “I am done with being humiliated, whether by the Manchus or the Americans,” he says, raising his voice in a burst of temper. “Because I am crossing oceans. I am building a life.”
Ultimately, the decision lies not with Low, but with Moon Gyet, who takes Gee up on his offer. He is prepared to study the documents that reveal to him the contours of his new identity and to undertake the physical labor of a demanding job. He is aware, too, of the stakes: “If I fail, it will lead to my family’s ruin.” Still, nothing prepares him for the grueling interrogation that awaits him at Angel Island. As if to underscore the haze of days that slowly accumulate, designer Clint Ramos’ interrogation room seethes with fog. Moon Gyet is soon joined on stage by two other actors and the scene shifts into what the playscript calls a “liminal space”: The black-tiled floors fill with
The rehearsal is perhaps deliberately meant to reflect the coaching papers that immigrants used, and by directly facing the audience, the actors subtly implicate us as would-be interrogators. The exercise could have easily devolved into a rote recital, but director Eric Ting saves it by featuring poetry from the walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station. Off to both sides of the stage, Chinese characters are projected onto black walls (Jiyoun Chang did the lighting). In spiraling out from the story of one young man’s journey to America, the play makes a larger point: 140 years after the Chinese Exclusion Act, the kinds of questions directed at Chinese immigrants by Americans may have softened in syntax, but they nevertheless carry an unmissable whiff of racism. “Where are you really from?” is one such formulation that many of us—even second or third-generation Asian Americans—will have heard countless times. It’s the kind of question that Washington Post op-ed columnist Michele Norris, among others, has rightly decried as “offensive,” “a clumsy attempt at hospitality,” and “triggering for the person on the receiving end — it pokes at something raw and personal.” Learning to preempt these questions or prepare for them with scripted answers—calibrated to have just the right amount of humanizing detail—is something that’s been internalized by all Asians I know. Racism as a strange loop. “The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction,” Toni Morrison famously said. “It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.”
In the final act, Moon Gyet—now Gee Lip Lun to everyone but his mother—travels back to China to “sell his name” that is not really his name. He settles on
a sparky woman named Ah Yuen (a splendid Shannon Tyo), whose family is “in dire need.” Tyo was cast in the lead of Suh’s other play from 2022, “The Chinese Lady,” where she played Afong Moy, widely thought to be the first Chinese woman to set foot in America. While that earlier production came across as ham-handed at times, “The Far Country” strikes the right balance between exposition and dramatization. Tyo, in particular, elevates any role she’s in. She disarms Moon Gyet with her bluntness, asking questions that he, after more than ten years of anticipating nothing but questions, is nevertheless unprepared to answer. Yet they reach an agreement that plants the seeds of a stable union. Its synthesis of history and family saga makes “The Far Country” another piece of the Asian American mosaic that Suh, along with other Asian American playwrights, has done much to build. I look forward to seeing what he does next.
