LIUSHOU NÜSHI

[Women Who Are Left Behind]

Spoken drama

Written by Le Meiqin and directed by Yu Luosheng, this prize-winning experimental play recounts the lives and emotions of a young woman and a young man whose spouses have gone abroad to seek a new life. Waiting in anxiety for news from her husband in America, Nai Qing, a physician, encounters Jia Dong, a taxi driver, whose wife has gone to Japan and has become a well-known Ah Xiu of the red-light district in the Ginza. Nai Qing’s knowledge of her husband cohabiting with another man’s wife in America draws her close to Jia Dong, who is in a similar situation. Before long, they fall in love.

After an emotional struggle for her conscience and the abortion of Jia Dong’s baby, the play ends with Nai Qing’s decision to leave Jia Dong and join her husband in America. When the play premiered in a Little Theatre in Shanghai in 1991, it touched the hearts of many Shanghai residents, tens of thousands of whom had gone abroad since the beginning of reform, often leaving loved ones behind. The realistic portrayal of the moral bewilderment, psychological predicament and final transcendence with respect to the issue of infidelity struck a sympathetic chord. The play quickly became popular and was even adapted for film.