Author: Suh, Lloyd
Year: 2022
Geography: Americas > Northern America > United States of America
Synopsis: Lloyd Suh’s The Far Country follows a Chinese family’s journey from Taishan to California in the aftermath of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Set in 1909, The Far Country examines the laws enforced by the United States to deny Chinese immigrants naturalisation in the United States. Set both in San Francisco and Guangdong in China, Suh displays migration as a process and performance shaped by surveillance and exclusion. Interrogating the cost of the American Dream and the effects of generational trauma, Suh’s play centres around invented biographies of ‘paper children’ on Angel Island, the coaching papers and interrogations required to pass through Angel Island’s detention system. Emphasising the racialised immigration law of the United States, the play displays how migrants must sometimes reshape their past to secure possible futures.
Publication: Suh, Lloyd. ‘The Far Country.’ Once in the Countryside: A Collection of Plays, edited by Christine Mok, Methuen Drama, 2025. Bloomsbury, https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/once-in-the-countryside-9781350439221/.