3 “All of Us Are the Same”: Negotiating Loss, Witnessing Disability

Speaking in Tongues

Language and communication are central themes in Quan’s Mother Tongue, a play that was a finalist for the 1996 Governor General’s Award for drama.1 Communicating with each other in three languages—English, Cantonese, and American Sign Language—the characters enact the linguistic, psychological, and social problems of what it means to be a displaced other or a perpetual stranger, in Etienne Balibar’s sense of the term, in Canadian society. Balibar argues that “foreigners are those ‘other humans’ or precisely strangers who already belong to other spaces, who are citizens from different states, either by descent or by adoption” (“Strangers as Enemies,” 4). He explains, “‘Strangeness’ and the various conditions referred to by the category of the Stranger are nothing natural, but they are produced and therefore also reproduced. They are not stable, but unstable and mobile” (4). As Chinese Canadians of varying ages and abilities, the three characters—the widowed immigrant mother; the young woman Mimi, who aspires to study architecture; and Steve, the sixteen-year-old who cannot hear—are all trapped by their fears, the expectations of the family members both in Canada and beyond, their pasts, and their linguistic disabilities. Steve, the figure with a disability, is the one most obviously unable to express himself, but the mother is, too, because she speaks mainly Cantonese and is not able to communicate with her son or with the social workers she has to deal with. Although Mimi is the most versatile of the three and is fluent in English, can understand Cantonese, and can sign, she, too, is hesitant about articulating her desires. She is burdened by her sense of family responsibility, with the guilt of her brother’s deafness, and fears that she will be unable to pursue her career freely. As Asian Canadians, all three characters have to struggle not only with their individual fears and inadequacies—those of growing up, losing a husband, pursuing a career—but also with ethnocultural differences that add another layer of complication. Their linguistic difficulties, in the cases of Steve and his mother, exacerbate the problem of being strangers or being different in their community.

To illustrate the difficulties of communication and the borders created by linguistic differences, Quan does not translate many passages for the audience.2 The mother speaks mostly in Cantonese, while the brother signs. When Mimi talks to them, she repeats enough of their words for us to understand what the mother and the brother said. On this issue of what is not translated, Julie Byczynski argues that “in the theatre, where language is normally shared by actors, and audience, dialogue spoken in minority languages can function in ways that upset the position of the dominant language as dominant [. . .]. Foreign dialogue has the potential to call into question the seeming authority that the English language has” (“A Word in a Foreign Language,” 33). The foreign dialogue is disconcerting and somewhat confusing, mimicking the state of the characters who cannot use English well. This inability to communicate and to be heard is also expressed repeatedly through imagery of drowning. Early in the play the mother says, “I speak Chinese. Your voices. Your words. You drown me out” (scene 1). For the mother, who came to Canada when she was eighteen, not speaking a word of English, the English babble of her children as well as the people in her community is overwhelming. Even though she has spent more than thirty years in Vancouver, English continues to be a threatening language. It is the language of officials, of government forms, and she is constantly afraid of losing the social assistance she receives. Similarly, Steve feels that his condition of not being able to hear at all or not speak well is “like liquid. Drowning [ . . . ]. The waves of air [ . . . ] circulating. It’s like that inside my head. Air floats inside me. The sound of ether rising [ . . . ]. Air forming into sounds I can’t hear. Into words I can’t speak. Into sentences no one will listen to” (scene 2). For Steve, losing his sense of hearing after a bout of high fever at age eleven has meant years of struggling to stay above the water, to not be swallowed up by nothingness.

As Lennard Davis has pointed out, impairment becomes a disability only because of the lack of resources of the person affected. Davis says, “In the social model, disability is presented as a social and political problem that turns an impairment into an oppression either by erecting barriers or by refusing to create barrier-free environments” (Bending Over Backwards, 23). For example, many of us are nearsighted. But having impaired vision is not considered a disability in our society because we have access to relatively affordable glasses or contact lenses. Steve is able to communicate as long as there are people around him who understand his signs. As his sister points out, “He’s deaf, not retarded” (scene 7). But because there are not enough people in our community who are trained to communicate with those with deafness, it becomes a disability that is terrifying, rendering him helpless. Hence, he associates it with drowning. In his own family, though his mother cares for him, she has not taken the trouble of learning sign language. She says, “I have to learn English. Too late now” (scene 3). Steve’s sister, Mimi, is the only one who understands him and is able to translate his desires for him. Upon discovering that Mimi is planning on moving to Kingston to study at Queen’s University, he is almost frantic with despair and pleads, “Don’t go, Mimi. Don’t leave me all alone” (scene 2). Her mobility will become his immobility, because without her his impairment will become a major disability.

For the mother, the lack of English skills is also threatening because it is associated with powerlessness in a predominantly Anglo, logocentric culture. Like many immigrant parents, she relies on her daughter to be the “translator,” to fill in government forms, answer phone calls, talk to doctors, and pay bills. Mimi becomes her link to the world outside as well as her link to Steve, who can speak only in American Sign Language. English is the language that her children speak, and she feels isolated from them because along with the loss of their Chinese language has come the loss of heritage and customs. The mother is particularly anxious because her children may or may not practice the Chinese traditions she values, such as Chingming, that of honoring one’s ancestors (scene 3). In a monologue she says, “I often feel as if I bore strangers who have my eyes, my skin, my hair, but whose souls have been stolen by invisible spirits” (scene 3). Part of the mother’s fears stem from her traumatic experiences in China, where, she says, “every night we would turn out the lights, draw the curtains. We waited for the knock at the door. It could be a friend, a neighbour—wearing a Red Army badge, ready to take everything away from us. To take everything away from me” (scene 7). She has brought this terror of authorities with her to Canada, still relives it frequently, and feels that she cannot trust anyone—neighbors, friends, or government agencies. The death of her husband has only added to her insecurity. The play overtly links her dislocation and sense of being a perpetual foreigner with disability at this point, for the mother’s apprehension about her daughter’s departure parallels her son’s fears of losing his sister, his translator.

As is typical of immigrant families with limited resources, the eldest child is saddled with many of the responsibilities of the family. Often the eldest is required to perform tasks that are carried out by adults in other families. Portes and Rumbaut, who have studied second-generation youths from different national origins and class backgrounds, describe the kind of experience Mimi has with her family as “dissonant acculturation” rather than the more ideal “consonant acculturation” (paraphrased by Levitt and Waters in the introduction to The Changing Face of Home, 17). “Dissonant acculturation occurs when young people quickly adopt American ways and the English language and their parents do not move as quickly. This is the trajectory that leads to role reversal: Children must translate for their parents, and they become more worldly and sophisticated about American ways, leaving their immigrant parents relatively powerless and often dependent on them,” whereas in “consonant acculturation” the parents and children “learn the new culture and abandon the old one at the same pace” (Portes and Rumbaut as paraphrased by Levitt and Waters, 17). Levitt and Waters suggest that the level of transnational involvement of the parental generation influences the way second-generation youth are acculturated (17). In Mimi’s family the parents maintain a high level of cultural and emotional transnationalism, as reflected by the two-location and double-time stages, but the second-generation youths have not had as much opportunity to learn or interest in learning about their cultural heritage or in maintaining transnational networks as their parents have.

One of the adult “jobs” that Mimi had to take on as a teenager resulted in Steve’s deafness. Years before, when Steve was sick with a fever, their mother had asked Mimi to take him to the doctor because she had to work overtime. At sixteen Mimi was more interested in attending the game at school than in her brother’s illness. Her forgetfulness had dire consequences for her brother, and this failure to act is something she has been unable to forget. In a flashback dream scene where we see the past, she says, “For years I’ve been sorry. Make a fist and circle it on my chest. Sorry” (scene 4). The highlighting of her remorse through her statement, first in English and then in sign language, has a ritualistic and mesmerizing effect on stage. It is a kind of repetition and, like the repetition of certain dialogues in Cantonese and then in English, adds an element of the spiritual and the dramatic. Words accompanied by gestures—or, in the case of the mother’s dialogue, Cantonese followed by English—produce a chantlike rhythmic effect, an otherworldliness that reminds us of other ways of communicating and speaking. Mimi lives in a transcultural world within her own family: she has had to negotiate with the diasporic Chinese culture of her mother, with the mainstream English Canadian culture and social practices by which she is surrounded, and with her brother’s silent world of gestures. Through the repetition of sign language and spoken dialogue, through the repetition of Cantonese and English dialogues, we are shown some of the difficulties of a second-generation immigrant youth, as well as the troubles a racialized other with a disability has to deal with in the simple act of communication in his everyday life.

Although the problems depicted in the play are present in many Asian Canadian families and in the families of recent immigrants, the figure of the youth with a disability serves to intensify the challenges faced by these families. Steve’s dependency on his sister and others to translate his needs and wants is a more acute version of what immigrants in Canada with little English (or French) experience in their daily lives. His frustration at not being able to say all the things inside his head is also reminiscent of those immigrants whose mother tongue is not English. Often what they can express is only a fraction of what they want to say. They, like Steve, have many words inside them, but their utterances, in broken or badly pronounced English, are heard by others as garbled and are not listened to closely.

The inability to communicate not only impedes a subject in his or her quotidian activities, such as shopping, banking, accessing health and social services, and so on, but it has psychic effects on the subject. In her work on the formation of subjectivity, Kelly Oliver argues that our experience of ourselves as subjects is maintained “in the tension between our subject positions and our subjectivity” (Witnessing, 17). She explains: “Subject positions, although mobile, are constituted in our social interactions and our positions within our culture and context. They are determined by history and circumstance [ . . . ]. Subjectivity, on the other hand, is experienced as the sense of agency and responseability that are constituted in the infinite encounter with otherness, which is fundamentally ethical [ . . . ]. Both are always profoundly interconnected” (17). In this play Mimi, Steve, and their mother all occupy subject positions that are marginal vis-à-vis the dominant white, patriarchal, able-bodied culture. For them, becoming full subjects requires “encounters with others” that are positive. In theories of identity based on recognition, Oliver says, there is the sense that “individual identity is constituted intersubjectively; that we come to recognize ourselves as subjects or active agents through recognition from others; that a positive sense of self is dependent on positive recognition from others, while a negative sense of self is the result of negative recognition or lack of recognition from others” (4). Oliver goes a step further and argues that “subjectivity is the result of the process of witnessing” (7). Witnessing means both “eyewitness testimony based on first-hand knowledge” and “bearing witness to something beyond recognition that can’t be seen” (16). Oliver places emphasis on understanding those who are different from us: “There is a direct connection between the responseability of subjectivity and ethical and political responsibility. The way in which we conceive of subjectivity affects the way that we conceive of our relationships and responsibilities to others, especially others whom we perceive as different from ourselves” (19).

What we have in Mother Tongue are two characters, Steve and his mother, who have difficulty in addressing others, in what Oliver calls witnessing. According to Oliver, those who have been othered have experienced trauma, and “witnessing works to ameliorate the trauma particular to othered subjectivity” (7). The number of people who actually listen to and can understand either Steve or his mother is limited. For this reason, the play Mother Tongue is important because it bears witness to their trauma of being culturally, linguistically, and racially different—as well as their trauma of being less than able economically and physically in a globalized world that emphasizes ability; linguistic competence, particularly in global English; technical competency; and literacy. Steve and his mother have difficulties acquiring and using these skills. In our position as audience members, we are the ones being addressed, and we are those who have the “response-ability” and the “ethical and political responsibility” (19) of seeing those who have been othered in our society with “love,” a term Oliver uses to denote an attitude of “openness to otherness and difference” (20). Oliver believes that “we are fundamentally connected to our environment and other people through the circulation of energies that sustain us” (15). She states, “We are obligated to respond to our environment and other people in ways that open up rather than close off the possibility of response” (15). Significantly, at the end of the play Steve, like Oliver, also refers to the unseen things in our environment that connect us. His inner voice says:

Can you see the words as they float in the air? My hands release them—out, out to be heard. Can you see the wind? The branches bending, the wind’s fingers drumming against the window. There—thunder. The vibration crosses my spine. I can hear it. Yes, there’s lightning. Music, music touches the floorboards, rises through my feet. My body hears all these sounds. Listen to my hands as I speak to you. Listen to me. Please. (scene 10)

This passage suggests that other forms of communication are possible through feeling, intuition, and gestures. It suggests that nature and even inanimate objects can offer connections. Steve’s appeal is uncannily similar to philosopher Kelly Oliver’s “new conception of vision,” which is based in part on Luce Irigaray’s theories. Oliver writes, “Imagining vision as circulation of energy through connections and touch, even caress, allows us to imagine our fundamental dependence on each other. Subjectivity is not the result of a war against all others. Rather, it is the result of a process of witnessing that connects us through the tissues of language and gestures” (223). It is this process of witnessing and communication that we experience when we watch this play about a racialized other with a disability.

Connections, communication, and transculturalism are further highlighted in Mother Tongue through its stage set and playing areas. In the Factory Theatre production in Toronto in 2001, there was a split stage: the realist scenes of present-day Vancouver in front and to the left of the audience and the dreamlike flashback scenes toward the right side and back of the audience. This set caused several critics to complain. For example, Glenn Sumi of Now Magazine in Toronto humorously wrote,

That’s [looking at one’s watch is] better than looking at Glenn Davidson’s set, though, which requires turning your head about two dozen times, tennis-match style. Director Jim Warren has staged the play, which explores the difficulties of communication and language in an immigrant Chinese family, on several playing areas. That’s to underscore the theme of bridging gaps. And who’s gonna pay my chiropractor bill?

As Sumi notes, the set symbolically suggests the need to build bridges, but, more important, it adds a surreal element to the play. Unlike the primary area, which represents the interior of a home, the other area, painted blue, suggests water, waves, and a more abstract space. Through this split stage the director is able to provide a dreamlike visual backdrop for the sections of the play from the characters’ memory and for the sections dealing with Chinese myths and their past. The stage evocatively suggests the strong presence of the past and the continuing influence of their originary culture in the lives of these diasporic Asian Canadians.

The story of the bird Jingwei, a well-known Chinese myth told to children, is alluded to several times in the play. It is a story that reminds the two children, Mimi and Steve, of happier times, before the sudden death of their father and before Steve’s deafness. Their father used to tell Mimi of the beloved young daughter of the emperor who drowned one day while playing in the sea. She was supposed to have been changed into a bird with a colorful head, Jingwei, who would carry bits of twigs and stone from the mountains to the sea in order to fill it up. The story suggests love and loss, transformation and heroism. Jingwei is associated with all three of the main characters in the play. The mother uses “Jingwei” as a term of endearment and calls Mimi by that nickname (scene 3). Mimi’s role as translator, mediator, and eldest daughter of the family is an endless and difficult one. She is like the bird, who every day “would pick up pebbles and twigs in her beak and drop them into the water” in order to fill up the sea (scene 12). Although the bird’s task seems like an impossible one, one admires its persistence, effort, and endurance.

Because both Steve and the mother have also suffered sudden loss, it is possible to link the myth of the drowned girl to them. Steve’s deafness is figured as a kind of drowning, and the mother’s departure from her family and homeland at age eighteen can be seen as a kind of loss. Her displacement, like that of many first-generation immigrants, has been a kind of exile and sacrifice. Their struggles to cope with their loss are as heroic as Jingwei’s attempt to fill up the sea with her sticks and stones. All three characters in Mother Tongue attempt in their own way to defy the Sea God, who says, “You can never fill me up in a million years” (scene 12). But according to Jingwei, “Every day for a million years I will do this. Every day until one day there will be no more water between me and my family. I will build a bridge, a bridge that they can walk across” (scene 12). Steve, the character with a disability, struggles with such epic tasks daily, but the task of building bridges is also something that his mother and his sister, as marginalized figures in Canadian society, also face to a lesser degree in their lives. Mother Tongue reveals the difficulties of those who have been produced as “strangers” to cross borders and bridges in order to become full citizens of their adoptive community.

Ethnicity and Disability

Sunil Kuruvilla’s Rice Boy,3 a play that was also nominated for the Governor General’s Award, similarly uses a character with a disability to illustrate parallels between disability and ethnic identity. The action takes place in 1975 in two distant locations—Kitchener, Ontario, and Kottayam in south India. Like Mother Tongue, it is a play about displacement, loss, and desire in an extended Asian Canadian family. It is more layered than Mother Tongue because, in addition to the main story of Tommy, a twelve-year-old Indian Canadian, there is a corresponding story of his Indian cousin, Tina, a sixteen-year-old girl who cannot walk, and a subplot involving a fish seller and a servant girl in India. One reviewer, Lisa Rabie, notes,

Rice Boy does not imitate the inveterate models in western theater, and Kuruvilla breaks almost all of the golden rules. He allows the play to wander along lyrically between two continents and two different time periods with sporadic flares of dramatic action that seem somewhat disjointed and jarring. But, the episodic nature of the play allows Rice Boy to spend less energy on plot and more lovingly create vivid and profound characters (“Rice Boy Explores Search for Identity”).

The two settings, that of Canada and that of India, are held together by the presence of the boy Tommy and his father. The disjointed narrative and the loosely connected plot are suggestive of the condition of both Tommy and his father as diasporic Indians. The scenes flit back and forth between present-day Canada and vignettes of the previous summer, spent in India. Like many Asian Canadians and Asian Americans, Tommy and his father inhabit a transcultural space, not fully belonging to one or to the other. Cheap means of transportation in the age of globalization allow them to travel between the two worlds, but their visits to India do not resolve their problems when they return to Canada. At the beginning of the play Tommy feels that his father is not Canadian enough, while his father does not think that Tommy behaves in an appropriate way as an Indian son. Tommy complains to his father: “All you do is sleep [ . . . ]. We came back from India six months ago! You’re going to lose your job again” (Rice Boy, 4). His father, fighting depression, shows his displaced state by sleeping on the kitchen counter and remembering what he used to be and what his life was like. He reminds his son, “I was a math professor once” (5), but in Canada he has been able to find work only in various menial jobs, including a factory job at Kitchener Datsun, and more recently at Mother’s Pizza. His difficulty in finding suitable employment equivalent to that he had in India is a common problem of educated immigrants who leave Asia only to have to take blue-collar jobs because they lack North American experience or because their degrees are not recognized. Studies of the adjustment of Asian Canadian immigrants and refugees show that “perceived discrimination, unemployment, and language difficulty each had significant and positive associations with depression” (Beiser and Hou, “Ethnic Identity among Southeast Asian Refugees in Canada”). In her study of Asian American immigrants, Yen Le Espiritu notes that frequently

the patriarchal authority of Asian immigrant men, particularly those of the working class, has been challenged due to the social and economic losses that they suffered in their transition to the status of men of color in the United States. On the other hand, the recent growth of female-intensive industries—and the racist and sexist “preference” for the labor of immigrant women—has enhanced women’s employability over that of some men. (“Gender and Labor in Asian Immigrant Families,” 628)

Although Tommy’s father is not competing with his wife, he is haunted by memories of her, for she supposedly drowned or disappeared while swimming in a river in India. He tells his son: “When you get older you stop thinking. All you do is remember” (Rice Boy, 5). This inability to go forward and to embrace what the future has to offer becomes a theme that is echoed by a number of characters in the play. Tommy’s father; his uncle; his cousin, Tina; Mr. Harris; and even the Mennonite farmer are all circumscribed by the past, their cultural traditions, and their fears of the future. Through the stories of these disparate everyday characters, Kuruvilla gives us a glimpse of the difficulties of dealing with loss and change—whether from migration across the globe, growing pains, or the shifting roles and expectations of women. As in Mother Tongue, the figure of the person with a disability shows in a physical and literal way what other characters experience psychically and internally.

Rice Boy begins with an elaborate ritual performed in India by women. Tina is practicing how to make rice kolam patterns, the south Indian tradition of drawing patterns based on geometry on the entrance of a house (see Aparita, “Review of Rice Boy”). These patterns, made of the powder from ground rice, disappear within hours, and as Kuruvilla notes in the introduction to the play, “The creation and destruction of the kolam enacts the struggle to find pattern and stillness amidst the flux of life” (Rice Boy, n.p.). Kuruvilla says that the characters in his play “find it difficult to accept the kolam’s message: all things are impermanent and should be celebrated for being so. But they try” (n.p.). However, the making of the kolam patterns is also about ritual, tradition, the creation and loss of beauty, and discipline. For Tina, who is unable to walk, it is a way to demonstrate her “normalcy.” As Granny teaches her how to put water into her palm and water onto the floor, she says, “You will do this every morning like the other wives in this village” (7). Granny sees it as part of the marriage ritual, linking it to other pleasures and comforts that an Indian wife provides for her husband. Performing the ritual is one way that Tina will become “eligible” to wed her prospective husband. For a few hours every day, she is able to create an artistic showpiece as do other women of the village.

However, because Tina cannot walk, she is not like the other women of the village. She is at once the same as and different from other women. Kuruvilla uses her body with its disability to comment on and contrast with the bodies of those around her. Her physical limitations mirror the limitations of various characters in the play, suggesting parallels between characters, between disability, ethnicity, race, and other forms of otherness. Kuruvilla invites his audience to think of similarities through repetitions of scenes and motifs. For example, in one of the early scenes set in India, Tommy climbs up a coconut tree and describes what he sees to Tina, who remains below. Tina encourages him to climb higher and higher, saying, “Describe. Keep going. What do the houses look like? Are they different from this one? You can be my eyes. How wide is the road? What do the buses look like? And the trucks? They paint big names on the front, don’t they? I’ve heard them drive by all my life” (10). Tina has been restricted to her house for much of her life, and only with Tommy’s visit does she venture beyond her patio. Tommy says to her, “I can see the whole world. What can you see?” Tina says, “The bottom of your feet” (12). Tommy later encourages Tina to leave the house with him in the night and go see the city. Tommy’s seemingly limitless view is an illusion, however. Even though Tina cannot see far away, she sees what matters. Unlike Tommy, she remembers Tommy’s mother’s death, and when Tommy is up in the tree, she sees his blood on the ground, dripping from Tommy’s nose. What Kuruvilla is suggesting is two different types of vision—one that sees the outside globalized world of commerce, progress, and industry and the other that sees the seemingly insignificant details of everyday domestic life. Encounters with others bring out different ways of seeing and viewing the world, as this scene between Tina and Tommy shows.

This scene is repeated later in Canada when Tommy meets a Mennonite farmer in the countryside. Again Tommy climbs up a tree and looks out at the world. The Mennonite farmer tells him that he was born on the farm and has never “gone past that road” his whole life (20). Each sees the other as a curiosity. Tommy says to the Mennonite: “You wear black and don’t believe in electricity” (19), while the Mennonite says to Tommy, “I’ve never seen a brown fella before” (19) and inspects him. When Tommy is up in the tree, the farmer, like Tina, asks Tommy, “What do you see?” Tommy answers with “A big field. Snow,” which leaves the Mennonite unsatisfied (20). As in the scene with Tina, young Tommy’s curiosity and spontaneity act as a catalyst for the Mennonite farmer, triggering in him desires that he has not yet fulfilled. The Mennonite, someone who has consciously retreated from capitalism and technology, ends up by climbing the tree himself at the conclusion of the scene, gazing outward. But the encounters go both ways. The Mennonite’s austere life inspires Tommy to confide in him and confess his past misdemeanors. Tommy tells him, “When I see nice pictures in a magazine, I eat them. I steal jam from the grocery store and drop the bottles from the bridge near our house” (19). Tommy’s difficulties come from his family’s displacement as well as from having experienced racism as a child. He says, “At lunchtime the children chase me round the school-house with a skipping rope and try to hang me from a tree. It’s because my father’s from India” (19). Because of his feeling of dislocation, Tommy spends a great deal of time searching for substitute father figures and ways to belong. The Mennonite farmer is one such father figure whom Tommy meets and then rejects. The similarities between this encounter and the one with Tina suggest that these characters offer different ways of perceiving the world. Both Tina and the Mennonite are circumscribed and limited in their own ways, but they are useful for Tommy’s development because they serve to bring out his own inadequacies and fantasies and help him see where his strengths lie.

The motif of the lost father is brought out more overtly in another scene set in Canada. Tommy reads about the disappearance of a twelve-year-old-boy, Doug Harris, from St. Jacobs, Ontario, on the back of a milk carton. In a rather surreal scene, he goes to visit Mr. Harris and offers himself as a substitute son:

Mr. Harris. I don’t have blond hair or blue eyes. I’m taller than 4 feet 8 inches and bigger than 100 pounds but I can be your son. I’ll shine your shoes Sunday mornings if you wake me up. I’ll shovel the porch if you do the drive. I’ll dry if you wash. All you have to do is feed me and take me for rides in the car wash. I’ll be proud to eat with you at the A & W instead of making you do drive-thru. People won’t stare at us when we buy our groceries at Zehr’s. You won’t talk with an accent. You’ll teach me how to throw a spiral. You’ll do oil changes in the driveway. (37)

This passage reveals Tommy’s desperate desire for assimilation, belonging, and the erasure of racial difference. Comic and at the same time full of pathos, it shows the pain of always being marked as racially other and different. Tommy’s desires to be “normal” are mundane and almost comic. He wants to have a father who does the kind of “manly” things one expects in a Western society—teach him to play ball, shovel the driveway, fix cars. Yet these are precisely the day-to-day rituals that are not performed by many ethnic or immigrant families. David Eng notes of psychic identification:

We must remember that idealized images such as masculinity, hetero-sexuality, and whiteness also imply an obverse set of images such as femininity, homosexuality, and racialization. These culturally devalued images are ones that socially marked subjects are encouraged to loath. Even more, they are encouraged to disidentify with these images. When held to these unpleasant and devalued identifications, the subject experiences them as external impositions, which leads to a negative sense of self and psychic sense of dislocation. (Racial Castration, 115)

Tommy’s father, though heterosexual, is feminized in North America because he cannot and does not do those “normal [ . . . ] Canadian things” like “camping,” “mini-golf,” and “water-skiing” (Rice Boy, 5). In addition, he is economically disenfranchised because of his low-paying jobs and associated with traditional feminine roles because he works for a restaurant and sleeps on the kitchen counter. Psychically, Tommy disidentifies with his father and searches for the idealized white, masculine father who is validated and upheld by Western culture.

Though Tommy and Mr. Harris play at being father and son for a while, the substitution does not entirely succeed. Tommy provokes Mr. Harris’s fantasies of his son’s return—he imagines taking Tommy to the farmer’s market, to a hockey game, to the father-son Christmas dinner at church—but Tommy does not sound like Doug, and the reality of Tommy’s identity keeps intruding into their playacting. The scene ends abruptly, in a way as unreal as it began, when Mr. Harris says, “For a few moments you made me feel better. Thank you. You should leave” (51). Through this scene Kuruvilla suggests that the kind of full assimilation Tommy craves will not be the answer to otherness and racial difference. Tommy needs to find another way of dealing with issues of identity and marginalization. He cannot just pretend that his past and his Indian roots do not exist, just as Mr. Harris cannot will away his past and the loss of his son.

In a similar way, Tommy and his cousin, Tina, play at being husband and wife when they go into the city together. Because of her disability, Tina, too, has to work through issues of subjectivity and otherness that others around her do not experience. She is a young woman yet not regarded by most people in society as “desirable” or attractive because of her inability to walk. The playacting of Tommy with the girl with a disability functions in a different way from his playacting with Mr. Harris. With Mr. Harris what Tommy was searching for was belonging, specifically to normative white Canadian culture. With Tina the experience contributes to Tommy’s maturity and growth as a boy, his affective development and understanding of sexuality. Tommy conspires to roll Tina to the city at night, when the others are sleeping, saying, “You don’t have to wait until you get married” (23). Though ostensibly about their night escapade, the language here and the activity are sexually charged. For Tina the clandestine trip is a big adventure, her chance to do what others have done. She says to Tommy, “I’ve never seen these many people in one place [ . . . ]. I want to do everything, Husband” (32). Though Tina is sixteen and older than Tommy, twelve-year-old Tommy is the one who takes charge of her. He introduces her to sights unseen by her previously and becomes somewhat dizzy himself with the experience. It is also around this time that Tommy becomes aware of his own body, of his reproductive capacity and his sexuality. In a rather bizarre scene set in a half-frozen Canadian cornfield, Tommy masturbates on the ground, determined to plant his “little seeds” in order to have a “baby. A new Tommy. Good Tommy. Canadian” (55). Tina’s impending marriage and her role-playing with Tommy lead to his fantasy of a regeneration without the feelings of abjection and otherness he himself feels.

In a subsequent scene of bathing, Tina inadvertently awakens Tommy’s sexuality, and together they enjoy a secret sensual moment. Tommy takes over the servant girl’s job of shampooing Tina’s hair while her eyes are closed and while she is not wearing her sari. Though her breasts are bare, they touch each other only with their hands, lathering her hair at the same time. This scene, though brief, is an important one because it is the first time we, as an audience, see Tina as something other than a crippled girl. On stage, it is an erotic and electrically charged scene. It effectively works to reverse our preconceptions of Tina’s disabled body. Disability theorist Susan Wendell points out that “disabled women suffer more than disabled men from the demand that people have “ideal” bodies, because in patriarchal culture people judge women more by their bodies than they do men. Disabled women often do not feel seen (because they are often not seen) by others as whole people, especially not as sexual people” (“Toward a Feminist Theory of Disability,” 268). Kuruvilla lets the audience see Tina as a sexual woman and allows her to articulate her fears, her desires to be like other women, and her wish to be loved and adored. She is afraid of disappointing her future husband when he sees her legs, afraid that he will find her ugly. At the same time, she dreams of being chosen to “read the news on state television” (Rice Boy, 44). She says, “My face is pretty enough. You wouldn’t see my legs behind the desk. I’m going to wander the streets until I get picked” (44). Tina’s excursion to the city and her role-playing with Tommy provide her with an opportunity for adventure, for fantasy and excitement, without the burden of responsibility and tradition. It is a moment when she can forget about her legs that do not work, her disability, and her otherness, which set her apart from the women around her.

The play is like a fable in many ways, with enigmatic meanings about loss, drowning, and death and unfulfilled dreams and romances. Disability is only one of the many reasons that the characters’ hopes and dreams are not realized. At the end of the play we are left with a series of losses experienced by the characters both in India and in Canada. A number of women disappear unaccountably. Tina, like Tommy’s mother, goes missing. When Tommy asks Granny where Tina has gone, for she has been missing for the last six months, he is given only a number of speculations—that she died, that she arranges shoes “when people go into the Taj Mahal,” that she “lives in Vellore and eats rose water ice cream, for breakfast,” and that “she was hit by a train” (63). Tommy thinks that it is possible that she is “sliding around” and wandering somewhere in the city (73). But the family and the audience never learn the truth about her. Tina’s disappearance echoes that of Tommy’s mother, who, according to Tommy, “drowned 10 years ago” when they went to India and she went swimming in the river (20). The fact that they never found her body, however, leads Granny to create doubts in Tommy’s father’s mind: “She sunk to the bottom of the river. Or was carried to the sea. Or did she just swim away? Is she in Cape Comoran eating beef biriyani in a five-star? Is she in Mysore sucking on a mango seed as she swings in a hammock? Your beautiful wife walks in the Nilgris wiping the soap from another man’s ear” (35). Though we do not know much about Tommy’s mother, she is associated through imagery and description with the sensuality and nostalgic feelings of India. The father remembers her hand: “It smelled like this skin. The gold sari she’d wear to church. Bright as a flag. We’d come home and I’d unwrap her. Going in circles, moving away from her body and then in the end, moving close. Rolling on the ground. Silk in the mouth. The taste like hair” (4–5). Granny insinuates that Tommy’s mother, like Tina, may have desired another life other than what the family expected. Both Tina and Tommy’s mother had their own dreams, and both of them mysteriously disappeared, leaving the audience to speculate about their ends. They have either died tragically or succeeded in following their fantasies of freedom from conventionality.

The subplot involving the fish seller and the servant girl, his exwife, also echoes the themes of loss, thwarted desires, and belonging raised in the main plot. Like Tommy’s father, the fish seller has only memories of his relationship with his wife. He remembers “taking lessons at the post office” in order to read to his wife (60), as well as the sensuality of their sexual relationship. But because of the servant girl’s desire to move up in the world, to better herself, she has disassociated herself from the fish seller, who, she says, stinks and has filthy hands. She says: “Long ago, you spread your fish smell all over me, onto my body, into my hair. I am clean now. And beautiful. But I’m always sad” (72). In response, the fish seller reminds her, “We are not like them. But you think that you are” (72). The cost of her desire for social mobility has meant loneliness and estrangement from the one who loved her.4 By the end of the play, the fish seller drowns, leaving the servant girl waiting in futility for his return.

The various vignettes, plots, and subplots of the play suggest the inscrutable and ineluctable nature of happiness. Like the kolam patterns, happiness is fleeting, and beautiful patterns, though desired, do not last long in this world. In Kuruvilla’s Rice Boy the condition of globality is revealed by the many parallels of the characters from India and Canada. The young woman with a disability in India is shown to have many of the same longings and struggles as other characters in the play. She has limited access and experiences of the world, but so does the Mennonite whom Tommy encounters in Canada. She has unfulfilled sexual and emotional desires; so do other women, such as the servant girl and Tommy’s mother. She feels marginalized and excluded from full participation in her society; so does Tommy as the son of an Indian immigrant in Canada. Kuruvilla is not negating the particular experiences and the extreme difficulties of the disabled body, but he is demonstrating how disability is an added factor in the way one is othered and becomes an abject figure in society. Rice Boy, like Mother Tongue, makes the link between disability and racialized or gendered subjectivity, revealing the potential and possibilities for disabled bodies. The disabled and racialized figures have aspirations that are rendered impossible to fulfill by cultural assumptions and material constraints in our present society. At the very least, the two plays allow these marginalized figures to articulate their frustrations and their needs, to look critically at the ways disabled figures are often ignored in practices and discourses of capitalist enterprises, migration, and global cities. Hence, they function as “witnesses” (Oliver, Witnessing, 7) to the plight of those with disabilities. Quan and Kuruvilla use what De Certeau calls everyday “tactics”—the untranslated passages, the two-world parallel settings—to subvert and question the “ways of operating” and the power of the abled (The Practice of Everyday Life, 37, xix). By placing figures with disabilities on center stage, Quan and Kuruvilla have taken disability and ethnic disability out of the shadows and the invisible recesses of North America, making them topics of concern in contemporary global society.