Artist Spotlight: Jessica Luu Pelletier
“I really want this story to find anyone who's never felt "enough" of something, or really, anyone who had a kind of weird time growing up, figuring out who they are in different contexts, and having to look for the context they feel the most comfortable in.”
——-Jessica Luu Pelletier
This month we want to spotlight Jessica Luu Pelletier – the playwright behind Chosen Family, the first of a series of play readings produced for Found in Translation. This play explores the intricacies of the bilingual experience of young people born in the diaspora.
Jessica Luu Pelletier is a New York-based queer biracial Vietnamese-American theatre artist, writer, and actor. Born in Hà Nội, Việt Nam and raised in Massachusetts and Guam, Jessica has always identified as a third culture kid and as part of Generation 1.5. Seeking to understand this place in the diaspora, she writes multi-cultural stories that aim to represent her communities, connect generations, and liberate those who have been Othered.
Chosen Family weaves together the Vietnamese-American diaspora with Buddhist reincarnation theory. The theory in question for this story is one that claims a person’s soul enters a “void” after passing on. Once in that void, the soul gets to decide if they’d like to live again. In this lies the piece’s Dramatic Question: if you knew everything you know now, would you do it all over again?
Found In Translation is a collaboration between Chuang Stage, Asian American Theatre Artists of Boston, and Pao Arts Center. This project explores and experiments with the nuances of multilingualism in theatre and the bilingual experience of Asian-Americans living in the diaspora. Found in Translation is made possible by a Live Arts Boston grant from the Boston Foundation.
We asked a few questions to Jessica this week to learn more about her process as a writer and why she wrote Chosen Family.
Why did you write this story and what inspired you?
This story was my first attempt at exploring my intersectional and diasporic Vietnamese identity through theatre. As a biracial Vietnamese-American, I didn't really feel like I had the authority to call my work "Vietnamese" or to speak on Vietnamese culture. In my head, writing about Vietnamese people or including Vietnamese culture in my work felt like I was becoming a "representative" or a "teacher," and for a long time, I didn't feel like I was the best person for that. Then, one day, New York's Sống Collective put out a digital call for Vietnamese playwrights. Restless in both quarantine and the 2020 social upheaval, they decided to take matters into their own hands and gather an inaugural band of writers, the Việt Writers' Lab, to better authentically portray the diversity of Vietnamese stories. Knowing there would be variety in the room and feeling like I could bring maybe a different but still true perspective, I joined them, and over an incubation period of six months, Chosen Family was born.
I initially joined the group unsure if I would write explicitly about Vietnamese people or if the work would be Vietnamese because I'm Vietnamese. But then, after a few weirdly very healing community-sharing sessions in the early months of our process, I felt compelled to somehow integrate all the little cultural elements we discussed that tied us together into my story - everything from the obvious, like language and spirituality, to the more nuanced, like "running on Vietnamese time." And that's how the story started.
Honestly, if I had to summarize the feelings, I'd probably say that I ended up writing it as a byproduct of better understanding myself in tandem with inspirations from my realized life, my fellow writers, and my communities. As for why I wrote it...I feel like I discovered that more and more every time it reaches a new audience, so it's hard to say for sure! As of right now though, I'd like to think it's an attempt at sharing the feeling of being seen in a raw way.
Who do you want to reach with this story?
Naive as it might sound, I want to reach everyone! While I wrote this story with Vietnamese people and culture in mind, I feel like there are many avenues to connect with these characters, depending on the individual watching. If I had to say though, I'd say I really want this story to find anyone who's never felt "enough" of something, or anyone who had a kind of weird time growing up, figuring out who they are in different contexts, and having to look for the context they feel the most comfortable in.
Why is it important for us to write about bilingual experiences?
I think bilingualism is important to write about because I feel that this concept is more often tied to assumptions when it really should be more of an inclusivity-aimed discussion. I feel like there has been a lot of "figuring out" as to how we should treat language because of the variety of beliefs that exist around it, especially here in the U.S.
I think a lot of us nowadays see the ability to speak, read, and write a language, especially English, as being tied to the idea of access. And as a result of this belief, we've seen families try to navigate what language(s) to teach their children to hypothetically give them the "best life." And then, in many cases, including my own, we often see other languages get given up in the likes of English to try and avoid being alienated and to hopefully garner basic respect for assimilating.
And as with many impactful life choices, this has come with unforeseen implications, such as the incurrence of almost a sort of equivalent exchange - the subsequent loss of access to the culture and community associated with a person's non-English language. And I feel like we don't nearly talk about these things enough in public, even though it makes so many of us so sad! So I feel like it's time for us to write more about it, even if we don't necessarily have "answers," just so it's more of a normalized thing for people to think about. I hope that in thinking about it, people then decide how they feel and how they fit into it, so that maybe, we can act more inclusively in respective spaces and make better-informed decisions for the next generations, which has always been important.
