Excavating childhood from the chaos of conflict
Responding to Precious Cargo by Barton Williams (Huynh van Cuong)
Barton Williams (Huynh van Cuong) / Photograph: Ralph Tonge
The boxes that face us, new cardboard, contain nothing – or do they belong to a magician, empty but able to make you come out different, or disappear? They are a visual joke so bad it is good: moving boxes, emotive boxes, boxing us in with him, the narrator, who is thinking outside the box. He will cycle rapidly through stories told in couplets. If he arrived in a cardboard box, that was not the end. Sometimes, he puts himself in a box. Sometimes, he will become people he has internalised. People who are not racist, but. People who love him in the life he leads away from Vietnam, his home, his true home. Once, standing, he bends, folds, and rocks, asleep in an aeroplane.
Scenes shift. In no kind of scale, snapshots of childhood loom large. Children’s faces look straight out at us like giant icons; we cannot but gaze back.
Precious Cargo, an Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2024 production by sruth-mara in association with An Lanntair, held me transfixed and continues to move me. Barton Williams (Huynh van Cuong), the writer-performer, explores the lifelong impact of the Vietnam war on the children of ‘Operation Babylift’. Think back to almost half a century ago. Think of it as the time when non-Vietnamese families in Australia, the USA, and across Europe, decided to send for, and adopt, Vietnamese children who, yes, perhaps had lost their family, but…perhaps need not have lost them. Not all children adrift in wartime are orphans. However, the fossil fuels burnt as those flights jetted off in 1975 consumed old family ties. The heat and light of landing forged new ones. By strange chance, while working on this piece of theatre, Australian-raised Williams met another of Vietnam’s Operation Babylift generation – his soon-to-be collaborator, Hebridean composer Andy Yearley (Nguyen Tang) – on the Isle of Lewis. What are the chances?
Listen. Music plays. Voices sound: grown people searching for their families, praying that someone will take a DNA test, wanting relationships that have not been filtered through the U.S. military. No chance. Across the wall of boxes that is also a screen, war planes and passenger planes scream, quietly. Clouds and ocean, projected, make the cardboard surface bigger than the surface of any land. This stage set has edge and depth and layers. Does it establish place? Not only. Not so much. It immerses us in the feeling of transgenerational memory. Still and moving images follow the illogic of what the heart holds close, through historical losses. We adapt our sense of ‘near’ and ‘far’, ‘known’ and ‘unknown’, ‘long ago’ and ‘right now’, until we can and/both the neither/nor.
Perhaps, like the narrator, we are unable to speak the languages or cook the cuisines of our ancestral places of origin. Perhaps we are fortunate, or limited, enough to be rooted in those places and traditions. For the moment, Precious Cargo helps us transcend the idea that ‘being present’ means making our attention small. The invisible speakers of the voiceovers are just as alive as the narrator’s elegant, eager intensity as he commands the stage. No more, no less. We are invited to dwell on scenes from lives that don’t have to be, and cannot be ‘our own’, as lingeringly as on scenes from the lives of our beloveds. Over the breadth of boxes, landscapes mix with newsreels. A column of boxes hosts a family album, the faded freedoms of the 1970s and 1980s.
Barton Williams (Huynh van Cuong) / Photograph: Ralph Tonge
Faces fill my eyes in the Demonstration Room in Summerhall, Edinburgh’s famous arts venue. ‘Demonstration’ is a funny word. Is a ‘demonstration room’ where you go to be de-monstered? This building formerly housed the University’s School of Veterinary Studies. Here, I feel like a creature that has barely escaped being demonstered. In the darkish room with tiered wooden seating, polished by the attentive rumps of the students of yesteryear, I ponder monsters. ‘Remonstration’ properly means a rebuke, or reproach. What if it meant ‘reverting to the identity or condition of monster’? In Shakespeare’s tragedy, King Lear, the Duke of Albany remonstrates with his wife, Goneril, ‘Bemonster not thy feature’, before demonstrating little self-irony as he fantasises aloud about ripping her apart in punishment for her bloodthirstiness. If you stay whole, but behave monstrously, you stay human. People ripped apart may become specimens; theatrical examples of textbook monstrosity. Faces fill my eyes. Yet, clearly, I am distracted.
We hear, in the play, of children with shrapnel in their eyes, shrapnel in their ears. Eventually, we shall hear of the true spirit passed from one generation to the next. Meantime, always, as the script lyrically reminds us: “The moon is the mirror in which loved ones who are separated can see each other.” My memory travels between traditions around mirrors and the dead. Memories of mixed mourning. Cover the mirrors in the house of the dead. Is it so the soul does not get trapped in them on its way to the next world? Is it so evil spirits cannot get in from their world to ours through them? Is it so we do not look at our own reflections, vain or vainly self-critical, but look out for each other? This is not in the play. Why am I distracted?
On the way into the Demonstration Room, I had found myself talking about the ongoing genocide in Palestine. It was a sunny day, and my thoughts were frozen. Polite nothings had not come to my lips. There seemed no way out or in that did not verge on these words; how the dead children, daily on the news, resembled people in my family. There was no change in my interlocutor’s eyes when I said this. We sat next to each other. Seeing her settle in for her enjoyment of the festival, I remonstrated with myself for not paying full enough attention. Failed spectator, too much at one with a modular set.
Precious Cargo, at Summerhall, Demonstration Room, Aug 1-18, 20-26, 15:10.
