L.P. Hartley once wrote, "The past is a foreign country;
they do things differently there. "
But for Marjorie Chan (Grad 1996), it's in that very different place that she hopes
to understand the way we live today.
Her first full-length play, 2004's China Doll, was a look inside the
foot-binding culture of Shanghai at the start of the 20th century, and
through it she examined contemporary issues of female empowerment.
Her newest script, a A Nanking Winter, has its first preview Saturday
night at the Factory Theatre in a Nightwood Theatre production and it
also works on two closely related levels.
It's both a frightening re-creation of 1937's "Rape of Nanking," during
which 300,000 Chinese people were murdered by the Japanese Imperial
Army, and the no-less-harrowing experience of a contemporary Chinese
historian who tries to tell the truth about the invasion at great personal
cost.
For Chan, she willingly admits, "It was a very emotional journey
for me. It was painful enough to learn so much about the massacre of
Nanking, but to recreate the emotions I felt when Iris Chang took her
life was almost impossible to bear."
Chang was the Chinese-American historian whose 1997 book, The Rape
of Nanking, opened a whole new examination of that dark event in history.
The book became an enormous bestseller and brought Chang, when she was
only 29, the fame and fortune of which she had dreamed.
It also brought enormous controversy and political tensions with the
current Japanese government as well as accusations of distortions and
inaccuracies in Chang's work.
Although she was to write one more major work in 2003, The Chinese
in America, Chang's personal life started on a downward spiral as she
was hospitalized for severe depression, eventually taking her own life
in November 2004.
Although Chang's life informs much of Chan's script, the playwright
admits she "deliberately decided not to follow a direct profile."
She changed the character's name to Irene Wu and gave her both a sister
and a Japanese-American husband, neither of which Chang possessed. She
also compressed the action and changed the circumstances of her death.
What did remain was the story a woman who tried to tell the truth as
she perceived it, only to find that much of the world was unwilling
to receive her message.
Asked what she thinks finally drove both the real-life Chang as well
as her fictionalized Wu to suicide, Chan is quiet for a long time.
"I don't know that anyone can fully answer that question for another
person," she says softly, "either in real life or on stage."
Chan admits she finds it fulfilling to "raise people's awareness
to forgotten pieces of history, so that eventually we will be able to
acknowledge things as they're happening. I believe art speaks to so
many people that I'm lucky to do it for a living and have the tools
to express what I feel.
"Where my brain casts and where my heart goes aren't always in
the same direction, but that's what makes the journey fascinating."
WHAT: A Nanking Winter
WHEN: Saturday to Mar. 16
WHERE: Factory Theatre, 125 Bathurst St.
TICKETS: $12 to $36 at 416-504-9971 or nightwoodtheatre.net
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