“Lavishing on desire”
Do we desire food out of hungry?
Do we desire out of lack?
If I crave something, or someone, does it mean something missing in me?
E gui (饿鬼 hungry ghost), a term used in pan-Chinese Buddhist culture, refers to a spirit trapped in endless crave, being condemned to insatiable hunger and thirst. However, they are forbidden to eat or drink because of excessive greed, selfishness or unfulfilled desire when they were alive.
Elizabeth Gunawan’s (writer, devisor and director) Prayers for A Hungry Ghost lingers on this image through an immigrant family from Hong Kong to the U.S. In this family without a matriarch, everyone is a hungry ghost. The father (Daniel York Loh) is a first-generation immigrant for whom food means freedom. He has a small body but eats a lot – a primordial image of the hungry ghost who has an enormous stomach with a tiny throat. He also wants a son, of course, a desire deeply ingrained in Confucian patriarchy.
Always “the inferior” among the sisters, the big sister (performed by Gunawan) craves love and attention, projecting it onto her date, later husband Eugene (puppetry: Aya Nakamura). But Eugene is drawn to her younger sister (Jasmine Chiu) even when his wife is pregnant. After she repeatedly asks “do you love me”, such never-reassured desire eventually incorporates into an ultimate presence of hungry ghost: after (or more precisely, during) a desperate orgy, she kills him. In one moment, she starts to eat glass. While such image reinforces her bottomless, unfulfilled desire, it also showcases how the female body consumes what exactly wounds it.
For the younger sister, being an artist per se means living through perpetual craving. Furthermore, being Asian renders that desire even harder to fulfil in a white-dominant world (although the image of classical pianist may slightly fall out of context). When she’s playing Mozart’s Rondo Alla Turca, Erin Guan’s projection displays a tiny figure wandering along an endless pathway. Gradually, as the music grows more intense and uncontrollable, the path becomes a tangle of chaotic graffiti, and the little figure disappears. It almost feels like this family of three, each lost within their own desire while at the same time inseparable from each other. This mode of entangled desires circles back to the not-so-unfamiliar narrative of how the patriarchy of pan-Chinese Confucianism suppresses (female) desire.
While such narrative is valid, it feels too Lacanian. Even the haunting figure of the mother (Matej Matejka, also movement director) traversing the stage seems like the forever-lost objet petit a. Under such a narrative paradigm, what is really oppressed is not desire, but the imagination to it. Once again, this Chinese version of the repression hypothesis perfectly fits into a narrative about how Chinese (women) are oppressed by their own culture, identical to that one told by Western missionaries 200 years ago.
While the first twenty minutes can feel too chopped up, the story unfolds more coherent once the big sister takes central stage. There is also a subplot highlighting the sisterhood, which strives to circle itself back to the show’s central theme of desire, as well as to be emotionally resonant. As an interdisciplinary R&D performance piece merging dance, puppetry, film, and storytelling, Prayers for a Hungry Ghost demonstrates great potential if it dares to imagine beyond repression with more profound emotional soundness.