Elderly Chinatown residents took the stage at the Pao Arts Center last month – some sang karaoke to their favorite classic Chinese songs, a couple of them showed off their jianzi (birdie foot game) skills to the rest of their crowd, while others watched bilingual improv theater sketches in Mandarin and Cantonese.

But behind the music, crafts and performing arts enjoyed by the nearly 200 participants, the March 8 event, “SenStory: Home as a Verb” contained a central theme: How to access collective mental health as a member of the Chinese diaspora, and how to make doing so exciting and engaging.

“SenStory” is the culmination of an inaugural residency collaboration between Vermilion Theater and Pao Arts Center in Chinatown. An Asian and Pacific Islander, women-led nonprofit, Vermilion Theater is based in Boston and aims to uplift voices of the Chinese diaspora by producing multilingual plays and hosting community engagement workshops that facilitate cross-cultural conversations about mental health. Over the past year, Vermilion Theater developed community workshops led by Mandarin-English bilingual, trained professionals specialized in music therapy and other forms of creative healing. Beyond the festival, “SenStory: Home as a Verb” also showcased participants’ art made in previous workshops, as well as produced a guidebook on creative practices. Vermilion Theater’s past productions have toured the East Coast, creating a wealth of comparative knowledge across East Coast Chinatown communities that the arts collective’s members drawn on to create community-driven initiatives.

Chinese diaspora communities in the U.S. often face difficulties in accessing Western mental health resources such as psychotherapy. Stigma about mental health issues in Chinese culture, language barriers, and a scarcity of culturally sensitive counseling are common barriers. For example, a first-generation Chinese elder facing depression may not feel comfortable in a one-on-one English-language counseling session, especially with a therapist with limited understanding of Chinese culture and its framing of mental health issues. In addition, research shows that Chinese immigrants to the U.S. often have somatic responses to mental health issues, such as psychological conditions that manifest as physical ailments. Counselors trained in Western psychotherapy may not have the best tools to respond to these needs.

To learn more about the performing arts project, Sampan spoke with Wisteria Deng, the founding artistic director of Vermilion Theater and a clinical psychology doctoral candidate at Yale.

Sampan: What motivated you to form Vermilion Theater and to host “SenStory: Home as a Verb?”

Deng: I started wondering how to bridge my personal passion of theater and performing arts with my profession of mental health, community psychiatry, and community mental health. I see how incredibly helpful therapy is. However, I only can see around 10 people a week. So the motivation of this project came from wanting to scale up mental health efforts and also push that out of the framework of therapy.

I have family members and friends who are first-generation immigrants. Some of them are losing their mental health, and that’s really a motivation. For people who are not as familiar with English, the language barrier is a huge hurdle to their treatment seeking. That’s why the nonprofit theater work I’ve been doing seeks to bring together both English and Mandarin. We want to allow folks who don’t speak English to have a safe space – even just to exist – and to connect with others. I think that’s already a huge piece of therapy. And then we try to explore creative expressions, movement, and things like that.

Sampan: What kind of mental health issues have you seen among the Chinatown community, both first generation immigrants and beyond?

Deng: There has been a huge shift since Covid. After Covid, I see normalization of depression and loneliness. In Vermillion Theater’s recent run of engagement and workshops, we’ve definitely seen more depression mixed with social anxiety or health anxiety.

Sampan: How do you choose the format of the show, whether it’s karaoke, a sketch show, or art?

Deng: We started with thinking about what’s most accessible. For participants, you don’t need to know anything about mental health or have been in therapy before. So that led us to thinking about the five senses. For the visual sense, participants made paintings, face masks, tote bags, prints. As they make these arts, they chat with each other and connect. With hearing, we do collective song making. And then we also use movement – so gentle stretching, or even just being more aware of their body. So the engagement starts with senses the participants already have with them, and they don’t need to put that in the framing of therapy.

Sampan: Even the word therapy can contain so much weight for many people of Chinese descent. It’s wonderful to present mental health in such a welcoming and collective environment.

Deng: I no longer frame it to participants as a therapeutic exercise. I just say exercise or practice. Sometimes I use like games or like, let’s try this together.