Looking Back to Look Forward

Reflecting on his cycle of five plays that traverse 150-plus years of history, Lloyd Suh says, “The plays that I’ve been writing recently on Asian American history... they’re all part of the same impulse...my children... have very little tangible connection to my parents’ journey beyond what we can tell them.... so how do we tell that story?” Suh approaches his plays as an act of connection, invoking a sort of thread, full of energy and ancestral whispers, that traverses the distance between two edges of torn tapestry. On one side of the torn fabric lie his children, third-generation Americans, and on the other side are his parents, first-generation immigrants. These two generations are bound together by the tapestry of Asian and Asian American lineage, and Suh, with every play, weaves them back together. Through his writing, Suh interlaces the personal, the political, the historical, and the topical into loving odes to his family and the broader Asian American experience. 

From the story of Afong Moy, the first Chinese woman to arrive in the United States in 1834 (The Chinese Lady, 2018), to the 1967 story of the students at Berkely who coined the term "Asian American" (Charles Francis Chan Jr.’s Exotic Oriental Murder Mystery, 2015), each of Suh’s plays endeavor to tell more of the Asian American story. In his imaginative play for young audiences The Wong Kids in the Secret of the Space Chupacabra Go! (2014) he tells the story of two siblings who don’t fit in with the Earth kids – and their adventure to save the world. In American Hwangap (2009) he explores abandonment, aging, and forgiveness through the main character Min Suk, who celebrates his traditional 60th birthday celebration by returning home to his family in suburban Texas after leaving the family 15 years prior. As audiences watch the Wong siblings’ struggle to fit in with Earth kids, or Min Suk’s family navigate immigration and separation, Suh provides insight into the way the political is intimately personal.   

The Far Country (2022), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama, takes place in the wake of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882; Eric Ting, who directed The Far Country’s world premiere, says the play illustrates how “the only way the characters can achieve a place in the American project is by severing ties with their ancestors.” Through The Far Country, Suh tries to rebind these severed ancestral ties while commenting on the racist and assimilationist ideas still ever-present for immigrants in America today. Spanning two countries and three generations, he soulfully enacts what the New York Times called a “loving and sorrowful... reclamation” of the past and the present.  

The Heart Sellers (2023) similarly enacts a loving and sorrowful reclamation, one inspired by Suh’s mother and the stories of other immigrant Asian women who came to America in the 1970s in the wake of the 1965 Hart-Celler Act. While writing the play, Suh realized that in deciding to examine his mother’s first months in the U.S., he was actually writing a play about the effects of that act. “It’s an intense feeling,” he says. “Oh wow, I can trace this history along such a long continuum.”  

Throughout his history cycle, Suh thoughtfully retwines lineages across that continuum, scrutinizing the intersection of policy and personal experience, creating conversation between divergent points in time, and by doing so, working to heal wounds inflicted by geographical distance, cultural erasure, and racist, exhibitionist American attitudes. 

However, what is perhaps most notable about Suh’s work is not its meditation on the past, but the unique way it binds the past to the future through deeply loving characters who always have hope and joy in their hearts. The Heart Sellers places the history of the Hart-Celler Act in the background of its action in order to foreground the budding friendship of its two characters, Luna and Jane, both Asian immigrant women. Suh asserts that the play is “principally and chiefly very much a comedy”, and that the characters’ primary objective is the simple desire to make a friend, to “make each other feel safe... [and] make the other person laugh”. Forged in the fire of the pandemic, with that era’s widespread loneliness and Asian American hate as inspiration points, The Heart Sellers combats xenophobia with an equally powerful dosing of laughter, love, and community. In all his plays, Suh encourages his audiences to look toward the future with joy and laughter in their hearts, to survive by love and hope, because “the joy in the room,” he says is “why any of this matters.” 

—Ella Talerico