Home
Reviewed by Stephen Fife
Latino Theater Company
Extended through March 31
RECOMMENDED
Midway through Home, Nancy Ma’s solo show about growing up Chinese-American, Ma tells about an epiphany that changed her life.
At the time, Ma had a well-paying job with a law firm in San Francisco, which made her family in New York City very happy. It was now expected that she would find a man, get married, have children. Have the American Dream that her parents had come to this country from a poor Chinese province to find. But during her lunch break one day, she heard a voice which she identified as God telling her to go to Los Angeles and become an actor.
This was a curious — no, more like an inscrutable — directive, given that, to this point, Ma’s accomplishments had been of the studious and intellectual kind.
A first-generation American, she was born into a poverty-level family in New York’s Chinatown, growing up in a tenement sixth-floor walkup infested with cockroaches and rats. As the older of two daughters, she was expected to make sacrifices for her family in keeping with old-world Chinese traditions. But Ma was desperate to escape the stranglehold of tradition and poverty and wanted to be part of the new world she saw on TV. To this end she made sacrifices in order to transfer to the Stuyvesant School, the best public school in New York City. (Only 4% of applicants were accepted.) She astonished her family by succeeding at this. More hard work got her accepted at Williams College — which her family sneered at, not seeing the point of a college education for a woman unless it’s at Harvard or Yale. But at least this helped her get the good job in San Francisco. What sense did it make to throw that away for life as an actor of all things?
At this juncture, the story seems poised to go in one of two directions: either it’s that time-worn but always encouraging success story — “I came to Hollywood with nothing but a dream, and now I have my own sitcom!” — or “I thought my purpose in life was to be an actor, but now I’m homeless, and I can’t even get hired to play a homeless person!” Nancy Ma’s story, though, goes in a third direction, far more interesting than either of the other two, and that’s what makes it exceptional and very much worth catching.
Ma has indeed had a difficult time of it here, and not only because there are very few good roles for Asian actors. As she recounts with a perfect blend of frustration and self-mocking humor, she was found to be “too American” for some roles and “too Asian” for others. She makes clear that by “too American” these casting people mean that she doesn’t speak halting English, and in so many other ways doesn’t fit the stereotype of what an “authentic Asian person” is supposed to be. (She ends up getting a series of terrible jobs to survive, keeping her struggles secret from her family.)
What Ma captures so eloquently is the difficulty of being a first-generation American, especially in a family that speaks little English and observes old-world customs. For all intents and purposes, her parents could just as well be in Beijing, though without the government interference. Young Nancy doesn’t feel seen or heard, and she isn’t, because her parents are simply incapable of grasping her ambitions. In this context, Ma’s breaking away from traditional behavior patterns and crafting her own journey through uncharted waters feels heroic, especially since she never asks us to admire her or give her credit for how much she’s suffered.
Such determination does come with serious consequences, as she makes clear when we speak briefly after her show. I ask about her younger sister, and she says with some anguish, “Oh she’s the perfect one, she does everything our family wants her to.”
As a black sheep oldest child myself, I feel her pain. But as someone who loves to hear the truth told with grace and humor, I also feel her glory in overcoming many obstacles and making a glowing work of art that I think anyone with a pulse will enjoy. Director Geoffrey Rivas and The Latino Theater Company also deserve a great deal of credit in giving Nancy Ma a platform and in helping to shape and stage her narrative with such force and simplicity.
The Los Angeles Theatre Center, 514 S. Spring St., Downtown L.A.; Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 4 p.m.; extended through Mar. 31. (866) 811-4111 or thelatc.org. Running time: 85 minutes with no intermission.
