‘Paper son’ pays price for a life built on lies
Chinese immigrant who assumed false identity reflects on past in ‘Harry Chin’
Harry Chin can’t bury the past any more. After a year of thwarted mourning, his daughter’s kicking him off her couch and into the world. His boss at the restaurant sees him moving slowly and burning his chop suey and wants to either force him to take time off or fire him.
Most important: Ghosts have started haunting him, and they won’t go away, no matter how many charms he acquires to ward them off or how many times he uncertainly proclaims, “I banish you!”
But in “The Paper Dreams of Harry Chin,” burying the past is exactly how Harry Chin (Jomar Tagatac) has survived. One of the so-called paper sons and daughters who assumed false identities to emigrate from China to the U.S. during the Chinese Exclusion Act, he had to not just part from his home and his family and never see them again, he couldn’t talk about them. Better not to think about them at all — even though he sends them money every month, even though alleviating their poverty and famine is the whole reason he got on a boat, memorized another man’s life to prepare for questioning and never heard anyone call him by his birth name again.
Jessica Huang’s play, which
opened Wednesday, May 11, at San Francisco Playhouse, painstakingly diagrams the human-sized ripple effects — across time, generations and geography — of racist immigration policy. Such a law means a man can’t be honest with his wife. It means he can’t fully love his daughter. It says some people’s identities aren’t important enough to keep. It consigns others to die forgotten and unloved. It prizes withholding
and secrecy as virtues, no matter the consequences.
If the mission of the show is to get Harry and by extension his adopted country to reckon with his past, Huang’s structure as a memory play doesn’t always help. Her knockout scenes, lovingly and thoughtfully directed by Jeffrey Lo, come earlier in the script: when Harry gets interrogated by an immigration official (Michael Torres) whose face is obscured by an American flag mask, who speaks in unintelligible barks while a translator (Sharon Shao) helps Harry tweak his responses to be more palatable while also, as a stand-in for the wife he left behind in China,
helping erase herself and say goodbye. Or when, years later, a woman from China (Shao) arrives unannounced to Harry’s restaurant, and Harry’s American wife, Laura (Carrie Paff), and daughter, Sheila (Kina Kantor), gradually piece together why she’s suddenly crying and who she must be.
But in the present tense, Harry’s main action is to admit to himself, to his daughter and to the ghosts of his wives and Poet (Will Dao), a fellow boat passenger and paper son, that all these events actually happened, apologize for his mistakes where he made them, acknowledge that he did the best he could and forgive himself. The trouble is that by this point in the show Harry is accepting truths that have long been abundantly clear to the audience. We’ve forgiven him almost immediately — not least thanks to Tagatac’s innate appeal, world-building imagination and sensitive choices — so watching him slowly go through that process almost feels redundant.
The ghosts, too, have a muddled story line here. Suddenly, the whole reason they’ve been haunting Harry for the entire play is just so they can be sent off with the proper ritual, a justification that comes too late to feel true or inspire sympathy.
Still, Lo’s actors deliver incandescent performances that seem to match Christopher Fitzer’s wondrous set design — a rotating box with endless morphing, unfurling compartments. Paff can imbue what might be throwaway lines with zest, sunshine and flutters. Kantor’s Sheila, in finally realizing what Harry needs to admit to himself, can make a speech into a way of truly seeing and then taking up another’s burden. Shao can pack towering righteous rage into crystalline grief and summon the whole force of that rotating set as she stalks Harry and somehow make it stand for all the ways the world has failed her.
The world has failed all the play’s characters, but “The Paper Dreams of Harry Chin” gives Sheila and Harry a fragile, hard-won happy ending. The America that created and enforced for decades the Chinese Exclusion Act doesn’t deserve to be let off so easily.