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Chimerica by Lucy Kirkwood, first performed at the Almeda Theatre, London, 20 May, 2013; transferred to Harold Pinter Theatre, London, 6 August, 2013. Revived at Studio Theater, Washington DC, September/October, 2015 Reviewed by David Scharff* “In ancient Greek myth, a ‘chimera’ was a fire-breathing monster with a lion’s head and a serpent’s tail. In Lucy Kirkwood’s drama, (2013) Chimerica is something bigger and scarier than that. The word was origi- nally coined by historian Niall Ferguson to describe the globally dominant, co-dependent relationship between trigger-happy spendthrift America and control-freak, money-grabbing China” (McGinn, 2013). Chimerica opens with the iconic photograph of Tiananmen Square, 4 June, 1989. We see the “Tank Man” who blocked the advance of a tank towards the protesters, his back to us. A shopping bag in each hand, he faces the tank, which then refuses to run him down. The playwright’s script instructions read, “It is a photograph of one country by another country.” Cultural and political encounter is the theme of the play, played out in the fictional and intensely personal portrait of two denizens of cultures that are in conflict and contrast in so many ways. Joe Schofield, who took the photo as a neophyte news photographer at the age of nineteen, now seeks to find the legendary, if now all but forgotten, “Tank Man” twenty-three years later, just as, in America, Obama seeks re-election against Mitt Romney. In the play, Joe tries to sell his editor a story about investigating whether the tank man is still alive, presumably living now in the US. The editor agrees at first, but later reneges when the corporation owning the paper seeks financing from the Chinese, who, after all, now own American finance. Meanwhile, Joe is in communication with his close Chinese friend, Zhang Lin, who lives in Beijing among the unbreathable smog, and teaches “wild English” to Chinese students, including the offspring of the rich and powerful. Zhang Lin, an educated, intelligent man, is wise to the paradoxes of Western culture’s many contradictions, and capable of far more sophisticated thinking about the complexities of contrast between West and East than is Joe. Two love stories are interwoven with the plot of Joe’s attempt to find the tank man and Zhang Lin’s attempts both to help him and to throw him off

* Also published in Couple and Family Psychoanalysis, 6(1): 118–122. 2016. By permission Phoenix Publishing House.

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the scent. Joe has a love affair with Tessa, a witty English marketing execu- tive, who first fends him off but eventually embraces their relationship. She becomes pregnant, but realises that Joe is incapable of commitment, and sadly decides to have the baby without him. In China, Zhang Lin (aged nineteen years) is deeply in love with Liuli, his equally young wife, who is pregnant with their child. She is killed in the Tiananmen Square mas- sacre, but in the 2012 of the play, she lives in imagination in Zhang Lin’s refrigerator. He cannot get her out of his mind, his unmourned regret still the center of his life. Throughout the play, these two worlds alternate: the cynicism of Joe’s world as he continues his obsession with finding the tank man, and the sad, wiser attempt by Zhang Lin to help him to a story, while throwing him off the track of his obsession with the tank man. Most centrally, Zhang Lin gives Joe clues to the story about the tank’s driver, also a hero because he refused to mow down the tank man. We eventually discover he was executed by the party, even while the Communist Party’s spin doctors made his sympathetic gesture the center of its own efforts to paint itself as a kinder, humanitarian force. Through these plot devices, the way in which the two cultures of China and America fail to understand each other in the global dimension, sym- bolised by the different ways of interpreting Joe’s iconic picture, is inter- woven with the stark difference in the two sexual affairs, one of which (Zhang Lin’s) is much more an affair of the heart than the other. But the real “love affair” at the center of the play is the one between Joe and Zhang Lin, who cannot let go of each other. The irony of this comes to us as it finally becomes clear that Zhang has allowed Joe’s zeal for finding the tank man to undo him entirely. Zhang is in fact the tank man— living until now quietly and anonymously, his identity only known by his brother. Now his attachment to Joe, accompanied by Joe’s unwise texts and e-mails to him—coupled with his own public exposés of the Chinese government’s cover-ups of poisonous pollution—have exposed him to the Party’s security forces, to torture, and eventually to arrest. It is his inability to separate from Joe’s quest, his own reluctant identification with Joe’s self-flattering and self-destructive, quintessentially American hubris, that eventually destroys Zhang. This is not an easy play to discuss from a traditional, intensely individual psychoanalytic point of view. We have no history of the development of any of the characters, with one exception. The woman senator whom Joe uses in trying to find the tank man, we learn, grew up poor, of immigrant parents, and is more deserving of consideration and capable of doing more good than Joe will ever be. So how do we think analytically of the charac- ters, the plot, the meaning of this piece without the kind of information that analysts traditionally see as central to imbuing meaning to a narrative? For 10-TheatreRev_OPUS_7_1.qxp copy.qxp 31/08/2016 14:35 Page 138

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me, this involves a shift from a focus on the individuals in their develop- mental arcs, to the meaning of the encounters in the here-and-now. But more than simply understanding the encounter as we see it before us on the stage, we need to shift perspective. How can we understand the encounter and the clash between two individuals to say something about the encounter of the two cultures in which they live? And how can we understand the way these two contrasting cultures influence each of the individuals who are in and of their own culture, even as they reach out to understand something of the other person and the other culture. (This is a quite personal question for me, involved as I am in teaching psycho- analytic psychotherapy in China, where I struggle to understand the cul- ture even as I offer to bring a quintessentially Western discipline to it.) In this way, we must focus on the role of culture in the life of the individual and the individual in the evolving life of the culture. China has an old, established culture. Despite the early efforts of the Chinese Communist Party and Mao Zedong to eradicate the influence of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism, they remain part of the deep struc- ture of Chinese thought, which is subtle, with philosophical views of good and bad, and a good deal of moral uncertainty about judgments on social matters. At the same time, the rapid shifts in family organisation wrought by the One Child Policy, and in economic organisation by the lightning speed adaptation of an entrepreneurial approach to development, mean that the Chinese themselves do not know where they are or where they are heading culturally. And it remains true that now, as for 2500 years, the government is more focused on eradicating any challenge to its capacity to govern and hold the country together than on any other principle of gov- erning. Therefore, individual acts are to be judged according to whether they support the Chinese state. This is far from a new idea in the Chinese universe, contrasting sharply with the American ethic of honouring the rights of individuals. Meanwhile, we have the hubris of Western, and especially American, idealism with its focus on clear distinctions between good and bad. A man is a hero if he stands up for what he believes. The state is there to uphold order, but individual freedom, the integrity of the individual, and human rights trump everything. The play is thus a psychological dramatisation of the clash of cultures and moralities. I think it is a triumph by its author, Lucy Kirkwood, to enact the subtlety of this cultural situation through the nuances of personal relationships and encounters. Joe and Zhang Lin, two close friends from America and China, know a great deal about each other. It is clear, how- ever, that Zhang Lin knows and understands far more about Joe than Joe does about Zhang. It is not just that Joe does not know Zhang’s true iden- tity. Zhang Lin understands Joe’s idealism and its destructive potential from 10-TheatreRev_OPUS_7_1.qxp copy.qxp 31/08/2016 14:35 Page 139

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the beginning—but he cannot bring himself to separate from it. Through his inability to give up on Joe and his identification with Joe’s idealism he brings about his own and his family’s downfall. Joe expresses the blind and self-destructive elements of American idealism. He ploughs ahead despite repeated warnings of trouble for him- self and those he drags with him—his friend Zhang Lin, the tank driver’s family, the senator who befriends him, and for his newspaper. By analogy, we can see at a personal level the way the US causes trouble for friends and enemies alike in its blindly self-righteous pursuit of principle. And yet, the world does identify with the American, humanitarian ethic, the damn-the-torpedoes-full-steam-ahead attitude to human rights and to the spread of the democratic ideal. Zhang Lin cannot extricate and save himself because, unconsciously, he agrees with Joe even as he tries to warn him of the dangers awaiting him and of the way he is dragging every- one into the abyss. The two romances the play features, the youthful Zhang Lin and Liuli, and the more jaded and worldly one of Joe and Tessa, also give flesh and blood reality to these problems. Zhang and Liuli’s romantic, hopeful rela- tionship, their sexual relationship is valued, giving life to hope, but it is smashed by the Communist Party’s heartless crackdown on idealistic youth. Joe and Tessa’s sexual and romantic relationship is both more mature and more cynical, undone by their own failures of the heart in a world of free choice. The paradoxes and ironies are complex and bewil- dering. In this sea of contrasts, we as the audience who come (so far) only from the Western point of view, are likely to be bewildered ourselves by the picture of the greater wisdom of the Chinese characters in this drama. Psychologically, in the encounter of vivid individual characters, we can see played out the implications for two tragic figures who are presented to us very much as realistic individuals. Those who surround them also seem real. And at the same time, reflecting on this play, we can come to see many complex ways in which the characters represent their respective cultures. Joe and Zhang Lin both hope passionately to make a difference to the culture in which they live—Joe with his iconic pictures and Zhang Lin with his political protest. Each is defeated, and in their defeat they carry with them the destruction of those they love. We can admire both for their fervent dedication, while seeing the tragedy of their dogged, single- minded, excessive dedication. And we identify with them, recognising that we too wish for justice, for human rights, for the ability to stand up to tyranny. And reluctantly, we can see the personal risk and sacrifice of those we love on the altar of such devotion. This is a probing, even-handed, wise, knowledgeable exploration of the human heart, the relationship of the human heart to the social and political realities in which it and we must always live, and the unknowable qualities 10-TheatreRev_OPUS_7_1.qxp copy.qxp 31/08/2016 14:35 Page 140

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of good and bad that can betray even the most well-meaning attempts to set the world right, East or West, in the encounter between the two. Chimerica, the title as well as the play, expresses the way that China and America are now and forever, inextricably joined in enigmatic ways that will always belie easy solutions to the complexities of our relationship.

REFERENCES

Kirkwood, L. (2013). Chimerica. London: Nick Hern. McGinn, C. (2013). Chimerica Review, posted 14 June. London: Time Out. www.timeout.com/london/theatre/chimerica