A particular draw toward acting for many actors is the electric emotional connection they feel when on stage enacting a role with which they truly connect. The lives of several cast members in the SRJC production “Anon(ymous)” parallel the stories of their culturally diverse characters.

Naomi Iizuka’s, “Anon(ymous)” re-imagines Homer’s classic tale, “The Odyssey,” with protagonist immigrant “Anon” wandering America, searching for his mother while encountering a variety of characters. A multi-cultural play, dealing with themes of immigration, identity and the journey, Anon(ymous) offers a provocative and modern perspective on the diversity of American society.

Hien Ngo Tam

Hien Ngo plays the role of Nemasani, the mother of Anon. Ngo said she feels both deeply moved by and connected to her character and the play itself due to her personal life history. “I’ll take advantage of my past, and let it speak as though her story has lived through mine,” Ngo said.

Ngo was born raised in Vietnam, where she had an eerie awareness of the Vietnam War in which her father, uncles and grandfather fought. After the communist regime took over following the war, Ngo’s father, fearful of imprisonment or placement in the re-education camps, was forced to live anonymously.

Ngo remembers the many times police officials would come in search of her father, when they would hide him in the upright cabinet in their home. “When he came out, you’d see the suffocation he endured, and the overwhelming anger he felt towards the country’s government,” Ngo said. She was forced to call her father “Uncle” around strangers, and lived in constant fear that he would be caught.

Ngo’s father and two older brothers eventually escaped to the United States in the early 1980s, where he was finally able to experience freedom. However, for Ngo, her mother and her younger sister, freedom was much further down the road. Being constantly harassed by local government officials, sometimes in the dead of night, Ngo’s family was eager to plan their escape to America. Finally in the summer of 1989, the Ngo women made their voyage to the United States.

An especially poignant and relevant scene in the play for Ngo is when her character Nemasani recalls in monologue an emotional journey about her escape on a crowded tiny boat with her son, during a violent tempest that ultimately ends in a shipwreck. Though her personal experiences enable her to put the highest reality and emotion into the monologue, it is far from easy for Ngo. “On the contrary, it’s so terribly hard to do so because I have to relive what happened on my boat,” Ngo said. Battling nightmares for years, she tried to forget the painful three-week journey on the sea, in which 62 people squeezed together on a tiny boat.

By the end of the second week, Ngo witnessed several children die from starvation. One of the children who died was her little cousin. “We all thought we were all going to die within the first week because by the third day the boat engine stopped working, and soon it got dumped into the sea, and we started drifting through storms and ravaged waves,” Ngo recounted.

As it turned out, the boat organizers had not provided enough food or water supply for the passengers. “After the first few days surviving with a few spoons of rice and water-bottle-lid-size portion of water, there was nothing left. The talk and fights about eating the two corpses was inevitable,” Ngo said.

“There was a lot of crying and praying among all of us because we just knew the end of the world was about to come.” Throughout the play, the phrase “the end of the world,” is repeated as a kind of mantra accompanied by noises of crashing waves, dropping bombs and sea storms. These sounds are evocative of Ngo’s own sea voyage. The winds and waves pushed the boat into a coral reef that created a large rift in the bottom of the boat, letting in water at a dangerous rate.

“Everyone was just waiting to die,” Ngo said. “I had no idea why and how I had enough strength and courage to scoop the water out with a bucket when everyone had refused to do it themselves because they either couldn’t move or had given up all hope. And one of the nights that I couldn’t sleep, I stood, scooping out the water, talking and praying to my cousin for some kind of miracle.” The miracle Ngo prayed for came in the form of two whales which maneuvered the escapees’ boat into an area where it was spotted by a Taiwanese fishing ship.

From there, the passengers were ultimately landed in a Philippino refugee camp in Bataan, Puerto Princesa, where they stayed for about three years. This is reminiscent of the character Anon, who also spends time in a refugee camp, and is later adopted by an American family. Out of the thousands of refugees Ngo encountered, she witnessed many different lives, she said. Though hailing from different locations of Vietnam, “We were all here for the same reason: searching for our own freedom and a new place that we could call home.”

Ngo said, “And of course every journey has its ending whether happy or sad.” The situation was similar to that of Anon, who is presumably reunited with his mother by the end of the play after confronting various obstacles and hardships. Ngo’s entire family was reunited after 10 years. New difficulties arose in the United States for the Ngo family, like learning to speak English and finding work. These dilemmas, which confront many immigrant families, seemed to incorporate into the very essence of Ngo’s new life.

“A lot of the times, I feel like I’m the product of a generation that has to keep patching things up,” Ngo said. “I definitely felt out of place in searching for my future, and not a week goes by that I don’t think, ‘Boy, my English sucks, and I hate writing, let alone speaking or performing in front of an audience.'”

Theater is a challenging and cathartic expression for Ngo. She finds a prominent theme in her life which correlates to Anon(ymous)—that different paths in the journeys of all people, which may end up in different places or strange lands, no matter how far one travels, “Home is always where we go back to in our memories, trace back to our roots, and proudly know where we all come from.”

Jamie Moore

Jamie Moore, in the role of “Belen,” has always felt a part of more than one culture. “I’ve never felt ‘at home’ in one culture over another, which is one reason ‘Anon(ymous)’ is important to me,” Moore said. Her mixed ethnic descent in part led her to feel as if she is constantly searching. “Searching, as the characters do in the show, for the places or people who will accept my duality,” Moore said.

Moore hopes to become a writer, and will start an MFA program in December. “It is really hard to write memoir or even fiction without dealing with whatever issues you are writing about up front,” she said. “I have had some difficult life experiences which I’ve allowed myself to forget.”

Moore relates to Anon’s journey and his realization of the certain specific steps one must take in order to claim parts of the past and move forward. Moore’s character “Belen” helps Anon to do just that. “She comes to speak truth from her own experience as an immigrant crossing the border; she tells him he cannot forget where he comes from, that he has to keep it close,” Moore said. “That will lead him as it led her.”

Anakarina Sánchez

Anakarina Sánchez plays the role of “Naja,” the goddess of the play who oversees all the rest, and doesn’t follow human rules. Sánchez connects to the themes of immigration in the play. Her mother was born in the United States and spent time living in Mexico, while her father was born in Mexico and moved to the United States illegally. Though now a legal U.S. citizen, it took 15 ye
ars and a lot of hard work to achieve. Sánchez said that her family created a positive environment for her and her sister. “Being an immigrant was never a negative factor in our lives; it was something to be proud of,” Sánchez said. She is proud to be Mexican and part of the Latino community, and finds that her cultural background has its advantages, like landing a multicultural role in “Anon(ymous).”

In “Anon(ymous),” there is discussion of immigrants trying to make better lives for themselves and their families. “It also sheds light on different cultures and ethnic backgrounds and their own struggles, whether universal or personal—trying to make a home in a place that isn’t,” Sánchez said. An important topic for her is the treatment and perception of undocumented immigrants. “They are people too, and are not here just to take our jobs or to raise crime,” she said. “We are here to be happy, just like everyone else.”

Frustrated that the media seems to consistently portray exclusively negative and one-sided coverage of minorities or certain ethnic groups, Sánchez believes that there should be more coverage of the positive, “Like this play!”

Sánchez, a dance major, has been acting since the fifth grade and dancing since high school. One day she hopes to teach dance professionally, and her dream career would be to choreograph for musicals, combining both her passions.