by Linda Chin
In Dragon Mama, the second part of a three-generation family trilogy that enjoyed its world premiere at the ART’s Oberon, the brilliant Filipinx American multi-hyphenate artist Sara Porkalob does it again. Sharing the small stage with no one/nothing else but a single chair, Porkalob shares the story of her mother Maria Porkalob, Jr. by portraying 20+ characters of different ages, ethnicities, genders. The chair too transforms multiple times – into the saddle of the neighborhood bully’s cycle, hospital bed for pregnant Maria, airplane seat en route to Alaska, a seat at the gay club where she meets 27-year-old African American R&B singer Tina. Slim pickings in Anchorage, Alaska in 1993, but when her boss Greg (the astute and well-read 40-ish white foreman of a fishing cannery) learns that she and Tina are planning a movie date, he recommends that instead of Forrest Gump, they see the new film playing at the indie theater on the outskirts of downtown. It’s an adaptation of the best-selling novel by San Francisco author Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club. The story is about Chinese American daughters and their immigrant Chinese mothers, and Maria just might relate.
The chair becomes a seat in the darkened cinema where Maria and Tina are watching a movie. Porkalob cleverly interweaves a film clip into the Dragon Mama narrative. From off-stage it’s not the familiar voice of Tom Hanks we hear, but an actress playing Chinese American young urban professional Waverly Jong, who exclaims to her China-born mother Lindo (in perfect, American English), “You don’t know the power you have over me!” and “Nothing I can do can ever, ever please you!” Seeing a woman on the big screen who looks like her express similar feelings of ‘nothing [you ever do for your family] ever being good enough’ rattles Maria to the core, and she leaves the seat to collect herself. Anyone who has experienced feelings of powerlessness with respect to a parent or child, of isolation from being on the ‘other’ side of a cultural or generational divide, has ever felt unrepresented in American arts, culture and media, or misunderstood by someone you care about will experience the emotional impact – and appreciate the brilliance – of Porkalob’s work in a profound way.
When The Joy Luck Club was first published on March 22, 1989, second generation Filipinx American Sara Porkalob was 10 days old. So to see The Joy Luck Club referenced, with reverence, in Dragon Mama was surprising. The Joy Luck Club enjoyed a spot on the NYT best seller list for over 25 weeks and the book (which sold over 2M copies) is beloved by baby boomers, the darling of many book groups, but is not familiar to many millennials. It again confounded expectations when the 1993 Hollywood version of a story about Chinese women featuring 8 unknown Asian actresses achieved box-office success. The novel was also adapted for the stage by Susan Kim, with its US premiere at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre in in 1997 and productions in several metropolitan areas in subsequent years (e.g. New York, Honolulu, Berkeley), but has been fairly dormant in the last decade. Porkalob’s inclusion of the Lindo-Waverly mother-daughter dialogue was not a contrived plot device. It is a piece of her family’s truth, uncovered when Porkalob was learning about her mother and grandmother. The Joy Luck Club was one of the first movies Maria and Tina saw together, Greg is a composite of real-life arts critic and ex-pat, and lucky for us, Anchorage was one of the few hundred cities on the film’s limited US distribution list.
Fast forward to March 2019, when The Joy Luck Club and Sara Porkalob both hit their third decade marks. The Umbrella Center for the Arts presented the play adaptation directed by Michelle Aguillon. The ART presented a repeat engagement of Dragon Lady, performed in repertory with Dragon Mama at the Oberon. Both companies added additional shows to accommodate demand, and enjoyed sell-out runs and the halo effect of bringing new audiences (Umbrella will become the Greater Boston area’s newest professional company in the upcoming 2019-20 season). And as icing on the cake, the ART commissions newly-turned 30 year-old Sara Porkalob to write her own story Dragon Baby, to complete the three generation Dragon Cycle family trilogy. Double Birthday Happiness!
The seeds author Amy Tan planted in 1989 have grown into a tree with multiple branches and multi-generational blossoms. The Joy Luck Family Tree includes the Tans and the Porkalobs. It includes Singaporean American author Kevin Kwan, who considers Tan’s masterpiece “One of the most exquisite books ever written. It really was part of my personal awakening into the re-acceptance of my Asian-ness and having pride in my roots that for a while I had sublimated trying to fit into Clear Lake, Texas,” (SF Chronicle, 9/2/18). As a book-to-screen Hollywood hit, The Joy Luck Club paved the way for Kwan’s 2018 Crazy Rich Asians 25 years before. It includes all the artists who have been involved in telling the sweeping story of Jing-Mei/June and Suyuan Woo, Waverly and Lindo Jong, Lena and Ying-Ying St. Clair, and Rose and An-Mei Hsu. In Umbrella’s production, 11 of the 12 cast members identified as Asian Americans, and 9 of the 11 are women.
The family tree includes actresses in recent NE stage productions, the haenyeos of Celine Song’s Endlings (ART) and Tina, a lead in Lauren Yee’s The Song of Summer (Trinity Rep) whose previous stage credits include roles as mothers/daughters in The Joy Luck Club. It includes all aspiring artists exploring their roots, so that they too may understand, remember, and feel proud. May The Joy Luck Club Family Tree forever bloom.
