Between Mother Tongues and English: Creating a Community of Asian Diaspora Experiences Through Documentary Theatre

Yibin Wang* and Yejia Sun**

Abstract

Language has always been an essential and vital yet often overlooked aspect of theatrical performance, creating an invisible barrier for people who don’t speak the language to access theatrical spaces. In this essay, we use the case of conducting mother tongue workshops in community spaces in New York City as a methodology to creatively engage with ESL community members. This approach, developed with artists and communities, not only makes the communities part of the audience but also aims to empower them to speak about their own unique experiences of immigration. Through the workshops, we argue that a new way of connecting between immigrants from different cultures can be developed, rooted in our individual connections to our own cultures. Therefore, this connection fosters a new form of communication in theatrical spaces, grounded in diverse cultures, without the need for explanation or translation in English as a way of assimilation into English-speaking culture.

Keywords: mother tongue, language, multilingual, documentary theatre, community, Asian Diaspora

So, is it a theatre piece?
Not exactly, I mean. In Chinese, it’s in剧场 (theatre). But it doesn’t have to be in the theatre for all our performances. So maybe we can call it 演出 (performance)?
But 演出 (performance) isn’t the sole purpose, right? We aim to develop community workshops for multilingual individuals. I mean, that sounds like a documentary project or community storytelling project. Like 社区戏剧 (community theatre)?
But it’s still live. It’s still…… Can we say it is still a theatre piece? But it’s not just for the community; it’s for…

Sitting in the English Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) classroom at University Settlement in New York City Chinatown, we were enjoying “wife cake” from Chinatown while having a meeting about creating posters in different languages for an open call for our next round of community workshops for our performance.

Over the past three months, we have visited senior centers every other week to host mother tongue karaoke sessions and facilitate community workshops with ESOL students. The poster was our final attempt to recruit more performers for the event to be involved in the performance that we would be staging in two months.

Sitting in this ESOL classroom, speaking our mother tongue, Chinese, mixed with some English, we found it somewhat difficult to precisely define what the project was about. The issue wasn’t that we didn’t know our goal, but that we knew exactly what we were doing, yet struggled to find the right words to articulate it in the English context of the classification of theatres.

In the project Tongues, we strongly believe that theatre doesn’t stop at the walls of the theatre but reaches beyond them into the communities. Whether it can be called a performance or a storytelling documentary, the main purpose is to ask questions and explore their complexity, rather than providing any fixed answers.

Therefore, through Tongues, a multilingual performance initiative, we try to explore the concept of mother tongues with communities of the Asian diaspora in New York City, one of the world’s most multilingual cities. Through our research and practice, we have come to realize that language, despite being such a pervasive and indispensable aspect of our identity, is often rendered alarmingly invisible in theatrical spaces. Language fundamentally shapes how we understand the world and communicate with each other. Yet mother tongues, our very first connection to the world, are frequently neglected within theatre’s cultural landscape for the purpose of being understood in the language that most people share English. When English becomes the sole mutual ground for everyone, it is positioned as the only bridge for cross-cultural connection, sidelining the rich diversity of languages that define us.

In this essay, we (Yibin, the project’s director, and Yejia, the dramaturg) use Tongues as a case study to explore multilingual theatrical practices and how mother tongues enable the creation of space for mutual connection. Fundamentally, we seek to answer a question arising from our lived experience: Can we find a way to connect beyond English?

This question is a response to the fact that theatre, as a practice in the context of the United States, is usually imagined or designed to be local and monolingual (typically in English) to engage as many people as possible. However, as ESOL speakers, we realized that accessibility in theatrical spaces is impeded by not only the language difficulties but also the cultural differences within the languages. But instead of what intercultural performances would strive to make such differences understood and made clear to the audiences, we asked a different question: Can we really tell our stories in English? Do we dare to be not understood in our mother tongues?

To engage with communities, we feel the strong urge that it is not enough to simply represent the community members on stage and invite their participation as audience members; it’s also essential to empower them to tell their own stories and understand the stories of others as the subject of storytelling. And most importantly, we want to experiment with the possibility of understanding in a new way. In this shared space created by the Tongues, language is just the starting point, but it addresses a more fundamental question: who we are and where we belong.

Forming the Community of Mother Tongues

When we first started the Tongues workshops in May 2024, we began by inviting artists and performers through our personal networks and an open call posted on online platforms such as the Asian American Arts Alliance (A4). Through a combination of online interviews and personal connections, the Tongues team has grown to include performers Michi Zaya (Mongolian), Mia Zhu (Mandarin), Lingyi Wang (Mandarin), OmRaj Raut (Nepali), and Andy Law (Cantonese), as well as the creative team of Yibin Wang (director), Yejia Sun (dramaturg), and Ruby Wang (producer), who are all international students or first-generation immigrants. In such spaces, English doesn’t become the prerequisite and sole form of communication and connection,

Our initial purpose was not to create a polished and finished product of theatre work, but to develop a method and process for finding answers through our perspectives in the multilingual communities. We sought to create a workshop model that could be adapted to various bilingual or multilingual communities and highlight the richness of their narratives. For them, to speak more than one language is like living in more than one reality and one world. And our goal of representing such stories is to reveal this untold and invisible world to both sides of the audience.

When we received artist residencies from the Museum of Chinese in America and the University Settlement in September 2024, we began a second round of workshops with the performers from the first round. In January 2025, we presented our first iteration of Tongues at the Exponential Festival, held at JACK, a performance space in Brooklyn. Over the course of a year, we conducted five different workshops for diverse audiences during these residencies and festivals, including mid-showings, community workshops, and staged performances. In June 2025, we presented our final staged performance of the first round at University Settlement, featuring community members and performers we had connected with during the community workshops.

One of the performers, Lisa A’yi (Aunty), is a representative of the senior community members at the Meltzer Center at University Settlement. Having immigrated to the United States in the early 2000s and worked as a home care aide for 15 years, she shared her stories of learning English at age 50 and becoming fluent in her third language (the other two being Mandarin and Cantonese). For her, speaking Mandarin at home with her son and mother in America is a way to maintain familial bonds. Stories from her and other community members added to the understanding of what mother tongues mean for them: the languages are a sense of belonging.

As we continued to observe different iterations of the performance from 2024 to 2025, we also witnessed the evolution of stories among our performers as they navigated their lives in New York City. Some returned to their home countries for short vacations, while others graduated and faced the immigration decisions of their lives. Others left the United States to pursue careers or lives in other parts of the world. Even the questions we asked during performances and workshops received different answers from the same people.

During a performance at Speyer Hall, University Settlement, New York, in June 2025, Lisa Zhou from China performed one of her favorite Chinese songs and shared the story behind it. Photo: Courtesy of SD Herzog

Tongues became not only a documentary project but also a living, breathing archive of our immigration stories. During one performance, a performer named OmRaj calculated the years he had spent in Nepal and the US, wondering if he could call New York his home now, given the substantial amount of time spent in America, and if he could still consider Nepal his home, since he could only return every few years. These reflections have revealed a growing anxiety about identity and belonging, as well as who and how they are defined.

Building Trust Across Languages

At the beginning of our workshops, we used prompts like “What’s your favourite hometown food, and how do you translate that into English?” and “What are the things you can only do in your native language here in America?” These conversations revealed how deeply our diaspora experiences, especially those connected to language, overlapped. That shared recognition, the feeling of “Yes, me too!”, filled the room after only a few sessions. Even the games and activities we used in rehearsal and on stage had a surprising depth of resonance. When asked to play a beloved childhood character from TV, film, music, or theatre, one performer chose a cartoon figure and then shared the family trauma behind it, a story many of us, as Asian diasporic artists, instantly understood without further explanation. This experience makes us realize, as we reflected after the rehearsals, that we don’t necessarily have to understand everything in the texts to connect with the concept. The different stories and memories merged into similar experiences that we all share in some way.

At a performance at Speyer Hall, University Settlement, New York, June 2025, Rita Liu from Taiwan sang one of her favourite Taiwanese songs and explained its significance. Photo: Courtesy of SD Herzog

One ensemble member was born in the United States but raised in their home country before returning to America for college, and spoke English with what we perceived as a “perfect American accent.” Yet during rehearsals, they confided that they felt more comfortable in this room precisely because they didn’t have to perform English perfectly, or to “sound American.” English for them was something they felt compelled to perform to access American communities or the theatre industry, either consciously or unconsciously. However, in the rehearsal room, they could let their speech slip into rhythms, tones, or even grammar rooted in their native language, even if they made some mistakes. While English remained our primary working language in the rehearsal room, the piece itself focused on languages other than English and required the combination of both mother tongues and English. The authenticity we found here, both in how we spoke and how we expressed ourselves, was rare. Directions and subtext flowed naturally, unfiltered by the need to “fit in” or the impulse to “be understood.”

Because the material was drawn directly from performers’ own experiences, the devising nature of the work was clear and made possible through workshops and rehearsals. With Yibin providing overall direction and Yejia shaping the structure, each member of the ensemble had the power to decide what should be shared and what should remain private. The rhythm, form, and content of the piece developed collectively in the rehearsal room with consent and contributions from the actors. Naturally, there was ongoing negotiation between the lead devisors and the performers to balance performativity and authenticity. Sometimes, a performer would worry about overexposure even while sharing profound stories. But the mutual care within the group kept us moving forward together.

During their June 2025 performance at Speyer Hall, University Settlement, New York, the ensemble closed the program by reflecting on the question, “What do you think of when you think of home?” with their eyes closed. (From right to left: Mia Zhu, Andy Law, Rita Liu, Michi Zaya, Lisa Zhou.) Photo: Courtesy of SD Herzog

The rehearsal space became a space where we could (or tried to) step outside the United States, or at least outside the expectations of “mainstream American culture”(if there is any), or at least the expectation that there is a norm to conform to. The community of the Asian diaspora created in the room gives us a glimpse into our realities of the world, which are neither purely English nor only our mother tongue, but in a unique way of communication.

But admittedly, the Asian diaspora cannot be understood as a universal and homogenous community because cultural differences are real within the communities, and tension arises over conflicting concepts. For example, our discussions around gender pronouns in English and how they differ in our own cultures sparked a debate about whether gender performativity can be a cultural matter, therefore subject to culturally specific ways of understanding. These conversations reminded us that honoring our mother tongues also means acknowledging our diverse cultural contexts. As we explored these ideas, we learned more about how to create a safe and respectful environment, allowing people to decide how they want to discuss these topics. Navigating this shift becomes part of our creative process: learning how to adapt to a new structure while transforming it from within.

The Paradox of Defining and Workshopping

After several workshops and performances, we have encountered this recurring question from our team and the audience about what this project truly is. This question points to a deeper inquiry, addressing not just the form of theatre but also the ontology of theatre—especially as it pertains to multilingual and immigrant communities.

As first-generation immigrant artists in New York, our understanding of theatre and performances often diverges greatly from the mainstream American perspective. However, in the broader American theatre scene, the real-life experiences of these cultures, especially Asian and Asian Diaspora, are frequently ignored, overlooked, and misrepresented. Even when Asian stories make their way onto the stage, they will most likely only talk in English on stage. People like us, who carry their home cultures with them, who are not simply trying to “fit in,” or who are often reduced to the single identity of “immigrants” with political implications, are often marginalized or “translated” on stage as a token of fresh-off-the-boat immigrants. However, our experiences as part of the Asian diaspora are complex and varied, shaped by our different backgrounds and our connections to the United States through migration. We aim to preserve our cultural roots and the richness of everyday life while adapting to a new environment, creating a unique presence in the U.S.

Each language holds its own world, and navigating those worlds has been a meaningful journey for us. We sought to capture the nuances of diasporic life, the everyday details and nuanced emotions that resided in the languages and bring ordinary people’s authentic experiences to the stage. Documentary theatre naturally became our chosen form.

Yet for us, this project is not just about representation. Representation is the first step, and the next step is about connection. Our central question is: How can we invite people in the United States to connect with us—not in English, but in the context of their native languages? At its core, it is about how we live with and connect despite our differences.

This question led us to create interactive moments with the audience: sharing food, translating a tricky phrase together, and voting between “America” and “home country.” The work evolved into something difficult to define, and the connections it fostered were remarkable. As performer Mia described her experience as a translator between Mandarin and English, she realized the languages she speaks in her everyday life are not just Mandarin or English, but an indefinable “third language” of both Mandarin and English. The impossibility of definition lies in the deeply interconnected nature of our lived realities when we communicate with others and the world.

At the same time, this interconnected nature is also reflected in the growing dilemma we faced during the workshops. This piece grows out of our diaspora experiences and our native languages, yet to make it legible to audiences, we often rely on English and lengthy explanations to narrate and explain our stories. How do we present our authentic selves while staying connected to others? That’s the challenge, and the question, we’ll continue to explore in future iterations. We seek to find a way to create a connection through the authentic stories without the need to explain ourselves further or be “translated” in a misrepresented way.

Conclusion

In the final moment for the performance, we asked not only ourselves but also the audience, “What is home to you?”

What we were surprised to discover is that, even if we don’t fully understand what they mean by the specific cultural facts, we still understand their meaning. Instead of cross-cultural narratives in theatre requiring connection through cultural performances, we started to create a new way of connecting: the connection between connections.

At Meltzer Hall, University Settlement, New York, March 2025. The ensemble and creative team of *Tongues* hosted a bi-monthly “mother tongues karaoke” gathering. Photo: Courtesy of Yibin Wang

Even though I have never been to the forest in Vancouver, I know what it feels like to walk in the forest near my home on a weekend afternoon. Even though I have never grown up in that small apartment in Hong Kong, I know what it feels like to listen to old cassettes in my childhood. Even though I have never tasted a momo^[1] in my life from a shop in Kathmandu, I recognize that same longing in the way I crave food from a dumpling house in the evenings.

Mother tongue gives us more than an alternative to English, as we speak English to be understood most effectively. We don’t have to understand every word and fact to understand how someone feels because the sense of belonging and craving for belonging are something we share that is truthful to our own experiences.

Tongues offers an example of how such a connection can be cultivated in theatre, a space uniquely suited to bringing communities together. It proves to us that despite this ever-dividing world we are living in, it may offer us a glimpse of hope of connections at times we don’t fully understand, or don’t need to be fully understood.

Endnote

^[1] Nepalese Momo is a popular dish of Nepal. It is a steamed or fried dumplings with a variety of fillings.

*Yibin Wang is a New York-based theatre and performance director from Hangzhou, China. He has a BA from Bard College and an MFA in Directing from Columbia University. He was also a grant recipient from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, working on a project that delves into the Asian community’s diverse diaspora experiences through the lens of native languages. Yibin’s interdisciplinary work explores cross-cultural narratives, communal experiences, new technology, and vibrant audience relationships. His recent directing/curatorial projects include Tongues (multiple venues), Cabin (East Village Basement), A Hunger Artist (Lenfest Center for the Arts), A Tree Has Not Yet Woken Up In A Dream (Beijing Fringe Festival), Playdate (En Garde Arts), A Theatre Letter To You (Columbia University), The Vanya Project (Columbia University), Designing Care (Hangzhou Fengshan Community). Website: https://yibinwang.weebly.com; Instagram: @yibinbillwang.

**Sun Yejia (孙也佳, she/her/hers) is an artist-scholar from Beijing, China, and is currently based in the US. She is particularly interested in documentary theatre, New Materialism, socially engaged art, and emerging media. She is currently a PhD student in performance studies at Northwestern University. In New York, her dramaturgical/writing of multidisciplinary works is presented at National Sawdust, Exponential Festival (JACK), Cellunova New Play Festival (Theatrelab), etc. Her essays were published at HowlRound and YingMing Theatre. She is a recipient of the Davis Project for Peace fellowship, Lisa Lu Scholarship, etc. (BFA., Communication University of China; MFA, Columbia University). Website: www.yejiasun.com.