Nina Lee Aquino, Ed. Love + Relasianships: A Collection of Contemporary AsianCanadian Drama

Abstract

NINA LEE AQUINO, ed. Love + Relasianships: A Collection of Contemporary Asian-Canadian Drama. Volumes I and II. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2009. Vol. I xi + 307pp; Vol. II xi + 279pp. NINA LEE AQUINO and RIC KNOWLES, eds. Asian Canadian Theatre: New Essays on Canadian Theatre. Volume I. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2011. xvi + 276pp. The twelve plays collected in two-volume set of Love + Relasianships, first comprehensive collection of Asian Canadian drama, vary widely in terms of their stories, aesthetics, and production histories. Many of them are what editor Nina Aquino describes as theatrical milestones (ix): for example, M.J. Kang's haunting Noran Bang: The Yellow Room was first play written in North America depicting contemporary Korean diasporic experience. Miss Orient(ed), a biting satire of Filipino beauty pageants by Nina Lee Aquino and Nadine Villasin, marked entry of Carlos Bulosan Cultural Workshop into realm of professional Toronto theatre. And pioneering playwright R.A. Shiomi's detective story Yellow Fever was first professionally produced Asian Canadian play (first staged in San Francisco in 1982, play received its Canadian premiere in 1983, by Canasian Artists Group in Toronto). These and other dramatic works bring us into broad terrain of contemporary Asian Canadian politics, raising formative questions of exclusion and racial violence, diaspora and immigration, transnational community, gender and sexuality, and stereotyping and media. Winston Christopher Kam's Bachelor-Man addresses queer identities and masculinity in context of 1923 Exclusion Act and bachelor communities of Chinese labourers. In The Plum Tree Japanese Canadian internment leaves its scar on present-day characters and defines their sense of home, land, and country. Jean Yoon's whimsical valentine to Yoko Ono, Yes Yoko Solo and Leon Aureus's hard-hitting Banana Boys both explore how cultural stereotype and expectation affect young identities and relationships. The range of stories attests to fact that there is no one definitive Asian-Canadian experience, and raises important questions about theatrical representation of diverse and multinational identities. Set in early twentieth-century Shanghai, Marjorie Chan's China Doll imagines how Ibsen's A Doll House might inspire a young woman with bound feet. Hiro Kanagawa's riveting Tiger of Malaya depicts Manila War Crimes trial of General Tomoyuko Yamashita. The complexities of intimacy, recognition, and communication are poignantly staged both in Betty Quan's family drama Mother Tongue and David Yee's engagingly varied vignettes, Paper Series. Such unruly identities and stories don't fit neatly into any one ethnic or racial box. At same time they test easy claims about universal human experiences by emphasizing how racial, ethnic, cultural, and national differences matter. In Marty Chan's Maggie's Last Dance neither concerns nor identities of thirty-something characters dealing with romantic fallout of their high school years are recognizably Asian Canadian; at same time, characters compare their anxieties about love to Quebec separatism, referencing most visible fracture in Canada's national identity. This subtle allusion to disunity is openly interrogated in anthology of critical essays, Asian Canadian Theatre. Its essays reflect how politics of race in present-day Canada are shaped by policies of contemporary multiculturalism, and how questions about representation and visibility are markedly different from those of a generation ago. Editors Nina Lee Aquino and Ric Knowles note how official multicultural script (ix) demands a certain kind of conformity: the very mechanisms of visibility that allow it to emerge also paradoxically might undercut its power to change and critique (viii). …