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“In ancient Greek myth, a ‘chimera’ was a fire-breathing monster with a lion's head and a serpent's tail. In Lucy Kirkwood's drama, (2013) Chimerica is something bigger and scarier than that. The word was originally coined by historian Niall Ferguson to describe the globally dominant, co-dependent relationship between trigger-happy spendthrift America and control-freak, money-grabbing China” (McGinn, C. 2013).
Chimerica opens with the iconic photograph of Tiananmen Square, 4 June, 1989. We see the “Tank Man” who blocked the advance of a tank towards the protesters, his back to us. A shopping bag in each hand, he faces the tank, which then refuses to run him down. The playwright's script instructions read, “It is a photograph of one country by another country.” Cultural and political encounter is the theme of the play, played out in the fictional and intensely personal portrait of two denizens of cultures that are in conflict and contrast in so many ways. Joe Schofield, who took the photo as a neophyte news photographer at the age of nineteen, now seeks to find the legendary, if now all but forgotten, “Tank Man” twenty-three years later, just as, in America, Obama seeks re-election against Mitt Romney.
In the play, Joe tries to sell his editor a story about investigating whether the tank man is still alive, presumably living now in the US. The editor agrees at first, but later reneges when the corporation owning the paper seeks financial backing from the Chinese, who, after all, now own American finance. Meanwhile, Joe is in communication with his close Chinese friend, Zhang Lin, who lives in Beijing under its unbreathable smog, and teaches “wild English” to Chinese students, including the offspring of the rich and powerful. Zhang Lin, an educated, intelligent man, is wise to the paradoxes of Western culture's many contradictions, and capable of far more sophisticated thinking about the complexities of contrast between West and East than is Joe.
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