Unfolding a Mysterious Family Chronicle: Piecing Together Shards of Memory and Care in Katherine Hui-ling Chou’s "She Says, She Says"

Beginning with a mysterious family chronicle, Taiwanese contemporary theatre director Katherine Hui-ling Chou’s latest production, She Says, She Says, has been five years in the making. Interweaving social realities surrounding dementia and long-term care with the “politically incorrect” entanglements between Shanghai and Taiwan, the work invites audiences into an encounter with a mysterious, magical, and sweeping history.

A leading playwright-director and performance scholar in contemporary Taiwanese theatre, Katherine Hui-ling Chou has remained active at the intersection of academic inquiry and theatrical practice since returning to Taiwan in 1997 after completing her studies at New York University and co-founding the Creative Society Theatre Group. Her works consistently take individual and family histories as their point of departure, weaving together magical realism and temporal dislocation to question the truths and obscurities concealed beneath grand historical narratives. In her latest work, she once again turns to the interplay between ordinary lives and monumental history, crafting a deeply moving portrait of their entanglement.

The origins of She Says, She Says can be traced back to an extraordinary chain of events spanning eight years. Chou Hui-ling explained that she spent five years developing the work, and the script has now gone through more than four drafts. The project began with a private nianpu—a chronological biography—passed on to her by a friend.

A nianpu is a detailed personal chronicle that records the major events of a person’s life year by year, from birth to old age. The owner of this particular nianpu was an actual intellectual born during the Guangxu reign of the late Qing dynasty. He was sent to Japan to study at Waseda University’s Faculty of Economics and, in the first year of the Republic of China (1912), became one of the first officials responsible for overseeing the nation’s fiscal budget. Throughout his career, he served in a number of government posts, including Commissioner of Finance for Hubei Province, and was deeply involved in the fiscal administration of the early Beiyang Government.

“How important does a person’s life have to be to be remembered by history? Over the past eight years, I’ve searched for this Beiyang official’s name on Google three times, and each time, all I found were one or two brief sentences. That, to me, says that history is disappearing. Forgetting is the true norm,” Chou reflected.

This nianpu, so deeply intertwined with “grand history,” was unexpectedly discovered in the home of an elderly woman known as Kimberly Hsu, despite her having no blood relation to its owner. Chou recalled that, as Madame Hsu prepared to move into a nursing home, her descendants began sorting through her belongings and came across the document, which bore a surname different from their own. “My friend was shocked when she found it. She said, ‘I never knew our family had any connection to the Beiyang Government or Cao Kun. Was our family really that remarkable?’”

Chou explained that the owner’s daughter became the inspiration for the character Evelyn Huang in the play. Kimberly Hsu and Evelyn Huang were lifelong companions—two elegant, unmarried women who were both financially independent and remained inseparable throughout their lives. When their descendants cleared out the apartment they had shared, they were left with a puzzling discovery: “The two aunties slept in the same bed their entire lives. What exactly was going on?”

It was this very question that sparked Chou’s creative imagination.

Chou stressed that she had no interest in assigning the relationship a fixed label such as “lesbian.” “The intimate companionship between women sixty or seventy years ago leaves so much room for imagination. They shared a bed for an entire lifetime—but how intimate were they, really? That’s a mystery we’ll never be able to define precisely, nor do we need to.” Rather than constructing a conventional, linear historical narrative, Chou chose to embrace this mysterious “blank space,” beginning her theatrical exploration in the final days of Madame Hsu’s life.

In She Says, She Says, Madame Huang has been dead for three years, while Madame Hsu, who remains alive, is living with severe dementia and memory loss. Spanning six weeks, the play follows the third generation of a Mainlander family—including a niece, a niece-in-law, and a grandniece—as they care for her. While sorting through the elderly women’s belongings, they must also navigate the elder’s incoherent speech and episodes of delirium.

Chou explained that for people with dementia, the more distant a memory is, the more vividly it is preserved, while short-term memories closer to the present often disappear entirely. “To those around them, elderly people often seem to be talking nonsense. But in her inner world, her memories of Shanghai in her youth, her conversations with her late friend Evelyn, and even her encounters with ghosts are all completely real.” This dramatic premise speaks directly to one of the most pressing social issues in contemporary Taiwan.

Chou pointed out that dementia is highly prevalent among Taiwanese over the age of eighty, meaning that almost every family is confronting the challenges of long-term care. Among her own family and friends, she said, this has been a shared reality for the past fifteen to twenty years. “My father used to have an extraordinary memory. When we were children, he would quiz us at any moment on the address of our ancestral home in northern Jiangsu or the names of our grandparents, because he was deeply afraid of being forgotten. In the end, though, he couldn’t escape fate.” Reflecting on life amid the fragmented, repetitive, and scattered memories that often accompany long-term care, Chou asked: “When an elderly family member tells you a story from the past that you’ve never heard before, do you believe it? And when you come across an object you never knew existed, do you feel it has something to do with you?

In its choice of historical setting, She Says, She Says reveals Chou Hui-ling’s careful dramaturgical thinking. Rather than placing the two women’s arrival in Taiwan in the textbook year of 1949, she deliberately sets it in 1948. What Chou seeks to tell is not the story of political refugees, but of “marriage refugees.” In her telling, the two women came to Taiwan simply to escape the traditional marriages their families had arranged for them. As Kimberly’s brother happened to be traveling to Taiwan on business, they decided to accompany him, treating the trip as a holiday. They never imagined that once they crossed the Taiwan Strait, history would take a dramatic turn, and the island would become the home they could never return to. This rebellious, forward-looking act of fleeing a marriage disrupts the singular, tragic political narratives that have long dominated literature about military dependents’ villages (juancun) or Mainlander migration.

“This is a multi-layered, multifaceted, and complex story. To put it boldly, within the current Taiwanese historical discourse, it is quite ‘politically incorrect,’” Chou admitted. She confessed that within today’s increasingly homogenized cultural environment, the journey to find a venue—such as the Taipei Performing Arts Center—willing to produce an atypical, non-lineal Mainlander diasporic narrative was a rocky one. “Yet, I must ask: Is this not our story? Are we truly confined to writing only a certain prescribed narrative?

In casting the production, Chou broke with convention by inviting the renowned Peking Opera actress Huang Yu-lin to take on the role of Evelyn Huang. “Yu-lin loves a challenge. This time, I’m not letting her sing a single line of Peking Opera. Instead, she is portraying a fully realized female character through the language of contemporary theatre.” The production also reunites Chou with her longtime creative partner and stage muse, Hsu Yen-ling, alongside acclaimed writer-director-performer Wu Wei-wei, powerhouse actress Lu Man-yin, and celebrated actors Da-Tian and Lin Zi-heng. Together, they take on this exceptionally demanding puzzle of memory.

To authentically capture the glamour of 1940s Shanghai and the sensibility of that generation, the production invited a retired professor from the Shanghai Theatre Academy to make online recordings of the play’s extensive Old Shanghainese dialogue, allowing the actors to study the dialect word by word. Musically, the production incorporates the big-band jazz that defined 1940s Shanghai, while drawing inspiration from The Gramophone Record (Liushengji Pian) by Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies writer Zhou Shoujuan, in which recorded sound becomes a vessel for a final farewell. Together, these elements form the play’s sonic soul.

Stage designer Chen Hui and Chou Hui-ling jointly conceived a sensory space defined by constant fluidity. The stage is populated with oversized and undersized objects, vintage suitcases, and gramophone records that can no longer be played, evoking the distorted, enlarged, and diminished fragments of memory within a mind affected by dementia. Through carefully orchestrated lighting, the living room shifts between a pre-pandemic long-term care home in 2019, a weathered Shanghai ballroom of the 1940s, and even the bed where the two women once slept side by side. As the boundaries between memory and reality dissolve, the audience journeys alongside the soul of an elderly woman with dementia through a magical, ever-shifting timeline, experiencing the flickering yet inescapable helplessness and silence that accompany memory loss and a crisis of identity.

2026 TAF: She Says, She Says ▶Learn More