Mixed Race Studies

What’s it like to “come out” as a Third Culture Kid on stage? Elizabeth Liang tells all!

The Displaced Nation: A home for international creatives
2013-06-20

The Displaced Nation Team

As reported here last month, Elizabeth Liang spent the month of May performing, at a venue in Los Angeles, a one-woman show about being a Third Culture Kid, or TCK. As some readers may recall, Liang is a self-described Guatemalan-American business brat of Chinese-Spanish-Irish-French-German-English descent. She was brought up by peripatetic parents in Central America, North Africa, the Middle East, and Connecticut. Many of us were curious about not only how she could pack all of that personal history into a solo stage performance, but also how the (mostly American) audiences would respond. Today is the day we get to find out. Take it away, Elizabeth!

—ML Awanohara

I had no idea what to expect from audiences when I opened my solo show, Alien Citizen, in Hollywood, California, on May 3rd (it closed June 1st).

Since the show is about my upbringing as a dual citizen of mixed heritage in six countries, I assumed it would appeal mainly to Adult Third Culture Kids (ATCKs) and people of mixed heritage—the people I wrote it for, since we rarely see our stories portrayed on stage or screen.

I wanted the show to be funny, but wasn’t sure if the humor would translate.

And I wanted people to be moved by the story…

Read the entire article here.

Alien Citizen: Review

www.ReviewPlays.com
ALIEN CITIZEN
Asylum Lab
2013-05-13

Jose Ruiz

Elizabeth Liang steps on the solo stage to tell the world what it’s like to be a TCK (Third Culture Kid).  These are people who, as children, traveled the globe intermittently because their parents were sent to diplomatic, business or military assignments and the family had to constantly adjust to new schools, new friends, new customs and new languages.  Her father worked for a multi-national company and was sent to several different countries during her formative years.

That in itself is fodder for a fascinating story of growing up with indeterminate roots.  When the story comes from Elizabeth Liang, whose ethnic heritage spans three continents, from her paternal roots in China, to her birth roots in Central America, to her mother’s varied European background, it becomes more than just a story…

Read the entire review here.

World Premier of Christmas in Hanoi

East West Players
120 Judge John Aiso Street
Los Angeles, California 90012
2013-02-07 through 2013-03-10

Tim Dang, Producing Artistict Director
Eddie Borey, Playwright
Jeff Liu, Director

East West Players Presents Christmas in Hanoi

A mixed-race family returns to Vietnam for the first time since the war. One year after the death of their strong-willed mother, siblings Winnie and Lou travel with their Irish Catholic father and Vietnamese grandfather to re-connect with their roots. Whether they embrace that past or reject it, they are haunted by their own family’s ghosts and by the phantoms of Vietnam’s long history.

Christmas in Hanoi is the Winner of the East West Players Face of the Future Playwriting Competition.

Featuring: Joseph Daugherty, Elyse Dinh, Michael Krawic, Elizabeth Liang, and Long Nguyen.

In association with Multiracial Americans of Southern California and Vietnamese American Arts & Letters Association.

For more information, click here.

A Hapa Family in Chekhov’s Three Sisters

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies
Volume 3 (2012), Special Issue: Mixed Heritage Asian American Literature
pages 130-146

Elizabeth Liang, Actress, Writer, Producer and co-host of “Hapa Happy Hour”

It is an act of courage or foolhardiness to produce theatre in the heart of the film world, depending on your point of view and how large the houses turn out to be. In the fall of 2005, I produced Three Sisters in a 60-seat theatre in Burbank, California (home of Disney and Warner Bros.). The odds were stacked even higher against the show’s success when I stipulated that the main characters, the upper-class and highly educated Russian Prozorov siblings, had to be played by hapa actors. This essay describes my attempt to interpret the play through a multi-ethnic lens while working with a monoracial director, and the challenges this posed, both on the stage and off.

Read the entire article here.

Alien Citizen: An Earth Odyssey [solo show]

USA Projects
2012

Elizabeth Liang
Los Angeles

Over the last two years, I’ve developed Alien Citizen (originally titled Unpacked) at the David Henry Hwang Writers Institute, Terrie Silverman’s “Start to Finish Solo-Show” Master Class, and on my own.  I performed segments of it at the “5,000 Women” Festival at Wesleyan University, the Hollywood Fringe Festival, East West Players, and Beyond Baroque.  This production will be my first step toward the much larger goal of taking a self-contained theatrical work around the country (and world, hopefully).  I am doing it now because of an irrepressible need to share the Third Culture Kid experience, which is extraordinary yet rarely told.

Who are you when you’re from everywhere and nowhere?  And what’s more important to a Guatemalan-American teen in Egypt: the Pyramids of Giza or the prom?  Alien Citizen is a funny and poignant one-woman multi-character show about growing up as a dual citizen of mixed heritage in Central America, North Africa, the Middle East, and New England.  Alienation and the search for identity, as well as the sometime refusal to search and learn, weave thematically through the narrative.  Another recurring theme is the challenge of growing into womanhood in environments that can be hostile to females (including the USA).  The main character struggles with being a “perfect guest” in each host country, which often involves stifling herself.  Where is the line between respecting others and betraying yourself?  Naturally, humor is a great survival mechanism!…

For more information, click here.

Special Issue: Mixed Heritage Asian American Literature

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies
Volume 3 (2012): Special Issue: Mixed Heritage Asian American Literature

Table of Contents

• Introduction to Volume III—Wei Ming Dariotis
• The AALDP Interview
  • Smoke and Flowers: An Interview with Olivia Boler—Wei Ming Dariotis
• Articles
  • American Orientalism and Cosmopolitan Mixed Race: Early Asian American Mixed Race in the American Literary Imagination—Melissa Eriko Poulsen
  • The Making of a Eurasian: Writing, Miscegenation, and Redemption in Sui Sin Far—Juanita C. But
  • Betwixt and Between Past and Present: Cultural and Generic Hybridity in the Fiction of Mary Yukari Waters—Rania Samir Youssef
  • Revisiting Local History and Ghostly Memory in Shawna Yang Ryan’s Locke 1928—Chia-rong Wu
  • Realizing blacknpinay: Negotiating Notions of Authenticity in Janet Stickmon’s Crushing Soft Rubies—Teresa Hodges
  • The Abjection of James Dean: Mixed Media/Mixed Race Performances in Ai’s Poem, “James Dean”—Cathy Irwin
  • Multiracial Male Masculinity: A Critical Mixed Race Analysis of Brian Ascalon Roley’s “American Son”—Kevin Escudero
  • Teaching Chang-rae Lee’s Aloft: Exploring the Limits of Race and Ethnicity—Jaime Cleland
  • Disturbing Stereotypes: Fu Man/Chan and Dragon Lady Blossoms—Audrey Wu Clark
  • Excursus on “Hapa;” or the Fate of Identity—Nicole Myoshi Rabin
  • A Hapa Family in Chekhov’s Three Sisters—Elizabeth Liang
• Reviews
  • Review: This is All I Choose To Tell—Cathy J. Schlund-Vials

Read the entire issue here.