Re-Surfacing the Chinese-Canadian Body in Performance: Elyne Quan’s “Surface Tension” and “What?”

Abstract

These humorous reductive warnings issued by her mother Rosa were intended to make Elyne Quan think twice before she embarked on a theatre career. Both were apt in terms of the race, gender, and body issues that Quan has found herself negotiating in Edmonton, Alberta, where she has established herself professionally over the past five years. As non-white bodies are gradually becoming visible in cultural representations, Quan has set out to examine the ways in which Chinese-Canadians are not only “surfacing” for the first time as they make their presence an indisputable fact of life, but “re-surfacing” as they remember and remind others about all those parts of themselves they lost over generations as immigrants. A second-generation Chinese-Canadian, Quan’s experiences of discrimination and hardship have been more oblique than those of her father, who came from Kaiping as a young boy with his family in the 1950s to open a café in rural Saskatchewan. By the time she was born in 1973, the year they came to Edmonton, her family had a relatively secure middle-class lifestyle. Becoming a theatre practitioner in a predominantly white culture has been Quan’s way of breaking new ground, as we see in the two performance pieces – “Surface Tension” and “What?” – which are the main focus of this article.