I have a dream in Chinese
Created by Irene (Fan) Yi | Produced by Liquid On Stage | Origin: Ottawa, Ontario
La Nouvelle Scène – Studio B
Show Details
A Chinese immigrant travels from Hong Kong to Vancouver while unraveling the fracture between her two names, two languages, and two homes. Blending poetic monologue, bureaucratic absurdity, and pandemic memory, this solo performance explores racism, exile, and identity. How do you begin again when you are still arriving?
Showtimes
- Friday, June 196:30pm
- Sunday, June 219:30pm
- Monday, June 229:00pm
- Wednesday, June 247:30pm
- ¹ Friday, June 2610:30pm
- Sunday, June 282:30pm
Good evening, passengers. Welcome aboard CX888 from Hong Kong to Vancouver. 各位旅客晚上好，欢迎搭乘国泰航空CX888航班，由香港飞往温哥华。
Please have your boarding pass ready. Please have your identification ready. Please be prepared to answer a few questions.
I have a dream in Chinese is a solo bilingual play moving through migration, racialization, and the unstable border between memory and survival.
I hear a scream. I’m back in the windowless workplace. I’m in the chair. Who are you. One interrogation after another. Then I’m standing on the chair, waving a piece of paper, until the chair disappears beneath me. I’m falling, falling, falling, and then — the sound of the sea.
It is a dream. Or it is not.
9 responses to “I have a dream in Chinese”
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The play started with an exclaimed “I hate white people!” which was unexpected but made us laugh.
Further in, we saw the narrator’s struggles with the constraints and impositions the society imposes on newcomers. A heavy burden indeed.
There was however an underlying current that made me uncomfortable, which was that the narrator saw all her negative encounters in terms of “white people”. The play could have gone a level deeper in exploring that, the collateral damage of oppression and how it forces people to default to categorization.