There’s no shortage of shameful chapters in our nation’s history, but one that’s discussed today less often than many others is the Chinese Exclusion Act.
Signed into law by President Chester Alan Arthur in 1882, the law prohibited nearly all immigration from China after several decades of relying on Chinese workers for hard jobs such as building the transcontinental railroad. The law wasn’t repealed even in part until 1943.
“The Chinese Exclusion Act was the first legislation ever to specifically restrict people based on nation of origin,” notes playwright Lloyd Suh. “And for a very long time it was the only one, until Trump’s Muslim ban.”
Suh’s new play “The Far Country,” now getting its West Coast premiere in Berkeley, explores some of the far-reaching impact of the Chinese Exclusion Act on immigrant families. Set in 1909 in the wake of the San Francisco Earthquake, the play deals with the phenomenon of what’s sometimes called “paper sons,” immigrants with forged documents establishing them as children of U.S. citizens.
We see them being questioned relentlessly at Angel Island Immigration Station, held there for months on end before either being allowed into San Francisco or sent back to China.
The station, which processed some half-million immigrants from 1910-1940, remains on Angel Island and serves as the foundation of the Immigration Museum and Detention Barracks Museum and other resources that are open to the public. More information is at www.aiisf.org.
“It is a play about an unlikely family during the exclusion era, and what people had to do to survive to live in America, to build something at a time when the country didn’t want them,” Suh says. “And practically speaking, it’s a look at the experience of people who were detained on Angel Island in the pursuit of a dream of a beautiful life in America, and the struggles and the work that they had to do in order to make steps towards attaining that over generations.”
Suh says he wanted to examine “how one knows oneself when the story you tell yourself about where you come from is invented, and when the truth of what you are is a secret or hidden.”
The play looks at how these immigrants’ previous identities are erased, overwritten with meticulously memorized fictional personal histories that would often be passed on to their children without explanation.
“A thing that I’ve been grappling with in general around history is how much of our stories are lost to us, both because history forgets but also because we don’t share it,” Suh says. “A lot of my peers and I, as second-generation Asian American immigrants, no matter what country of origin our families come from, there is a sense of ‘leave the past in the past.’ It’s too painful to talk about. You don’t need to know. Move on. I have a lot of empathy and understanding for where that comes from, but I also think there’s a danger. And so a lot of this writing and a lot of just what I’m doing around history is trying to reconcile those two realities.”
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The play is also a San Francisco story. An Indianapolis native now based in New Jersey, Suh keeps coming back to the Bay Area both to work and as the setting for some of his plays. He has a long relationship with SF’s Magic Theatre, which premiered his plays “American Hwangap” in 2009 and “Jesus in India” in 2012.
In fact, “The Far Country” was sparked in part by his last production at the Magic, the 2019 Bay Area premiere of “The Chinese Lady,” about Afong Moy, the first Chinese woman in the United States, who was put on display in a traveling exhibition in the 1830s.
“I had been writing a few different plays that kind of accidentally were becoming connected to this idea of unearthing these forgotten pivotal moments in Asian American history,” Suh reflects. “In the research of these plays, I kept coming across so many stories of the exclusion era. It always felt like a major turning point in so many of the things that still linger today: legislation, economics, where stereotypes come from, and probably biggest of all what story we tell ourselves, what we know of our legacy and what we don’t know. And so I always felt like I’ve got to tackle that somehow. Right before the pandemic, I was in the Bay Area for a production of ‘The Chinese Lady,’ which is one of those history plays, at Magic Theatre. And if you go out the back door of the Magic Theatre, you can see Angel Island right there. And I just thought, okay, I’ve got to try this.”
“The Far Country” comes to Berkeley Rep fresh from its world premiere at New York’s Atlantic Theater Company, where it was directed by former California Shakespeare Theater artistic director Eric Ting.
The Berkeley production is directed by Jennifer Chang, a Bay Area native who helmed the world premiere of Suh’s play “The Heart Sellers” last year at Milwaukee Rep and will direct that play again when at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley, Aurora Theatre Company and Capital Stage combine forces to present the play during the 2024-25 season.
At its core the play is very much about what gets passed along from one generation to the next, both in terms of the family’s story and also the opportunities and possibilities that one generation’s hardship enables for future generations.
“I think anybody who takes the extraordinary step to change their lives completely and move to a new place where they don’t speak the language and they don’t have family or roots, it’s a self-sacrificing act that ultimately dreams of the future,” Suh says. “I think about my parents’ journey, the journey of the families of my peers, who often were fleeing terrible conditions, political oppression, war, and knowing that they’re coming to a place where they might not have a great life, but they could potentially build one for generations to come.”
Contact Sam Hurwitt at [email protected].
‘THE FAR COUNTRY’
By Lloyd Suh, presented by Berkeley Repertory Theatre
When: March 8-April 14
Where: Berkeley Rep’s Peet’s Theatre, 2025 Addison St., Berkeley
Tickets: $30-$135; 510-647-2949, www.berkeleyrep.org
