Playwright's Perspective: Julia Izumi
Between November 2017 and November 2018, five people from different parts of my life died.
After the second death, I got hit by a car. It wasn’t going fast, and I didn’t break anything. I was in pain, but I could walk so when the ambulance arrived (there was a kind stranger who called one even though I said I was fine as I was dragging my body along the sidewalk), I asked to be taken to the theater and not the hospital. I wasn’t going to let this bump in the road (lol) make me miss a rehearsal.
After the third death, I was diagnosed with severe acid reflux, a condition known as GERD. I had to stop eating anything acidic—tomatoes, garlic, chocolate, onions, anything greasy or fried or spicy, etc. So all of my favorite comfort foods were taken away. Pizza, katsu, curry… Severe stress is the most common cause of GERD. When my gastroenterologist asked me if I had experienced any excess stress lately, I said, “Oh, you know, just living daily life.” I was very confused why she did not find that funny.
After the fourth death, I was alone in my apartment watching a video of a puppy playing a keyboard. It made me laugh. And minutes went on and I couldn’t stop laughing. And then I realized I wasn’t laughing anymore, I was crying. I was crying so hard I was finding it hard to breathe. I wondered if I was going to die because of this dumb little video. Amid sobs and heaves, I closed all the other twenty-three tabs on my browser so that just the musical puppy remained on the screen. If someone found me dead in the morning, they had to know the exact cause! It was too funny a way to go.
I did survive that evening. And the next day I started investigating therapy.
After the fifth death, I knew what to do. I was in grad school and I had pages due for our workshop but instead I brought sushi to class and asked my cohort and my professor if they could help me hold a little celebration of my great-aunt’s life. I asked them to pretend they knew her and make up a story about her, as if we were reflecting on her beautiful life together.
One could argue this was a copout from writing and it sure was. But it was also one of the few times I knew what I needed to take care of myself and asked for it. When I think about moments in my life that I have found belonging, I think of eating sushi with my beloved fellow writers, who fully committed to playing pretend for me.
I’m not an adoptee. I’m not Cambodian. I don’t have siblings or white parents. As a monoethnic Japanese-American, I have never been uncertain of my cultural heritage. I’m not even tone-deaf. It’s funny that in a play about identities, I don’t share many with the main characters of this play except that we are all racialized as Asian in this country. That one link has made the American Theatre believe it’s okay for me to write this story. But is it? Honestly, I don’t know.
I do know that a few days after I thought I was going to die by puppy video, I figured out the title of this play. Regretfully, So the Birds Are. A sentence as bizarre as I was experiencing life in that moment. And while I don’t share most of the characters’ identities, I do know what it is like to feel utterly lost. And to have the devastating discovery that so much of your life was and is determined by decisions and choices you didn’t make and by random chance.
