The Pao Arts Center is built on Parcel 24, a historically significant plot of land where hundreds of Chinatown residents were relocated in the 1960s to make way for a highway on-ramp. The Asian Communal Development Corporation (ACDC) transformed Parcel 24 into 66 Hudson Street in 2016, which contains affordable homes as well as community and public space. In a collaboration between Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center (BCNC) and Bunker Hill Community College (BHCC), the Pao Arts Center, Chinatown’s first arts center, was opened in 2017. It immediately became a dedicated cultural space for the Asian American and Asian immigrant community.
The roots of Asian American theater are entwined with the development of a collective cultural identity in the 60s, as the idea of “Asian America” emerged in response to experienced racism. This form of activism emerged from the struggle of Asian American performers and writers to establish their humanity in the face of a society steeped in exotification and othering. Even in modern times, the mainstream media and film industry has been heavily criticized for their lack of representation, racist caricatures, and limited roles for minority groups. Recent statistics have shown that Asian American performers are the least likely among the major minority groups to play roles that are not defined by their race.
Found in Translation arose from a discussion about the lack of dialogue and content surrounding multilingualism in theatre. Asian American Theatre Artists of Boston (AATAB), Chuang Stage, and the Pao Arts Center decided to band together and work on a project with the support of the Boston Foundation’s Live Arts Boston grant. Found in Translation is a play reading and community workshop series in Greater Boston that emphasizes the power, as well as the complexities, of being multilingual, an immigrant, or identifying as AAPI.
“Chosen Family” is the first play in this series. It explores the intricacies of the bilingual experience of young people born in the diaspora. The play itself will be bilingual, being performed in both Vietnamese and English. In Buddhist reincarnation theory, a major religion in Vietnam as well as Asia as a whole, it is said that at the end of someone’s life, they are given the option of whether or not they want to live again. This is a central theme of the story. Four Vietnamese-Americans are reunited at their old Vietnamese language school, a perpetual place of learning due to not experiencing enough suffering in their lives.
A major concern for small, minority-focused theater groups is how to expand their audiences. Few theatregoers who flock to big-budget Broadway productions are aware of, or interested in, alternative theater scenes. Even outside of theater, there is a widespread belief that works by or about Asian Americans are primarily aimed at Asian audiences, rather than Americans as a whole. Playwright Jessica Luu Pelletier was previously hesitant to speak on Vietnamese culture, or to label her work as Vietnamese, as a biracial woman, but she finally decided to join the Việt Writers’ Lab in 2020. The characters in Chosen Family will represent a piece of the Vietnamese-American experience, but Pelletier aims for a broader audience. She hopes to have her story reach and connect to a wide variety of individuals. “I really want this story to find anyone who’s never felt ‘enough’ of something,” said Pelletier, “or anyone who had a kind of weird time growing up, figuring out who they are in different contexts, and having to look for the context they feel the most comfortable in.”
Though the initial reading of Chosen Family has been cancelled due to COVID-19, the Pao Arts Center hopes to host it in the future when safety permits.
