 I'm a doctoral student in Asian theater and university of poetry. So if you're one of my advisors, I talk to you. Because I study classical theater specifically in Japan. And I also do cover contemporary Japanese theater a little bit more. That would be not part of this presentation today. And artistically, I'm a director and an actor. And currently, I'm an apprentice at the theater of Yu-Gen. Just a couple of walks away from here. Yeah, Yu-Gen! Where we do a lot of fusion work, combining traditional Japanese theater, usually known with contemporary European scripts or Western literature to create something new again. So we're sort of working in this Asian American milieu, but different, I guess. Alright, but what are we here for today? Today we're here to talk about ghosts in Asian American theater. And how ghosts are symbolic representation of the Asian immigrant experience. And also we'll be talking about horror movies and Asian horror and Asian ghosts, which I know many of you are excited about, which we will be getting to that as well. But in order to get a better feel for how the Asian horror and ghost genre be popular with the Ring and Jewel or the Grudge, have been influenced by centuries-old traditions, and how that's really affecting Asian American theater today, I'd like to start sort of in a reversed fashion. Start by talking about characteristics of Asian American drama. And get some of the boring literary things out of the way so we have a better context to talk about, especially the plays today. The one that hopefully some of you just saw, and if you've read the Xevo, the one that hopefully many of you are sticking around to see the brothers' paranormal. Alright, so to begin with, what is Asian American drama? This question is quite contentious, and so what I'm giving here are some characteristics of what we might call Asian American drama. This is not to be an exclusive, exhaustive wisdom. This is theater for Asians. This is some of the things that playwrights especially have developed, and from reading a number of plays and looking at the history of what we have developed by stage as Asian Americans, what kinds of themes emerge from this? Alright, so the first thing here is as a recognition of Asian and Western cultural influences on Asian American lives. American theater, in my opinion in general, can be characterized as a search for identity and a discussion of what it means to be American. Whether we're talking about The Octo Room or Tony Kushner's Angels in America, the interrogation of what it means to be an American has existed in dramatic literature since the founding of the nation. And when tackling this issue of identity, race plays a central role in a process of what I call navigating the hyphenate, which means recognizing the influence of both ancestral culture and American culture on an individual. We might also call it a blank hyphen American drama, but all of all this navigating the hyphenate to make a sound case. The navigation of this hybrid identity is a major component of Asian American theater. In addition, the majority of Asian immigration to America is a relatively recent phenomenon happening last 100, 150 years primarily, creating large groups of first, second, third, or in my case fourth generation Asian Americans far removed from their cultural heritage that is not the dominating force of daily life, but it's close enough that it remains a prominent influence on who you are. This history leads to both of the next major characteristics, which is a presence of multi-generational families on stage and reclaiming or connecting to cultural history. Multi-generational families are vital importance to the greater themes of the Asian American theater because family is one of the major conquest of culture and it's how we connect and identify ourselves through our parents, through our grandparents, through our great grandparents, going back generations to figure out how has culture come down to me, how has my ancestry come to me? And thus it plays a significant role also in the process of reclaiming cultural history. This is not to say that in order to reclaim Asian cultural history with the same blood in the parent's family as we do, we have to reject the American part of our identities, but rather, in order to better appreciate what it means to be Asian at the autosuperficial level, reconnecting with the cultural past is a necessity. To rediscover in cultural history then it's a major element of Asian American drama because as the temporal distance between generations gets larger and larger, the immediate influence of our history becomes further and further removed and the strength of that hybrid identity begins to slowly disappear over time as we become simply American. But what fuels that need then for reconnecting? In my personal experience, that need is driven by an externalized other way where people look at you and say, this is who you are because of your parents or things that you have done with your life or cultural practices, your family, like how like I grew up eating chopsticks and I had a rice cooker at home. I didn't realize that that was in common until I was almost 15. But these are the kinds of things that other people think you need to identify, from people. And because the process of death plays a very strong way to develop your identity but that othering is often times racially generated. Because the process of othering often relies on the appearance and the shape of things and how we expect things to look and function. All of our groups, of course, have been subjected to this stereotype. And this means these are used as a means of repression both politically and culturally, consciously and unconsciously. Even if you think this is something funny, this is a joke, when we're using stereotypes in someone we're playing into this history, into this political pressure. And so the final major characteristic of Asian American theater is the deconstruction of orientalist stereotypes that have defined Asians in America well over a century now. Something that I actually feel very busy with quite effectively. We'll talk about that toward the end of the presentation. All right, now I should note that these characteristics are not just in Asian America. Anyone talking about immigrant theater in any way can usually use these kinds of things. One of the things that I feel is really important here is that this has been a major force and these characteristics are strongly expressed in Asian American theater, more so than other kinds of theater which have different sort of focuses. Okay, so why is this culture active? Why is this important behind it? How does that emerge in today's two plays? Why is it that ghosts are the vehicles for these characteristics? Why ghosts? In order to have a better appreciation of how ghosts work and why we're using them in this in this particular scene. I'd like to look at the place of ghosts in traditional Asian culture first. I think it would be helpful to use Buddhism as sort of a meta-narrative to look at the beliefs and philosophies and the spiritual powers of ghosts in traditional Asian culture. So for those who aren't really familiar with the history of Buddhism, it traveled from India through China and into East and Southeast Asia. And since Buddhism is a much less dogmatic religion than either Christianity or Islam, the cultures that I came into contact with were heavily influenced by Buddhism but Buddhism in turn was influenced by local culture from local customs. And so as it adapted to the various locales across Asia, indigenous practices sometimes mixed with and sometimes just simply came side-by-side with Buddhist philosophy. And therefore, several broad similarities exist across disparate cultures even if the precise traditions and customs are a little different, and completely alien to one another. But they still have this sort of meta-narrative to help ground them together. One of the results of the syncretism is a pronounced split in the philosophy behind what ghosts are, especially the ghosts of dead persons. And incorporeal beings were spirits that were not once living humans. So basically, we're looking in two large categories of things that English, we would usually refer to just as spirits generally. But they have very different places in East Asian philosophy, especially in the Buddhist way. We have ghosts of dead people and natural spirits. Spirits of trees, of rocks, of mountains, sometimes in places. It depends of course on the cultures to how we find this, but these are two very different categories. And Buddhist doctrine also helped mold a general Asian view on how ghosts are created. Why are ghosts here? What are they doing? Ghosts are created by emotional attachment to the living world. Basically, they're created by addiction to being alive. You have more constant, always wanting to experience more. And whether that is love, or it's anger, or it's passion, or it's drive, or war, or destruction, these attachments keep people in the world happening and dying. And so they're unable to escape. And when a soul was unable to transition to the next phase of existence correctly because of these worldly attachments, usually a priest or a monk is able to pray for the spirit to find enlightenment. And frequently using the phrase Namu Amida, for some variation thereof, which roughly means a hail Buddha, the spirit can find enlightenment and be released from life. The big trick here is that unlike Western ghosts without forage, Asian ghosts, especially Buddhist ghosts, cannot be satiated. They can't be satisfied. They are addicted to being alive. And much like you wouldn't want to give a method of more depth to make them feel better. You want to get an awfulness. This is the same idea with ghosts. You can't give them the emotional experience. You can't give them their revenge because it just makes them want it even more in the future. And they'll never be able to escape. So a priest acts kind of like a therapist. He says, alright, you've had enough. It's time to go. Thank you. Men's wills of murdered victims held onto their revenge and ripping off your face don't exist. And they're very popular in entertainment. And so if it's not surprising that for both their religious and entertainment value, ghosts and ghost stories have their major source of theater and cinema in Asia. Traditional Asian theater ghosts are traditional Asian theater has had an enormous impact on the development of horror genre in more ways than one. And so I'd like to take a moment to look at some of these traditional Asian theaters and since the Asian horror as a genre basically originated in Japan I'd like to look at plus the Japanese theater as the root of this horror genre. So to begin with, ghosts serve a dual function as entertainment and religious parable in one breath. This is typified more strongly than we know. How many of you are familiar with no? Okay. Okay, they know basically that the idea though is usually about the spirit of the dead person that's disguised as a living person somebody comes along and encounters this ghost and there's a moment of reveal where we are actually talking to the ghost of the dead we're talking in the past this is really creepy. It was developed first in the 1400s and it was designed originally to be both spiritual and entertaining. No was popular theater 600 years ago. But ghosts in no function less like ghosts in revenge stories or spooky tales so they weren't designed to be plays to scare your socks off they were designed to be plays to get you engaged with more of an existential view of the world and why do we suffer? How do we suffer? How can I no longer suffer? That was sort of the idea of no. That's of those souls of suffering people who have been trapped between life and death because of the inability to let go of attachments and so on and so forth. Dramaturgically, these ghosts tell the stories of their lives and the places they lived and how they died, which are often tragic and full of pent-up emotions and pathos and they can connect both the characters on stage and the audience to the source of that pathos and frequently employ a moment of double-speak where seemingly human character drops their pretense of disguise reveals that they are a ghost and pulls the audience into a phantasma moment creating a liminal space where truth and reality are destroyed everything that was once objective becomes subjective and it's a scary place to be. That's where fear originates and you know, suddenly you have to question what is real? What is truth? I don't know anymore this is really weird, oh my god. This then plays into another common culture or excuse me, a common trait in traditional Asian fear where causality is sometimes only hinted at if even at all, things just happen for sometimes no reason and it's up to us then to interpret why this is going on what is really happening here and the stories then are often left completely open-ended a sort of resolution might be achieved where the ghost goes away for the day but there's no guarantee it's not coming back tomorrow and it's in my opinion that this reflection and transglute to the Buddhist viewpoint where existence is encompassed by a cyclical rather than a linear motion like it is in the western phantom of development nothing really ends and this openness is very pronounced I don't know however about the 1600s and the early 1900s rather than popular entertainment in fact there are journals from the 1600s of aristocrats saying that they were going to punish their children by taking them to know and making them feel helpless I should tell you about how far down the 200 years is kind of here not to say that they cannot be enjoyable now they must defend you again here at every time we do know, I love knowing beautiful means of expression but it's not normally the kind of thing that most people will go and seek out for but that got replaced instead by Kabuki Kabuki is the spectacle hybrid monster that dominated the Japanese theater for basically 300 years and right up until World War II Kabuki was the dominant form of theater in Japan and it was highly popular, people loved it but one particular place instead of talking about oh, Kabuki is this, Kabuki is that I'd like to focus just on one place in the repertoire which I think is very, very telling and belated the place is called Yotsuya Kaimon Ghosts of Yotsuya it was originally staged in 1825 and tells the story of a woman who becomes a vengeful ghost sounds familiar already this particular story is a dramatization that combines two real-life grizzling murders with a well-known tradition of ghost stories in Japan that dates back to 1700s and creates a spectacular revenge ghost play the events of this particular play are one of the things that made it so famous so, in summary, it's assuming most people don't know the story of the ghost of Yotsuya so Oliwak is a woman who is poisoned by a jealous rival this poison mutates her face and causes her hair to fall out of ready clumps as we can see here on my left the actor puts on homostatic which deforms their face and looks at their eyes sagging and as the actor is combing his hair the hair comes out of the width and so in a stagehand he is sitting under the stage pushing extra hair up through the floorboards to make it look like her hair is piling larger and larger she goes more and more frantic and blood starts to drip on her hair and form a lot of piles for her it's one of the most spectacular scenes in her life it's a spectacular scene it's one of the things that makes it so famous the story continues Oliwak's husband disgusted now with the side of her hiders someone to rape her so that he can force her for adultery because classical realism is not very condo women but the mercenary, instead of killing Oliwak takes pity on her because of her horrific appearance and instead shows her her own reflection so she can understand why her husband would want her to make such a tragic fate Oliwak flies into a terrible rage and accidentally trips and cuts her throat on the sword that the mercenary is carrying she bleeds out on the floor killing her husband through his final days and the husband, realizing that now he's going to be guilty of the murder of his wife decides to take her body and nail it to a door then nails a servant to the other side of the door and throws both of them into a river hoping that when their bodies are found he can claim that she was being unfaithful to the servant and thus as her husband it was his right to murder both of them and desecrate their bodies but Oliwak, having been killed full of rage and hatred returns as a vengeful ghost torrenting her husband into killing several people including her rival and her entire family and after her husband flees because he realizes he's being tormented on the coast he finds the door floating down the river and he pulls it out to the bank but the body is still in real life and the bodies return to life to have one last go at cursing the husband and this is only the midpoint of act three and a five act play this play is very very long there are many more events and crazy spectacles because these two events are really what make Yotsuya Kai not so famous the play was a smash success that not only captured the anxieties of the early 19th century Japan but has lent itself to numerous interpretations that have allowed it to endure to the present it is one of the only Kabuki plays that has been regularly performed since it was created in 1825 very other few plays can make this play it's still one of the most popular plays in the repertoire today due to both the story and of course which I sort of described Kabuki theater was at such a stage of sophistication by the 19th century that a lot of effects like the bloody hair being pushed up to the floorboards have been created which occurs in act two but it's really the husband finding the door with the bodies on it that creates one of the most virtuoso performances in all of Kabuki which is kind of easy in Kabuki all the actors are played all the roles are played by men so even female characters are male actors and so over on the right-hand side of the screen this is where the husband finds the bodies this is Oguiwa nailed to the door what's amazing though is that he covers it real quickly with a rug and then flips the door over and the same actor is playing the murder servant on the other side of the door so the actor playing Oguiwa is having to do a sudden costume change for three or four seconds portray the other character flip the door back around to switch back into Oguiwa so these kinds of things have made this play just spectacularly popular because these are special effects one rival play in place at a time Unsurprisingly this play has been adapted for the film and television starting in early as 1912 and is most recently is 2006 making it highly popular and widely known for the story to be handled these adaptations offers a gruesome and horrific quality of the 1825 script this particular design for Oguiwa's make-up is one of every film adaptation of this story the combination of brutality, violence, terror and spectacle are all hallmarks of the Asian horror genre just from looking at the make-up it's easy to see a direct connection between Yotsuke Ion and Senegal J. Horror filmed with a ring you can already see the prototype of Sonica here with her hair, with her long hair and her creamy face it's a natural evolution from one to the other the modern archetype of the creepy Asian ghost girl is heavily informed by these traditions and Kabuki set the expectation their performance could be both spectacular and terrifying and smashed together with a fantasmal, unexplainable nature of the film the stage is set for an unstoppable horror tradition the comparison between Yotsuke Ion and the modern Japanese horror film doesn't really need to be explained but in the ring in particular I find a few other fascinating vestiges of the film things that have trickled down in the centuries how many of you have seen the ring or are familiar with the story of the ring oh, very few the ring is basically the story of a murdered young girl whose body is thrown down a well and her spirit manages to create a supernatural videotape an old VHS anybody who watches the videotape receives a creepy phone call saying that in seven days they are going to die and at the end of seven days her ghost crawls out of her television screen and terrifies you to death a basic plot of the ring but, sorry the protagonist discovers that the girl can be stopped the person who views the video makes a copy of the tape and shows it to someone else and basically what this is is you're sharing your story long enough to get her off your back for a moment much as listening to and interacting with some of the very powerful spirits and you know playing is enough to ameliorate that moment they actually are striking similarity with their events nirvana is not achieved you do not escape the cycle of life and death but in both cases the story is blood ended and the audience can continue to reflect on it just as they would in a no play another static that I think Asian horror takes from no is the idea that something is just not right you can't always put your finger on it something is strange, something is weird from the central figure in a no play whether he or she walks oddly embarrassing herself in the third person or if you encounter them and suddenly there's a night when it used to be day or storm comes out of nowhere something is just off and the other characters can sense that and so can the audience so the phantasmal when the spirit reveals who they really are creates a parallel into this liminal world there's a parallel in the treatment of ghost movies and horror movies where impossible and horrific sounds like a cat which is made famous by the movie Rudge or the terrifying terrifying bodies like a little girl crawling before a disjointed and mangled limbs like a ring makes the familiar strange it's completely disorienting to join in to make this thing more so the reality isn't real this abnormality of the expression in a fashion film usually be much more cinematic of course but strikes the same disorienting core stage with connection alright so then why was J4 so successful in the rest of Asia I believe it's because similar to those traditions that link together to this Buddhist medivari that I already talked about for example when we look at Korea dating back to the time of the Free Kingdoms which is late after antiquity there was a dog that was used by generals to chase away spirits human and owner in a shamanistic fashion another famous Korean ghost tale concerns a young woman named Aron who was killed while defending herself from a rapist her ghost successfully punishes the magistrates who wouldn't know about it successfully punishes magistrates who will not investigate her death until finally someone does to finally someone does and after trying a temple was built to venerate her a temple which still stands in Korea today actually is a very popular story and Aron is a typical example of how Korean is applied as a typical example of what's called a Buishin or literally the spirit of a dead person which in Korean folklore is contrasted by a yudhion or an immaterial spirit so it goes this idea of ghosts or a delinquent Buddhism native religion deals with spirits or shamanistic sense and in fact Aron is the cover type of the stereotypical modern Korean ghost which by most accounts is a young girl dressed in almond white and long black hair and haunts places of great psychic trauma a publication of a suicide murmur and frequently looks like one of these images here and as you can see here again similarities with Iwak and the girl from the ring is exactly like this this is the same thing you can see here Thailand so Thailand while we're looking at Thailand because of brother's paranormal some of the Thai influences in our play Thailand is interesting because while it's predominantly Buddhist nation folk customs have all made an integral part of Thai beliefs and a plethora of ghosts and spirits exist to haunt Thailand they haunt houses and cemeteries and also trees interestingly enough and most of these terms of spirits all in the term pink usually just means a ghost but they can't be on a wide range of terms and again I'm not an expert in Thai culture so from what I understand these spirits are they're usually spirits of the dead we're talking about trees but it makes for an interesting mix of both the ghosts of the target and natural spirits all these many spirits are uniquely Thai but some also have minor culturalities for example the Preta or Pitta are associated with Buddhist beings called Hungry Ghosts that were greedy or voracious people in life but after death they're attachment to greed and to consumption is so strong that they return as ghosts with swollen bellies and eternally insatiable appetites but constricted throats that no matter how much they try to eat they can never be satisfied because nothing ever reaches their soul and they're hunger, bully, or is in death these are pictures of Preta from Thailand you can see the long starving tongue the tiny necks and huge with the distended belly especially in the female figure these Preta are found in every other culture especially Japan that all came from no place to dramatize and another kind of universal spirit found in Thailand is called Pthai Holm or is the same kind of spirit that is found across Asia represented in the ring and it's usually that vengeful ghost the scary ghost with that spirit is restless and suffered a violent or cruel death on the other end of the Thai story with a uniquely Thai story is the story about a woman named Mai Ngoc Ngoc was a beautiful woman who died during childhood while her husband was away at war and when he returned home he found his wife and child bleeding from his and all those who were named these were ghosts of people who died to disappear or mysterious to the world one day the husband learned the truth about his ghostly wife and child and flees in the middle of the night and Ngoc flies into a rage attacking her neighbors accusing them of having driven off her husband but eventually she's found her own birth and daughter by a powerful monk a variation of an exorcist practice that's found in other countries such as China as well she's venerated for her loving devotion to her husband in the modern day and people make regular offerings to her in the temple but still stands in her memory in Ngoc so she has been a widely popular Thai story in every one family time built in the story this is a picture of the shrine of Mai Ngoc these are various representations of her and dresses or other goods that are given to her to pray for easy childbirth or more emotional emotion okay so again I want to talk a little bit here about the ghost and modern age so we get some of these retarded figures with the ring and open-endedness this is a picture from the movie the ring itself knows the similarities again with Korea and Kabuki and this girl she crawls here in the lower left corner crawls out of the TV to kill someone alright so with all this in mind it's going to take a little bit of two flights for today for those of you who are planning on seeing Brothers Parallel that haven't already I'm going to be probably giving away a little bit of the plot that's why I was figuring that I was going to do this a lot of stuff is going to need to be cut here so we're going to eat so I realized that most of you probably haven't seen a red dress as I was doing so it's pointless to enforce the name it's not a good idea it's not a good idea it's pointless to enforce the name I will do my best to not give anything away mostly about the other thing I'm saying I'm going to throw this at you ok, things I can't talk about the recognition of duality in the process of bothering ghosts in both of these plays are used to establish otherness and that emphasizes the need to navigate a multicultural identity like the interference of these plays in their descendants ghosts are things which don't belong but linger because they don't have a place to be near the top of Affluence C3 and Brothers Parallel Felix took quotes one of the characters quotes an article speculating about a rise in Asian ghost sightings in the US the article attributes it to the rise of popular Asian horror movies but through the metaphysical lens of the immigrant perhaps there could be more reasons why aren't we seeing more Asian ghosts in America than part of this play and perhaps the reason is that because Asian ghosts don't have anywhere else to go they are completely out of context just like the immigrants that they represent ghosts are always seen as the other because they're not part of the living therefore not one of us and Asian ghosts are further step removed to America because Asians are an additional lover it's not only are they not living they're also not American they know where to go and it's interesting that to see who sees ghosts who doesn't see ghosts, how these ghosts get represented in Brothers Parallel it's when you're watching the play pay attention to who looks at the ghosts who can see them and who can't because I think this is informed very heavily by the relationships of people in America immigrant communities, native communities to especially African American communities how our histories are very quite divergent but lead to the same question who is what, who is us, who is not alright, this process is inverted in Dread of the Zebra the mother in Dread of the Zebra was transplanted from her old country to a new one where she finally found a way to identify herself with the new world through home gardening channel and through her attachment to curb appeal but suddenly she finds that she has to return to Korea to take care of her mother and is forced to confront this identity that she has sort of been giving up the mother is now a foreign mother in her home country longing for the American mainstream and desperately hanging on anything like the trellis to retain her new identity as an American it's only after she has her own ghostly out-of-body experience where she encounters mythological beings possibly the spirit of her mother possibly not possibly Kim Jong-il possibly not possibly asking Korea that she is able to return or start the process of returning to a complete home and it's her otherness that turns her journey into one like the Asian ghost from the western soil ghosts in both these plays guide the living through this other territory to negotiate the Asian American hybrid identity Max needs to be reminded of who he is, the main character from Brothers Parent World and he has fed his cultural past with Hannah on her family on the other hand basically, you know, reminded of their Asian because they are constantly being confronted throughout the play but they are stuck trying to fully grasp what that might mean in light of the incomprehensible circumstances surrounding Hannah's grandmother's suicide and there is sudden relocation to Korea Korea is not America America is not Korea so where do they belong how do they fit into the world and the answer to that the multi-generational aspect takes on new dimensions in direct gazebo by linking the death of the ghosts of their recent dead, the spirits of the nations past and placing the demilitarized zone in a liminal space with unlimited potential for enlightenment much as you would find in an open the line of ascension from tiger mom to grandmother to mother to daughter is a pathway for transmission of myth and legend and the temporal distance we are skipping again this is about Brothers Parent World alright suffice to say that in Brothers Parent World there is a collision of past and present in that play and look for that how that might be then influenced by this understanding of the Buddhist and the spirits of the past coming back first and this is where things really diverge quite heavily between these two plays so looking largely at Hannah and the Dreadless Evo and the process of reclaiming cultural history the ghosts of the sea different metaphysical states of the game the ghosts in Dreadless Evo aren't just souls of the dead this play is filled with psychological spirits and creates the space where the ghost spirit dichotomy is deconstructed and the two elements open up a world of history and myth melded at our native concrete at our native real this liminal space also stretches beyond singular culture and establishes the amalgamated culture of the living characters and habit in this way ghosts are used much more like they would be known in part 3 scene 11 there's a number of wonderful I just love from Dreadless Evo that demonstrates construction of the liminal space first off the tiger grandmother is there the reference to the stereotypical roaring friend in Asian tiger lung is probably quite immediately obvious to many of us especially those of us that have grown up with Asian American families that issue was very slightly less hard to miss but the boundaries between ghost and spirit are challenged but the same actor playing both the tiger grandmother and grandmother forcing these two different kinds of spirits sort of the naturalistic spirit and the spirit of the dead into a single physical body and bridging the dead and bringing the dead and the mythological together and turning it into a contour for greater spiritual truth then in added reference to that tiger grandmother dressed in the grandmother slippers has just actually probably eaten the actual grandmother of the play as another cultural layer because you can't have a talking wild animal dressed like an old lady threatening to eat someone's grandmother without a book immediately you're booking a little red riot obviously it's not difficult to do that which makes this whole moment even more bizarre and even less usual and so suddenly this is not just a ghost play this isn't just an immigrant story it's the retelling of a class of European and fable as well and boundaries between culture, past, present, future and individual identity have been completely destroyed and we are left with nothing but an open liminal space where identity and reality are completely fluid all of this is all brought together by the little stone in the bottom that Hannah has inherited from her grandmother whatever the stone in the bottom really is whether it is actually the remains of the bare spirit of antiquity or if it's just a hell of a way to prevent it from starting a vial that hey this is your pool by virtue of the spirit journey in this play it makes the mythological vial it doesn't matter to me mythology has been made concrete in this stone and that makes the object it really makes it then a heart's wish the heart's wish of the ancient bear in this process of making the mythological vial opens up another important Asian American element which is the deconstruction of identity based on stereotype dang is actually my favorite example for the play and when at the top of part two he starts talking about being in Korea for the first time with his conscious memory how it's messing with the construction of Kruge is because he's so used to seeing everyone not looking like him that he's kind of based his identity and not looking like everybody else and so suddenly everybody looks just like him who am I what's going on and every part of him screams out that he doesn't belong and he finds that he is almost completely unable to tell one person from another is the constant brain jokes with command with garlic the girl is indicating is that really a different person can't actually tell and as the girl says just because you're Asian but because of his understanding of what it means to be Korean it's built around his physical stereotypes and so this play deconstructs those stereotypes and it's through the channel of the man with garlic that dang is able to really deconstruct these images of himself and the identity he's formed for himself the old man becomes dang's story in the past as he provides the conduit for dang to connect with his Korean heritage and to begin to understand it on a much deeper metaphysical level even though dang doesn't speak Korean however but somehow when the old man starts to speak to him in the subway train he understands the myth that he's being told he understands it on some very personal very deep level of how Korea was created and how he was created and like the 100% hearts level wish that Hanna receives dang is eventually given a token of his past connection that piece of garlic that he received from the old man eventually both dang and his sister have now been given parts that mythology made concrete and thus they can begin to come to a new understanding of what it means to be Asian-American and like the Amish Gazebo on the rooftop of the apartment building in South Korea, Hanna and her family they never fit perfectly into the surrounding environment but through the ghosts of the past and the specters of the world that they inhabit they can still find a place to be I think I'm going to end it here Do you know why the ghosts in all those traditions are female? I was going to give you a question this was something that I had a question on but again like I had sort of thought handily commented on in Buddhism, traditional Buddhism in East Asia was very unkind women were thought to be very and very incapable of being able to control their emotions and many especially no one has learned about women and their jealousy and their attachments and their trivial things so I think that plays very strongly into why women even to this day in East Asian cultures how they're fighting up about Feminism in Asia is a very very steep hill that people are still trying to overcome and I think the ghosts that represent that philosophy brought to you brought to life in the modern anything else? I saw the film the Thai film Lam Na I guess about 10, 15 or so years ago that was made on that that's what we were talking about I was wondering how faithful are modern interpretations I mean obviously the ghost stories are you know the modern ghost stories are variations but the ones that try to tell a traditional story how accurate do they tend to stay and those kinds of actually the question for you was your stance on that I don't know I know that there have been dozens and dozens of adaptation of that particular legend so I think there are variations on whatever the quote unquote truth is I mean in terms of like the legend I mean I've even known that we could even claim the legend as being pure truth yeah I'm not entirely sure but there are many variations of that thank you this is trivial but I'm curious and this made me more curious what's the significance of the garlic as the sustenance that they're given in Korea I wish I knew the answer to that that's an excellent question do you guys have any ideas does anyone have any ideas well I just you know I remember when I first went to Korea many years ago and I was told well you know you think Italians eat so much garlic well they eat 13 pounds per person per year Koreans use 26 pounds per person per year so it's such a basic food I'm just thinking it's a basic essential food it does ward off evil spirits ah I know that in many cultures this is actually more of a western thing with the garlic but I once heard that resulting in the why this whole thing about vampires for instance why they're warded off by garlic was because they're dead bodies and garlic was used to cover up the smell of dead bodies so if you smell garlic instead of dead rotting flesh I don't know maybe that has something to do with them like yeah I have a question so with regards to the personalities of the ghosts of female ghosts in particular in the various cultures you've mentioned I wonder is there generally a distinct shift in the personality of the being that is the ghost in life versus death because there's so so sinister is it like they've always been like that very much like are they all opened up to that possibility after that that's a really interesting question I think when we're looking at especially traditional storytelling women are transformed if we're talking about the female ghost actually any ghost in this case a ghost is transformed by whatever emotion it is most strongly attached to the reason they can't move on is because their entire existence has been replaced by that evolution so in the case of most of the female ghosts women were assumed to be rather jealous or vengeful that was the characteristic standard they assigned to them and so it was always assumed that either jealousy or rage always consumed their whole existence so they were definitely usually not like that as women in life but they become that as women in death to more or less of a certain degree sometimes it's like there's a story about a woman who it's very obvious that she was destined for this fate sort of like to explain how women are like this anyway so it's very sexist but sometimes that is the case but in most cases no people are completely transformed by whatever they were attached to specifically a unique about Japanese ghosts I remember the Japanese film festival all about ghost stories and how they were a lot of foxes, fire fox as foxes there's specific kinds of ghosts unique I didn't go into that here but every East Asian has a giant plethora of different kinds of spirits fox spirits are actually not completely unique to Japan they're shared across many East Asian cultures but foxes are usually ship shifters and tricksters and they're known as beings of great magic mystic power why they're always tricksters I'm not entirely positive but that is a common thing for foxes so yeah that's just one example of many other kinds of spirits that exist out there fox spirits are an example of a natural spirit they were not a person who died in the past they're not vengeful or anything like that they're just usually out to make people's lives different I'm directing Princess Play which I'm precisely not an expert on Asian ghost or ghost Asian or otherwise but I've had to watch quite a few Thai horror movies which I don't like them which is selflessness but the thing that became really clear fairly quickly at least in the kind of vengeful female ghost movies that I was focusing on they also have children there's like another version that are about children ghosts but it usually seems like at least in the modern storytelling or the modern stories the way the ghost is in death is really defined more so by the nature of their death so what happened to them when they died you know how they died and usually it involves an unjust or painful or whether it be rape or murder or you know and etc they take that turn it seems like that's the thing they carry and that's the things they're trying to invent so it doesn't seem like it really always carries to how they are in life but it's how they are in the moment of their death what they experience but I would say from a very limited I absolutely agree yeah could you provide us with just a quick overview what are male ghosts like male ghosts or a male ghost would male ghosts go after somebody who cheated them for example other male ghosts so when we're looking at I'm going to go back to note here there's a whole bunch of different kinds of male ghosts they were men who were cut down in the prime of their lives and they're very they don't realize the battle is going on because they were so focused on the battle they don't realize the battle is over and what they're doing is they're fighting a battle for hundreds of years that they have no place in anymore because it's gone or they can be murder victims again people who are after revenge or someone who has been cut down for not necessarily the prime of their life and drowns himself because a girl is being spiteful towards him and she tricks him into believing that she's in love with him and when it comes out that he's not going to throw himself in a river or a pond and drowns himself and he comes back for the sole purpose of making this world as like a devil that's all he does and he threatens her he says that she's going to be old and ugly and he starts cursing these things like the infirmities of age because he himself was an old man there are other kinds of ghosts for example it's the moment when they're not coming to you so there are, they do exist does that help at all? yeah it's something like women they're supposed to be bendable and overly attached to the world and find out what our male ghost is like you know so usually pretty angry they're sort of angry at the circumstances and instead of being vengeful completely they're more about it's like trying to get out of the camp because the only way they know how to get out it's a story of a young boy again it's a story of a young boy who was cut down in the battle and he doesn't realize that the world is going on without him essentially it's a note played by a very famous aristocratic old man he was very talented he was very artistic he was very genteel poetry and he was a real badass on the battlefield he was really respected he was killed at 16 by a much older general of a rival army his ghost was never able to run because he was so upset at having died in the left line yeah I'm sorry I missed some parts of this I don't know if you talked at all about spirit houses no I did not actually did you mention that that house was the house that was from where I had found ghost haunted houses like houses are a place for you abandoned houses especially places you can find ghosts is that what you're talking about no no houses which is a place which is a place everything and I'm not actually too knowledgeable but the reason I ask that is because for two of the plays at least then I know there are discussions about that and just in the drama charge of discussions of the plays the idea that a spirit has a place to go back to when they visit their relatives or their families what else was said well I mean tell us about spirit houses are you referring to the little tiny house where you leave food for them they're a little like altreds but you put it in the hall I did some research because we discussed this and they often are outside and there's doors and somewhere there's a ghost to go so that they don't bother you so that there's no rest in the house and we talked about that during and just as a question the director brought up it was also the main feature of the fortune that was yes that was a Chinese although the yeah it was a different version we sort of had to fudge it in terms of traditions it should have been a bucket where we went with the little the main reason why we used that specific house was that it was actually a very Chinatown Asian ghost place it was because it was actually like $15 in Chinatown sort of like very Americanized and you know it had a little red candle that you plugged in it was super super cheesy and that was actually purposeful so I can't say that it has a lot of roots in no but then it's still it's an Asian American play it's a multi hyphenate play right it's not just even a Asian Irish American play yeah well the way we used that one was the house sort of like what you're saying was a way for the sister to communicate with her dead brother so to be able to send things to him she was going through this super Americanized super cheesy Chinese looking red candles but it was like a bunch of video game interface she put something in it with download to the level of the game where he was in the athlete what's the name of that because it seems like well right now Obama is starting so the Japanese tradition of like when the ancestors come back to your house they're supposed to come back and so and you're supposed to be there to say hello and give them a party like in Day of the Dead I'm just wondering like is this the inevitability of ghosts is supposed to come back you find that dominant in Asian American theater that we're in it's just you're supposed to live with ghosts to understand the question correctly so the question is for Asian American theater is the expectation we just have to live with ghosts or is that we're expecting them to come back all the time either or I think because the way that ghosts are used in Asian American drama that there's an expectation you're always living amongst the ghosts of those who come for us I really think it's that we're expecting them to sort of cyclically return but that they're always present they're always in our lives and they're always informing who we are whether we recognize that in any given moment or not is the sort of question but they're always present it doesn't have to be yours absolutely not and this is where it gets really tricky I think this whole idea of ghosts are dead persons versus spirits it gets really mushy I guess when you start really talking about the deep philosophical meanings of it because once a person has died and they've escaped sort of life and death they're depending on which local customs you've been heavily informed by which country you're living in it can be things like when we talk about ghosts of living people or ghosts of dead we're only talking about hauntings things that are haunted by spirits that never leave but we're talking about ancestor spirits of people who have died and didn't really have strong lingering attachment to the world they have more like spirits in the animistic sense they're not really the ghosts of dead people so much anymore in the same way there's so much different philosophy to connect this it's hard to draw to draw generalities about this but yeah it's absolutely true that the ancestors were always with us and they're not really ghosts in the same fashion but they don't want to get a nail I wanted to talk about that house Chinese house that we just saw from Hong Kong and definitely from China's area actually that thing instead of putting in a yard most of us would put inside of the house because we need to give that people dying and the spirit of their soul will only float in air so that giving them how to explain their resting for that comfort and that candle so maybe actually that's cool yeah the ones that I did research on were Thai specifically and those were exteriors so it's interesting it's a similar idea and you're saying fortified local culture or specific culture really did this change and the reason that we did that is we were talking about what the gazebo was we were wondering what it was and it was an interesting way to explore that idea that was really interesting I had even thought about that and there's one more interesting concept the longer the candle is the richer they are haha haha more to feed more to the culture that's the boring a few of you in the Brothers Paralemmo we have time if anybody does what it's about we're going to talk about the sea lovers one then we have time I've seen Brothers Paralemmo I've been waiting for the poster for the people who brought it and even then I'll tell you because people will those of us who have seen it can be like hungry in a little corner but also because those of you who are staying I hope this has piqued your interest in it nothing really needed to have their it's so fascinating but we're going to ask everybody in a minute to move out so that we can set up and then we'll let people back in but we will be having a talk back at the end of that play as well the first part of the talk back will be like the one at the end of Hannah where it's really about the playwright getting information but there is also time for people to hang out after that and continue this conversation we welcome you today we'd love for you to do that the whole reason that I had come here today is that I wanted us to just have a little extra information a little bit of a slightly different point of view that we might have come in with to allow us to have more conversation I want us to be able to engage with these plays as more than just watching as a team so thank you very much for coming to the talk thank you