Treetrick bring their bilingual show Dear Lihua to the Edinburgh Fringe this year. Creative producer Elaine Quan and the team tell us more about the play.
“A woman dies in London and wakes in an afterlife divided by language. Assigned to an “English Heaven”, she must navigate memory, identity and belonging while slowly losing her mother tongue. Dear Lihua is a bilingual theatre piece blending English and Mandarin, exploring migration, assimilation and the emotional cost of translation. Combining text, movement and multimedia, the work invites audiences into an intimate and unsettling space between languages, where communication is fragile and meaning is never fixed.”
Where: Studio at theSpaceTriplex
When: 24-29 Aug
Ticket link: https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/dear-lihua
What can you tell us about your show? What is it about and where did the idea come from?
Dear Lihua tells the story of Qiuqiu, who wakes in a language-governed afterlife after dying during her Global Talent Visa application in London. In the Unanswered Letters Archive, she meets Li Hua, the fictional exam pen-pal who becomes a collective ghost of migration, belonging, and unheard voices.
The idea came from our long-standing desire to explore bilingual theatre and the experience of living between languages. As newcomers to the UK, we have all faced questions of identity and belonging: we work hard to improve our English, while at the same time feeling our Chinese gradually slipping away.
Li Hua is a figure that almost every Chinese student knows from English writing exercises, a familiar stranger who accompanied us through years of language learning. In the show, Li Hua becomes a way of thinking about migration, aspiration, and the voices that are often left unanswered.
In the show, Li Hua becomes more than an exam name. Li Hua is a collective ghost: every person who believed language might open a door, and every voice that was still waiting for an answer. Qiuqiu, meanwhile, represents many Chinese people striving to build a life in the UK while navigating the tensions between languages, cultures, and identities.
How would you sell it to audiences in one paragraph?
Dear Lihua is an inventive, bilingual English/Mandarin dark comedy that transforms the migrant experience into a surreal bureaucratic afterlife. Drawing on the shared memory of generations of Chinese students writing letters to the fictional “Li Hua,” the show explores language, identity, and belonging through a uniquely Chinese diasporic lens and the exhausting feeling of constantly translating yourself to be understood. Playful, poignant, and visually imaginative, it invites audiences to reflect on what gets lost—and what survives—when we cross borders in search of a new life.
Do you enjoy participating in the Fringe? And do you have any moments you particularly remember?
Yes, very much. This year will actually be our first time bringing our own work to the Fringe, so we feel both excited and nervous. Several members of the team have taken part in the Fringe before, but this will be Dear Lihua’s first time at Edinburgh, which feels very exciting for us.
One memory that has stayed with us from previous visits is watching a small-scale show in a packed room and seeing how complete strangers could be moved by a story together. That experience made us want to create work that could connect with audiences in the same way.
What are you looking forward to the most in Edinburgh?
We are most looking forward to sharing Dear Lihua with audiences and seeing how they respond to our bilingual storytelling. This is our first attempt at creating a bilingual theatre piece, and we are excited to explore how English and Mandarin can exist together on stage to tell a story about language, identity, and belonging.
We are excited to see how audiences from different backgrounds experience that — what feels familiar, what feels strange, and what conversations the show might open up afterwards. The Fringe feels like the perfect place to test this new experiment and start conversations with audiences from different backgrounds. The Fringe feels like the right place to test something ambitious, playful, and still growing.
What’s next for the show?
First, we survive the Fringe! After that, we hope Dear Lihua will continue its journey beyond Edinburgh. We’re keen to develop the piece further, share it with new audiences, and keep experimenting with bilingual theatre and stories of migration, language, and belonging.