REVIEW: LILI, THE CHINESE GIRL, NOT LILY Camden Fringe at Etcetera Theatre 5 & 6 August 2024

‘light-hearted entertainment, a bilingual play with songs and music, scratching the surface of the identity crisis’ ★★★

The stage was littered with neat piles of cardboard boxes of all sizes, making you wonder if someone is moving in or out of an apartment. Upstage left sat a lone figure behind a keyboard. The musician started playing live, a cue to the two actors to enter the stage, and they began setting up the first scene of a sushi food place with the aid of the boxes. There is a saying that less is more. As the show progresses, the boxes seem to be cluttering the stage allowing far less space for movement.

Girl meets boy, they strike up a friendship and a relationship develops, blossoms and deteriorates over the course of three months. Lili, played by the writer-actor-producer Feifei Xiang, is a Chinese female graduate student living and working as a retail assistant in London. She is becoming increasingly exasperated with her work situation at the perfume shop and struggles to cope with the racial discriminatory atmosphere of her workplace. She meets Cam, a worker at a local sushi food place, and starts confiding in him her frustrations. About her customers, her colleague making racist name-calling remarks and her graduate visa soon to expire.

Cam, played by the Scottish based actor-director Angus Battacharya, is the embodiment of the naive unguarded person you almost feel sorry for towards the end. A Caucasian male from a quite wealthy background, working at the Asian food place, he is a resourceful good listener, an advisor and friend to Lili. His weakness is his excessive attraction to Lili and her demands. Easily persuaded to move in with her in her apartment just after a couple of weeks of meeting her, Cam soon finds rifts appearing in their cohabitating life.

Cultural differences emphasised by Cam’s mispronunciation of Lili as opposed to Lily, and Lili’s own language struggles and hygiene habits, became the source of arguments for the two lovers. Her graphic description of her sexual experiences with men, possibly meant to be funny, was quite vulgar and gross for a young girl. She became critical over everything and about everyone around her. Whether it was deliberate or not or as a result of past experiences with micro-aggression, Lili is seen to be a self-seeking, puppet master of that relationship.

A monologue delivered in Chinese by Xiang and translated in English by Battacharya, was a touching scene, authentic and real. Lili opens up about how her family in China never express their love and appreciation verbally. 'Wo ai ni (我愛你)'. A simple phrase translated to ‘I love you’ was so difficult to express in her own language. Could that actually be the roots of many of her problems? There is a long road ahead of her to reach emotional maturity and her decision at the end of the show is perhaps the beginning to finding out who she really is.

While the production ‘Lili, the Chinese Girl, Not Lily’ attempts to cover a lot of (far too much) ground on the experiences of an east Asian migrant trying to find her feet in the UK, it offers light-hearted entertainment, a bilingual play with songs and music, scratching the surface of the identity crisis faced by the Chinese Girl. The beautiful sounds of the music composed by Yinhe Tao and live keyboard playing, accompanying the vocals of the two actors, was a delightful feature of this production.

Writer: Feifei Xiang

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