Ping Chong stopped in Chicago a few weeks ago in search of our undesirable elements.
The New York director and performance artist has embarked on similar missions to New York, Tokyo, Seattle and Minneapolis, and each time has come up with a theatrical work titled “Undesirable Elements.” These pieces tell the personal stories of people — mostly immigrants — who were born into one culture and now live in another.
And if you have a rich immigrant’s tale, or know someone who does, Chong wants to hear from you.
On this particular Saturday morning, Chong had gathered representatives from several local ethnic organizations to explain his “Undesirable Elements” project and send out the call for participants. Chong started the meeting with his own son-of-immigrants story.
“I’m first generation American and my parents never spoke English,” he explained in a thick New York accent. “I grew up in Chinatown, so my public school was 99.9 percent Chinese, and if you weren’t Chinese, tough. Then I went to junior high and it was half-Italian and half-Chinese, and if you weren’t Chinese or Italian, that was tough. Then I went to my high school and I was the only Chinese and it was tough for me.”
Having grown up as both an insider and outsider, Chong is fascinated by these kinds of stories, and began presenting them in 1992 when a gallery owner asked him to put together a performance piece as part of an art installation he was displaying in New York.
“They wanted me to do it for free,” the award-winning theater maker said. “It was the only show in my life that I did for free, and it was the best thing I ever did. I just got on the phone to all my friends and said `I need a large gender spread and a geographic spread. I need people who are open to talking about culture and religion.’ I did it by my own little self, no staff, nobody, and I got eight people out of that.”
Since then, “Undesirable Elements” has become one of the Chong’s signature works among the many he mounts each year employing video, puppetry, performance art, theater and visual art.
Although Chong often performs himself, for “Undesirable Elements” he serves as writer and director, gathering profiles of potential participants through a questionnaire and choosing those he wishes to interview. He selects the final eight participants based on two-hour interviews and almost always ends up with more good stories than he can use.
What is the most important quality he looks for during the interviews?
“Everyone always loves a good story, so anecdotes primarily,” he said. “I’m looking for things that point to Diaspora, identity, cultural collision and stereotypes. But it comes down to interesting anecdotes as much as possible, because it’s through the lived experience that the audience can understand the issues. When its abstract, its harder to grasp.”
Once Chong has chosen his eight participants, he writes monologues for each based on the stories they have told him. Although he culls the information directly from the interviews, Chong occasionally finds his subjects unwilling to share certain bits of their past with the public.
“Sometimes it’s fear of political consequences in their home country and other times they might feel that it is a little too personal,” Chong said of details he is sometimes asked to excise from the monologues. “But in most cases, I fight with people over those things because I feel like by not talking about it, they are not helping us understand the situations, so I’ll do anything I can to keep them in.”
His Chicago production of the work will be his 11th in six years. Although he will be popping into the city periodically during the next few months, he is leaving the initial screening process (from January to March) in the hands of locally based assistants while he finishes a production of “Undesirable Elements” at Hamilton College in Syracuse, N.Y. Chong will return here for the final interviews in late March and is scheduled to present the show May 7 at the Chernin Center for the Arts in the Duncan YMCA on West Roosevelt Road.
Although he has used some professional performers and actors in previous productions of “Undesirable Elements,” he stressed that most of the participants are just regular folks with good stories. They don’t even necessarily have to be ethnic outsiders.
“Their `undesirable element’ could also be gay culture or women’s culture or about ageism or class,” he said. “We are not just talking about skin color.”
Whether participants are chosen for their ethnic, gender or age perspective, Chong noted that openness and tolerance are a must in his storytellers — especially in a production that hopes to explore and promote those qualities.
“People who do this are going to have to be open about what’s good and bad about their culture. It’s not just about waving their flag,” he said. “There is also the possibility that they might be participating with cultures that they have historic animosities with and they should keep that in mind.”
Chong added that if there is one political message that runs through all his shows, it is that stereotypes don’t always reflect the truth.
“The only way to get past the stereotype is to see the real people and not just what the media presents to the public,” he said. ” `The Siege’ is not the way to learn about what a Muslim is. Asian women are not just the wife, the whore or the mistress, but that is what Hollywood has portrayed them as, from Anna Mae Wong to Joan Chen. The media is the villain in many ways and stereotyping is intense in every culture.”
Still, he stressed that it is not just the majority culture that needs to learn from minorities.
“The project would be misunderstood if it was seen as a way of educating white people,” he said. “It’s a way of educating all of us, because we are all equally insular and that is not necessarily our fault. It is a social constant. So what we are trying to figure out here is how do you create a society that can get along and wants to learn from each other. What are the conditions that make that possible?”
FORMER `UNDESIRABLE ELEMENTS’
A Cuban, Puerto Rican and Thai woman from the Bronx.
A Chilean educator working in a penitentiary in Newark after having lived under Pinochet.
A 17-year-old Hmong boy who escaped Vietnam with his father on a boat that was attacked by pirates.
The great-great-grandson of Sitting Bull.
A Somalian parking lot attendant who escaped from the Somalian civil war to Eritrea, then got caught in the Eritrean civil war and escaped to Ethiopia, where he got caught in another war and finally landed in Minneapolis.
A Japanese man whose grandfather protested World War II by converting his factory into something that could not be used for the war. His father applied to study humanities at Osaka University and was not accepted. This inadvertently saved the boy’s life as all humanities majors were sent to the frontlines first.
An half-Jewish half-black woman who was abandoned as a baby and raised by a Menonite family in Indiana.
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For information on how to submit your story to Ping Chong’s “Undesirable Elements” project, call Teresa Cisneros at 312-738-7980 or write to her at the Chernin Center for the Arts, 1001 W. Roosevelt Rd., Chicago IL 60608.
