Summary
Joe and Mel sit at a bar after the first presidential debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. The two reporters discuss Joe's recent interview with Paul, though Mel encourages him to drop the idea of the story. Senator Maria Dubiecki visits their table and greets Joe and Mel by name, entering a discussion about her future political aspirations. After she and her young assistant, David Barker, leave, Joe receives a phone call from Frank. Frank explains that he has a lead for Joe's Tank Man story. Mary Chang, a woman who accidentally published a memorial advertisement about the victims of the Tiananmen Square Massacres while living in China, told Frank her story. At the same time, he visited her place of work, a strip club.
Joe and Mel visit Mary at the strip club; she dances to a remix of "China Girl," a song choice she abhors. Mary explains that a woman named Feng Meihui purchased the incriminating ad using a credit card; she offers to corroborate the claim using evidence from her "notebook," the careful records she kept while working at a newspaper. She gives Mel and Joe a copy of her resume, hoping her compliance with their investigation will encourage Frank to give her a job. Their meeting is cut short when Mary leaves to dance in a "United Nations" performance.
Meanwhile, in Beijing, Zhang Lin records himself telling his story, which prompts a flashback to 1989. In this flashback, Zhang Lin recounts how he and his future wife, Luili, met back in the 1980s. While walking past a store searching for a new bed, Zhang Lin sees Luili selling refrigerators. Instead of the bed, he buys the refrigerator, believing "that refrigerator would change [his] life." After setting the machine up in his apartment, Zhang Lin opens it to find Luili freezing inside, like a "stowaway." Not questioning her appearance, he invites her to bed to warm up, though he has no bed. Taken with each other, the two then-strangers "made love on the floor instead." After Zhang Lin's reminiscence, Zhang Wei gives his brother a set of new plates, believing they will be "more hygienic." Zhang Lin is uncomfortable that the dishes came from the exploitative factory where Zhang Wei works and that Zhang Wei walked through dangerous levels of smog to deliver them, but he thanks his brother for the gift.
Joe invites Tess to his apartment to apologize for his behavior at the restaurant and to offer her apolitical photographs to use on her company's credit card. He accidentally shows Tess the wrong folder, which contains war photographs. The two discuss the images, Joe lamenting how in a digital world, where "schoolkids armed with iPhones" take better pictures than Joe, photography no longer has the power to "change anything." The two then discuss Joe's aversion to having children, which he ascribes to the unfairness of bringing a child into "a shitty place." Tess laments that she has no friends in New York except her emotionally needy drug dealer.
Joe visits his ex-girlfriend, Michelle, an officer in the New York police department. She gives him the address of the only available Feng Meihui in Manhattan, an older woman who runs a fish stall in Chinatown. There, he meets Feng Meihui and her daughter, Jennifer. Meihui agrees to speak for money only because she needs to pay Jennifer's tuition and explains that she took out the ad for her infant son, who was killed by a stray bullet during the massacre. She also says a man named "Jimmy Wang" paid for the portion of the ad about the "Unknown Hero," the Tank Man. Meihui explains that, as smuggling people into America is her family business, she helped Jimmy Wang escape in the aftermath of Tiananmen Square.
Joe and Mel follow Meihui's lead to a flower shop owned by Pengsi. Pengsi hesitates to cooperate with Joe and Mel, believing they are cops. After Mel leaves, Joe takes a photo of Pengsi and sends it to Zhang Lin, who deletes the message and calls Joe, enraged that Joe would send an email about Tank Man, which Chinese censors will flag. Zhang Lin is also angry at Joe for not calling his nephew, Benny.
In Zhang Lin's apartment, he records again, voicing his regrets. In a flashback to 1989, Zhang Lin remembers pressing his wife to break her hunger strike and eat because she was pregnant. A British reporter, Kate, approaches the young couple embracing in the car. Though Liuli does not speak English, she joyfully recites a litany of hopes for her future child.
Ming Xiaoli, Zhang Lin's elderly, dying neighbor, visits his apartment with a plant as a gift. She tells Zhang Lin to arrange a "strip tease" at her funeral before becoming upset by a dream where her daughter scolded her for smoking. Xiaoli then recalls her time modeling for a "Party Poster" as a child, bringing her mild fame. Both depressed, Xiaoli and Zhang Lin get drunk together.
Analysis
In the opening of Act Two, Mel and Joe comfortably access a bar full of politicians and openly talk to Senator Maria Dubiecki. Though journalists are supposed to be impartial, it is clear from their conversation that both Joe and Mel favor Barack Obama and are on friendly terms with Senator Dubiecki. This scene, where Mel and Joe are physically and socially close to politicians, invites the audience to question how impartial American journalists can be in interconnected political environments.
Frank's treatment of Chinese Americans, particularly women, is ironic as he attempts to publish Joe's story, which champions human rights in China. While Frank explains to Joe how he received a tip leading to Wang Pengfei, the supposed Tank Man, he receives an in-office massage from a Chinese woman, a stereotypical and often sexually exploitative profession. Frank received the lead from Mary Chang, a woman "sleeping on the floor" of the strip club Frank frequents. Thus, Frank's reprehensible, almost fetishizing treatment of Chinese women is ironic; he attempts to profit off a story that casts China as a villain and America as a hero, using the image of an unsung Chinese national hero, while at the same time exploiting a woman victimized by Chinese censorship laws.
In the third scene, the ironic fetishization of Chinese women is demonstrated even more explicitly. Mary lost her position in China after accidentally publishing a memorial for victims of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, leading her to work in the strip club because she was out of options. At the strip club, she is forced to dance to "China Girl," an exoticizing, racist song. Then, Mary and Ellie-May, an American woman wearing a sequined "stars and stripes bikini," leave to perform in a "United Nations" performance, presumably a dancing show featuring women of various nationalities and ethnic backgrounds.
The play uses Zhang Lin documenting his story on a laptop as a framing device to transition into flashbacks of his life with Liuli. At the end of the play, Zhang Lin is revealed to be the Tank Man, his story and image co-opted by Joe and America writ large. Thus, by recording his memories, Zhang Lin reclaims his own story and adds nuance to the Tank Man photograph.
In Zhang Lin's storyline, he constantly drinks beer from his refrigerator, inside which Liuli's bloodied ghost hides. The fridge and beer are both symbolic. When Zhang Lin first saw the refrigerator, he attached significance to the object, believing it could "change [his] life." Similarly, Zhang Lin believed that American values like free speech and material wealth would improve his life. However, Zhang Lin is surrounded by the consequences of hyperconsumerism, such as the polluted air and river, and, because Joe's exercise of "free speech" made Zhang Lin an international icon without his consent, Zhang Lin cannot speak the truth of his experiences. Still, he drowns his pain in beer, a quintessentially "American" drink, unwilling and unable to reject China or America completely, though both nations have destroyed his life.
Joe apologizes for his behavior at the restaurant while he and Tess look through photographs. One such photo is of a mourning Palestinian woman who threw an iron bar at Joe, likely for invading her privacy by taking pictures of her and her dead children. This scene is ironic, as Joe is not aware that his photography blurs ethical lines, documenting others' worst moments without their permission; he apologizes to the woman he was rude to after she attempted to profit off the suffering of others—but not to the woman in the photo whose suffering Joe himself profited from.
As Tess and many others point out, one of the most compelling aspects of the Tank Man photograph is that the anonymous man is holding shopping bags. Though Tess points out that the shopping bags indicate how ordinary people doing mundane activities like shopping find themselves amid historical moments, Joe angrily dismisses the shopping bags. He believes that the Tank Man is a "hero," and the shopping bags undercut his great act of defiance. Heroism is a theme explored throughout the play; Joe, who struggles with needing to personally change the world, feels that "heroes" are a distinct category of people and tries to be one himself. However, he understands his greatest accomplishment is photographing someone else's heroism.
Joe also complains that the saturation of photographs in the digital age makes his work nearly worthless, as people are so desensitized to images of tragedy and trauma. Thus, Joe's intense need to revive interest in the Tank Man photograph makes sense, as his work reflects a disillusioned need to reclaim relevance, more than a romantic desire to show the world the truth.
In Zhang Lin's memory, Luili lists a series of things, some mundane and some fantastical, that she wants for her future child. Though some of her desires are generic and cross-cultural, like a desire for her child to be "a great artist" or be "happy and clever and kind," Luili intersperses her list with American ideals and items that represent consumerism. For example, she claims her child will have "a doorbell with an electric chime," "own three pairs of Levi's," and have "a car with a refrigerator in it." These "goals" demonstrate the romanticized view of the West prevalent in 1980s China that Zhang Lin now criticizes.
