I’ve been looking forward to seeing “The Heart Sellers.” I loved playwright Lloyd Suh’s “The Far Country,” a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, produced locally by Berkeley Rep last year [https://www.berkeleyside.org/2024/03/19/far-country-chinese-american-immigration-experience-berkeley-rep]. Moreover, the hardship of immigrants has been much on my mind lately since the US President and the Republican Party are turning the already challenging lives of recent migrants upside down and with it, the essential promise of America.
I’m not alone in wanting to see “The Heart Sellers.” The play ranked ninth on the list of the ten most-produced plays in America in 2024. Now, Aurora Theatre is presenting a terrific co-production of it with TheatreWorks, Silicon Valley, and Capital Stage, Sacramento (which has already closed).
And director Jennifer Chang, who also directed Suh’s “The Far Country,” understands the subtlety of the subject matter and cultivates the full range of emotions from the two outstanding actors. Like an ignorant American, I did have occasional difficulty understanding the foreign accents. But not enough to detract from my complete enjoyment of this simultaneously heartwarming and heart-wrenching production.
Set in an anonymous US city in 1973, “The Heart Sellers” explores the relationship of two new Asian immigrant women during their first American Thanksgiving. After meeting in the grocery store, vibrant Luna (Nicole Javier) from the Philippines and more sedate Jane (Wonjung Kim) from South Korea find friendship in their shared experiences.
Both are very much alone; their medical resident husbands are mostly absent, and they are left to learn English from TV (Julia Child and “Sandford and Son”), wander the wonders of the local K-Mart, and miss their families in their home countries. During the 95-minute, one-act play, the two young women bond over discovering the joy and freedom of the US while acknowledging their isolation and fully cognizant of their “foreignness.”
The clever title, “The Heart Sellers,” is a play on the 1965 Hart-Celler Act that significantly changed US immigration policy. It ended the racist quota system that greatly favored immigration from Western Europe and all but excluded the rest of the world. Hart-Celler established a new preference system prioritizing family reunification, skilled workers, and refugees rather than country of origin.
But to Luna, the Hart-Celler Act means something very different. In a laudatory soliloquy by Nicole Javier, she explains that when entering the US, you must dig out your heart and leave it with Immigration — you must sell a bit of your heart and soul in exchange for the promise of America. You are no longer of your home country, but not yet in your new one. You are disconnected from all those things that create context and confidence. Wonjung Kim’s final soliloquy brings tears to one’s eyes.
These monologues reminded me of my grandmother, who emigrated to the US as a teenager. Whenever I asked her about her home country, she cut off the discussion with, “We’re here now.” She never said, “This is our home now.” Her attitude was, “This is where we are, and we—and you —have a good life.” Her family and the life she left behind were too painful to discuss. Such is the life of the immigrant.
By Emily S. Mendel
emilymendel@gmail.com
©Emily S. Mendel 2025 All Rights Reserved
