King - Golden Shield

by Anchuli Felicia King MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited Level 1, 715 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia www.mup.com.au First published 2019 Text Anchuli Felicia King, 2019 Design and typography Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2019 This play is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers. Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher. Cover photography by Isamu Sawa Design by Vic U Rehearsal photographs courtesy Deryck McAlpin Text design and typesetting by Cannon Typesetting Printed in Australia by McPhersons Printing Group 9780522876369 (paperback) 9780522876376 (ebook) With a $4.6 million investment by MTC and MTCs Playwrights Giving Circle, the NEXT STAGE Writers Program has introduced the most rigorous playwright commissioning and development process ever undertaken by the Company, setting a new benchmark for play development in Australia. ___________ Thank you to MTCs Playwrights Giving Circle for sharing our passion and commitment to Australian stories and Australian writers. Louise Myer and Martyn Myer ao, Maureen Wheeler ao and Tony Wheeler ao, Christine Brown Bequest, Allan Myers ac qc and Maria Myers ac, Tony Burgess and Janine Burgess, Dr Andrew McAliece and Dr Richard Simmie,Larry Kamener and Petra Kamener Anchuli Felicia King I read something on the internet. Louise Myer and Martyn Myer ao, Maureen Wheeler ao and Tony Wheeler ao, Christine Brown Bequest, Allan Myers ac qc and Maria Myers ac, Tony Burgess and Janine Burgess, Dr Andrew McAliece and Dr Richard Simmie,Larry Kamener and Petra Kamener Anchuli Felicia King I read something on the internet.

This is how most of my plays start. Its also how the majority of the worlds population gets its information. As of April 2019, 56.1% of the worlds 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. Its 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 mathalgorithms that determine what we see or dont 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 globalizationwhat some contemporary philosophers, borrowing terminology from computer science, call metaobjects.

Theatre is uniquely suited to dealing with metaobjects because its an aggressively immediate and analog form. Its a space where big issues can be transformed into little stories, where the epic and the quotidian dont 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 Chinas 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 storiesthe core of which is the story of Julie and Eva, two ChineseAmerican 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 ThaiAustralian playwright thinking she has anything meaningful to say about ChineseAmerican 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 internetthe enlightened texts of linguists, engineers, activists and lawyers are just a click away. The only thing were 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 frontsnot 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 countsthat as multivalent and impossible as communication is, we have to keep trying because its the best mechanism we have. Anchuli Felicia King is a playwright and multidisciplinary artist of ThaiAustralian descent.