Tai Wei Foo in Carried by the River.Dahlia Katz/Supplied
- Title: Carried by the River
- Written by: Diana Tso 曹楓
- Director: William Yong 楊漢源
- Actors: Shiong-En Chan, Tai Wei Foo 符岱微, Brenda Kamino, Honey Pham, Michelle Wang
- Company: Red Snow Collective
- Venue: Tarragon Theatre Extraspace
- City: Toronto
- Year: Until March 23, 2025
Between 1979 and 2015, China implemented a controversial series of one-child policies as a means of population control, creating a national gender imbalance that, despite the cessation of such measures a decade ago, persists today, owing to a wide cultural preference for boys. In rural areas, the discrepancy is even more pronounced, with some villages reporting a ratio of 130 men to every 100 women.
In Carried by the River, playwright Diana Tso 曹楓 explores the aftermath of China’s one-child policies through the lens of Kai (Honey Pham), a queer young woman born in China but raised in Canada. When her adoptive mother dies, Kai is faced with an all-consuming, existential question: Could a trip to China unlock the secrets of her past?
It’s an interesting premise brought to life in a moderately successful production by director William Yong 楊漢源. The play uses a smorgasbord of storytelling techniques, including shadow play and dance, to make its points, combining visual metaphors with dialogue to poke at the bruise of Kai’s sense of un-belonging. But Tso’s script, while laced with intrigue, is at times achingly underwritten, built on a foundation of coincidences that starts to crumble by the time Carried by the River rolls to its conclusion.
When Kai arrives in China, she soon meets Ting Ting (Michelle Wang), an effusive cosmetics vendor who offers to show Kai around on her visit. Almost immediately, the women exchange stories: Kai is in China to find her birth family. Ting Ting has forever hoped to reunite with her long-lost sister – in fact, she’s made 1,000 red paper cranes with that wish in mind, a prayer for the little girl born into China’s restrictive one-child measures.
Pham and Wang offer earnest, energetic performances of a script that, at present, struggles to find its footing as it breezes through Kai’s story. When Ting Ting suddenly falls ill with an unspecified health scare, the twist is abrupt and unearned, foreshadowed only by a few weak coughs.
Wang does her best with the role, but Carried by the River‘s quick 90-minute runtime doesn’t allow for Ting Ting to have a complete arc, one that might allow her to feel the simultaneous exhilaration and grief of potentially finding her sibling but learning that she is queer. In its current draft, that journey feels clipped, despite the pleasant chemistry between Pham and Wang.
The play explores the aftermath of China’s one-child policies through the lens of Kai, a queer young woman born in China but raised in Canada.Dahlia Katz/Supplied
That said, some of Yong’s directorial flourishes are quite striking, particularly the movement sequences executed by Shiong-En Chan and Tai Wei Foo 符岱微, who prowl across the Extraspace stage as a series of spiritually significant animals. Foo’s tiger, especially, is fantastic, brought to life in an iridescent headpiece and brightly coloured clothes (designed by Ting-Huan 挺歡 Christine Urquhart).
Brenda Kamino, too, is memorable as Ting Ting’s grandmother Lao Lao, who we quickly learn can convene with the afterlife. It’s an effective device in Tso’s script that allows for Kai’s story to reverberate with supernatural possibility, and it’s realized well for the stage by Yong, who intelligently avoids succumbing to ghostly cliché.
Still, Carried by the River does occasionally get carried away with gimmicks, particularly during sequences in which we see Kai video chatting on a tablet, the image projected onto an onstage curtain. It’s not immediately clear who she’s talking to, or, indeed, why we need the projections. The time spent on those moments might have been better used to further explore the relationship between Kai and Ting Ting, or indeed, Kai and her own identity.
I was reminded, while watching opening night of Carried by the River, of Hayao Miyazaki’s animated feature Spirited Away, which follows a young girl, Chihiro, as she befriends the spirit of a fictional river. In the film, Chihiro must reconcile her privileged upbringing with the realities of the spirit world, steeped in metaphor and tradition.
Carried by the River‘s Kai feels almost like an aged-up Chihiro, her world spinning as Tso’s play asks hard-hitting questions about destiny and heritage. And despite some muddy aesthetics and writing flaws, the play lands, much like Spirited Away, with a resounding oomph: This is just one person’s story, one woman’s experience of China’s population control. What stories might still be to come from that era? And indeed, what stories might be forever lost as one-child policies fade into China’s increasingly distant past?
