The Heart Sellers is the fourth in a series of Lloyd Suh’s plays that locate characters at significant moments in Asian American history: The students at UC Berkeley who coined the term “Asian American” in 1967 to replace “Oriental” (Charles Francis Chan Jr.’s Exotic Oriental Murder Mystery, 2015); Afong Moy, the first Chinese woman in the U.S (The Chinese Lady, 2018), who was put on display in the human museums of the 1830s-70s; the lives caught up in the wake of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act (The Far Country, 2022; finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama); and in The Heart Sellers, two Asian American women who kindle a friendship two months after arriving in the U.S. The Heart Sellers is set in 1973, eight years after the 1965 Hart-Celler Act reshaped 175 years of country-specific immigration policy to a system that prioritizes family reunification, skilled labors, and refugees. (Read more about the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Hart-Cellar Act, and U.S. immigration policy to 1965 here)
The Heart Sellers began from Suh’s curiosity about his mother’s life when she first arrived in the U.S. from Korea in the 1970s; he quickly realized that after writing two plays about the lead-up to and immediate fallout from the Chinese Exclusion Act, he was working on a play set in the aftermath of another piece of immigration legislation. “It occurred to me that the Hart-Celler Act was a kind of bookend to these stories about Asian American lives in the United States,” he said. “And looking at the plays that I’ve been writing recently, I realized that they’re all part of the same impulse. My parents are first-generation immigrants. My children are third generation, but they have very little tangible connection to my parents’ journey beyond what we can tell them. How do we tell that story?”
In The Heart Sellers, Suh tells that story in two keys. The play premiered in 2023, some ten years after Suh began writing deliberately about what he characterizes as “some of the most painful parts of Asian American history.” The play doesn’t shy away from the realities of life in the U.S., but it is also deeply about arriving somewhere—the experience of making a friend, of finding someone who can pierce through the loneliness and isolation of emigration and understand you well enough to make you laugh. “Once I understood the assignment, The Heart Sellers was a gift,” Suh says, “These two want to make each other happy. They want to be friends. They want the other one to laugh. What a gift to realize that this is a play about the pursuit of joy.”
It is a hard-won joy. Jane and Luna left their home countries in the wake of 1972 military coups from their countries’ longtime leaders—General Park Chung-Hee of Korea, Jane’s home country and Ferdinand E. Marcos of the Philippines, Luna’s home country. Each leader, facing the end of the term limit on his presidency, declared military law, and revised their country’s constitution to extend their tenure. Both dictators began violent crackdowns on their critics and political rivals. Jane and Luna land in the United States in September 1973, as their husbands begin a medical residency program. They’ve arrived in the wake of the televised Watergate Hearings, as President Richard Nixon is fighting a subpoena for the White House tapes. In just the three months they’ve been in the U.S., Vice President Spiro Agnew has resigned, the “Saturday Night Massacre” saw The United States Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General resign rather than follow President Nixon’s call to fire the special prosecutor for the Watergate Investigation, and Nixon declared to 400 Associated Press editors, “I am not a crook.”
Beyond the turmoil of their own countries and the United States, Jane and Luna face the isolation of a new country and culture, the expected strangeness of food and customs but surprising details as well: dust seems different, yams don’t taste the same. Luna was raised in English (and likely Tagalog, which was adopted as a second official Filipino language during Luna’s childhood), but Jane has been learning what English she can through various American television shows. Beyond the language barrier and cultural disorientation, the women navigate a world of mostly white Americans who treat them with curiosity, mistrust, or hostility as well as their husbands’ expectations for the way a “good wife” behaves. Jane and Luna’s husbands are different men from different cultures, but the pressure each woman feels to ease their husband’s entry into the U.S. is similar and hasn’t left much space for either woman to discover how they would like to live in this new country. But tonight is different; tonight, they’ve found someone who might understand them in a way their families at home and their husbands have not.
Or as Suh said in his remarks in August at the first rehearsal of Studio’s production of The Heart Sellers, “There was a time when I thought it was a play about two people becoming friends. But that actually happens very quickly. What I’ve come to realize, seeing this play in several productions from January 2023 to DC right now, is that The Heart Sellers is about whether being friends can save these women from the massive, global, existential things that are going on in the world and in their lives. Loneliness and homesickness are part of my mom’s story and the story of women like her. But they also had to create a new community and find solidarity in people who are like and unlike them.”