A statement from the writer of A Great Migration
A Great Migration started in my Junior year at Northwestern when our playwriting professor asked us to write what scared us most; I chose to write my family. I am not afraid of my family, but growing up I was afraid to talk about my family, even to other family members. We were not a “standard” American family: firstly there was no father in the picture (there used to be, but he left), and secondly my brothers and I looked East Asian which didn’t seem to make sense next to our white mother. We loved each other, as most families do, but we didn’t know how to talk about the Korean elephant in the room that was our absent father. So we didn’t. We coasted on silence. Life was crazy enough with a single mother raising three boys all in different grades, moving us wherever she could find work. Thankfully, albeit in an awkwardly painful way, we recently had to find our missing father so that my older brother would not be enlisted into the Korean Army when he went over to teach English. And so the silence was broken, and breaking family silence is terrifying, and so I wrote a fictional autobiographical play about it. I have since graduated from Northwestern, this past June, and written and developed plays about the Mars Rover singing, and the horror that is Madama Butterfly, but no play scares and excites me like this one.
Preston Choi
A Great Migration started in my Junior year at Northwestern when our playwriting professor asked us to write what scared us most; I chose to write my family. I am not afraid of my family, but growing up I was afraid to talk about my family, even to other family members. We were not a “standard” American family: firstly there was no father in the picture (there used to be, but he left), and secondly my brothers and I looked East Asian which didn’t seem to make sense next to our white mother. We loved each other, as most families do, but we didn’t know how to talk about the Korean elephant in the room that was our absent father. So we didn’t. We coasted on silence. Life was crazy enough with a single mother raising three boys all in different grades, moving us wherever she could find work. Thankfully, albeit in an awkwardly painful way, we recently had to find our missing father so that my older brother would not be enlisted into the Korean Army when he went over to teach English. And so the silence was broken, and breaking family silence is terrifying, and so I wrote a fictional autobiographical play about it. I have since graduated from Northwestern, this past June, and written and developed plays about the Mars Rover singing, and the horror that is Madama Butterfly, but no play scares and excites me like this one.
Preston Choi