/ARTS WEEKLY/AUSTRALIA: Odyssey from Tiananmen to Down Under Goes Onstage

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Sonny Inbaraj

PERTH, Australia, Mar 30 2004 (IPS) - After the Tiananman Square massacre in 1989, Chinese actor Yang Li was once told by a fortune teller to place his trust in women if he wanted to advance in his career and never give up on life.

Fifteen years later, that prophecy has come true for Li. His one-person show, ‘Thirteen Hundred Ashtrays’, has received national acclamation, both from the public and theatre critics, as a brave effort of an actor who plays himself in his own life story.

‘Thirteen Hundred Ashtrays’ was staged for three weeks to packed audiences at the Perth International Arts Festival recently and is written and directed by Angela Chaplin, artistic director of the Deckchair Theatre.

Li’s life story is a riveting tale of an odyssey from the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing to the shores of Australia in 1993.

The actor and his wife, four years on the run from Chinese authorities, arrived in Melbourne airport, from Eastern Europe, on a two-day holiday visa and a huge suitcase with 1,300 ashtrays.

”The ashtrays are to remind me of my family and friends I left behind in China,” he says. ”That’s the only way I can remember them.from the smell of the cigarettes they used to smoke.”

Li first met Chaplin a year ago, when she auditioned him for a small part in a play she was going to direct. Little did Li realise that meeting would change his life as a small-town actor and give him national recognition.

Li recalls the conversation he had when he first met Chaplin. ”When I told Angela bits and pieces of my life story, she said she wanted to write a play about me,” he says.

”When I heard that, I told her she was just pulling my leg. I didn’t take her seriously then,” adds Li.

But a month later, Chaplin contacted Li and told him she was ready to write the play and wanted him to help her with it.

”So I told her everything about me and my wife, Xiao Pei. I just poured my heart out and she put the words to what I was telling her,” recalls Li.

With a script in hand, Chaplin and her production team decided to make ‘Thirteen Hundred Ashtrays’ a reality. ”To write the play, I spent hours with Yang as we recorded his life. Being an actor makes Yang a very good storyteller and a natural observer of what is happening around him,” Chaplin tells IPS.

”During this time he and his partner Xiao Pei shared some very personal events with me and they have been brave enough to allow me to bring them to the stage,” she adds.

‘Thirteen Hundred Ashtrays’ begins with events in the Cultural Revolution. In 1966, things started to go wrong for Li’s family despite his parents being former soldiers in Mao Zedong’s People’s Liberation Army.

Li’s father is targeted by the Cultural Revolution Group and accused of being a member of the bourgeoisie.

Distressed by his father’s maltreatment, Li at the age of seven commits his first act of defiance against the Communist regime to the detriment of his family.

”I couldn’t understand why my father, who had sacrificed for the Revolution, was being labelled by Chairman Mao as a bad person. Out of that anger, I defaced a picture of Mao Zedong in a public place,” Li relates.

The whole family is then bundled off to a re-education camp in the countryside for four years after the matter was reported to the police.

The highlight of ‘Thirteen Hundred Ashtrays’ is Li’s portrayal of the events in Tiananmen Square in the lead-up to the bloody Beijing Massacre.

”Xiao Pei and I would go to the square and hang out with the students. Being an actor in Beijing, at that time, everyone knew me and the students would ask that I read poems for them over a megaphone,” recalls Li.

”That was the least I could do for these brave souls who were asking for democracy,” he adds.

When the brutal crackdown began after the Chinese army used guns and tanks against the pro-democracy student protesters, Li and his wife, like many other dissidents, fled the country.

The two political fugitives travelled to Eastern Europe and underwent extreme hardship because of their lack of experience in foreign cultures and poor command of English.

But it was not destined for Li and Xiao Pei to be destitute in Eastern Europe. Through a stroke of luck, both ended up in Australia.

”It was Xiao Pei who was insistent that we go to Australia to give ourselves a last chance. She told me to do it for her,” tells Li as he tries to shake off the emotion.

Li considers himself fortunate to have sought political asylum in Australia in 1993. ”It was a kinder and compassionate Australia under a Labor government then. Both Xiao Pei and myself would have been locked up in a detention camp if we did it now under the present (conservative Coalition) government,” he says.

Li recalls the moment he landed at Melbourne airport in 1993. ”I was questioned for an hour by Immigration on why I wanted to be in Australia. Xiao Pei was traumatised and crying in a corner. I had a lot of explaining to do on why I had such a large suitcase and 1,300 ashtrays in it.”

”But then something wonderful happened,” he adds.

”After an hour, an Immigration officer came up to me and said I was free to go. Then he added: ‘ Welcome to Australia.’ ”