Anchuli Felicia King
I read something on the internet.
This is how most of my plays start. It’s also how the majority of the world’s population gets its information. As of April 2019, 56.1% of the world’s population was online. Fifty-five per cent of that content was written in English, and 800 million of those users were Chinese, making it by far the largest national population online.
And yes, I got those statistics from the internet.
It’s easy to balk at statistics like these, but how can we actually conceptualize the human cost of this mass global digitalization? Indeed, how can we conceptualize the internet? As a nebulous cloud of data? As a vast, interconnected web of servers, data processing centres, household objects (the Internet of Things)? Or should we think of it as pure math—algorithms that determine what we see or don’t see, algorithms written by an emergent class of technocrats who increasingly define our political, social and cultural lives?
To my mind, the theatre is a really good place to grapple with impossibly big phenomena like the internet and globalization—what some contemporary philosophers, borrowing terminology from computer science, call ‘metaobjects’. Theatre is uniquely suited to dealing with metaobjects because it’s an aggressively immediate and analog form. It’s a space where big issues can be transformed into little stories, where the epic and the quotidian don’t just coexist but coalesce. In theatre, the personal is always political, and vice versa.
In 2016, I read something on the internet. A group of Chinese dissidents were mounting a class action lawsuit against a US technology company for their purported criminal collusion with the Chinese government. The plaintiffs alleged that this billion-dollar corporation had knowingly helped the Chinese government build systems that would enable online censorship and digital surveillance as part of the Golden Shield Project, the national security policy that has since become synonymous with China’s Great Firewall.
For some ineffable reason, I knew I wanted to write a play about this. And I knew that the play should be written in both Mandarin and English, so the play would need a translator. And if it needed a translator, why not make them The Translator, who could not only translate literal text but also subtext and context, revealing the total sum of semiotic misfires that can happen when two parties try to bridge a communicative chasm?
I read everything I could find about the lawsuit. Then I read a lot more. I read public documentation on the numerous cases Golden Shield is based on. I read transcripts of civil trials, theses on the Great Firewall, books on digital filtering, on Mandarin-into-English translation, on the surveillance state and linguistics and technocracy … and then I threw it all out and tried to write a compelling piece of drama.
So how ‘real’ are the events in this play? I would say the broader circumstances and events are based on fact, while individual characters and events are heavily fictionalized. In this sense, the play is itself an act of translation. Complex global issues are mapped onto fictive human stories—the core of which is the story of Julie and Eva, two Chinese–American sisters struggling to navigate their fraught relationship and shared trauma. The Chen sisters are in many ways my metaphor for the toxic sisterhood of China and America, two economically codependent superpowers that continue to struggle with their profound ideological incompatibility.
I am, of course, painfully aware of the hubris of a 25-year-old Thai–Australian playwright thinking she has anything meaningful to say about Chinese–American relations (or indeed, about international litigation or human rights abuses in China). My hope is that Golden Shield gives you an impressionistic sweep of these metaobjects, and if you want to learn more about them, please consult an actual expert who will have far more interesting and nuanced things to say than I ever could. That is after all the wonderful thing about the internet—the enlightened texts of linguists, engineers, activists and lawyers are just a click away.
The only thing we’re really qualified to do as artists is ask questions about what it means to be human. The heart of this play is a universal human predicament: the failure to communicate. Golden Shield explores how we fail to translate effectively on all fronts—not just between different languages and cultures, but between technologies, judicial systems, lovers and family members. I hope that what people take away from the play is that the attempt to translate, as fraught as it is, is what counts—that as multivalent and impossible as communication is, we have to keep trying because it’s the best mechanism we have.
Anchuli Felicia King is a playwright and multidisciplinary artist of Thai–Australian descent. As a playwright, Felicia is interested in linguistic hybrids, digital cultures and issues of globalisation. Her plays have been produced by the Royal Court Theatre (London), Studio Theatre (Washington D.C.), American Shakespeare Center (Staunton), Melbourne Theatre Company, Sydney Theatre Company, National Theatre of Parramatta and Belvoir Theatre (Sydney). As a multidisciplinary artist, Felicia has worked with a wide range of companies and institutions, including Punchdrunk, PlayCo, 3LD Arts & Technology Center, Roundabout Theater, 59E59, Ars Nova, the Obie Awards, The Builders Association, Ensemble Studio Theater, NYTW and Red Bull Theater. She is a member of Ensemble Studio Theater’s Youngblood Group and Roundabout Theater’s Space Jam Program. Formerly based in New York, Felicia continues to work internationally and is based between London, New York and her hometown of Melbourne, Australia.