“Elizabeth Liang in Alien Citizen: An Earth Odyssey, (c) HapaLis Prods.” Alien Citizen: An Earth Odyssey is like an anthem for those who grow up internationally but its genius has thus far escaped the attention of the international school community. Elizabeth Liang’s gripping film and performance is a godsend for international educators grappling to find creative ways to address difficult, complex issues relating to racism and inequalities that speak to both children and adults.
FILM REVIEW
Film Review of Alien Citizen: An Earth Odyssey By Danau Tanu Visiting Research Fellow Waseda University
Written and produced by Liang, Alien Citizen opens with a booming voice taunting her on stage to answer the unanswerable questions that Third Culture Kids (Pollock et. al., 2017) and mixed-race children often hear: ‘Where are you from? … What are you?’ It then follows Liang’s childhood of moving internationally with her ‘Guate’-Chinese-Irish-European-hodgepodge-American family, partly to escape the civil war in Guatemala in the 1970s at first and then later as a ‘business brat’ when Xerox posted her father up and down and across the Atlantic Ocean. Liang—the sole actor in Alien Citizen—seamlessly switches from one character to another as she humorously unearths a hoard of deep-seated pain that many children experience but have no words with which to express it. After moving to Fairfield County in Connecticut, USA, she notices that ‘nobody on TV looks like me, except maybe Spock on the Star Trek reruns!’ Just as Liang is feeling culturally displaced and in need for a sense of belonging, she begins losing her Spanish, the language that connected her to her father’s large and loving extended family in Guatemala. But she does not stop there. Liang deftly places those same issues that have been covered a myriad times in expat memoirs squarely in the middle of a world riddled with social inequalities that spans across centuries. Liang spares no one from critique, not even herself. In a poignant scene, after trying and failing to speak Spanish to their housekeeper, five-year-old Liang takes a broom in an attempt to hit their housekeeper, Filomena, while her older brother tries to stop her. My own doctoral research shows that when children are overwhelmed by language barriers, they sometimes express it in ways that look like the behavioural problems of a spoiled, privileged brat, such as by punching their classmate or yelling ‘shut up’ at their teacher (Tanu, 2018). It is not lost on the adult Liang that ‘Filomena left her home in the highlands of Guatemala’ out of poverty to take care of her privileged family in ‘the coldest, unfriendliest town in New England’. Later, she alludes back to Filomena as Liang makes fun of her beloved Chinese Guatemalan family elders who were horrified by the dark tan she had picked up from playing in the sun at her
72 EARCOS Triannual Journal