In the late 1980s, a journalist named Xinran hosted a radio program called Words on the Night Breeze. And what the night breeze carried were voices: voices of women sharing stories—stories of love, stories of heartbreak, stories of tragedy, and stories of hope.
Twenty years later, these voices were gathered and published into a book called The Good Women of China. It was a small but powerful book. A book that touched lives—as books often tend do. And just as the twentieth century was changing her colors for the twenty-first, this slim volume found its way into the hands of a young university graduate by the name of Caroline Watson.
Caroline moved to Beijing, where a tribe of passionate artists began to form, gathering around a love for—and a belief in—the transformative power of theater and art. Out of that love blossomed Hua Dan.
I made my way to Hua Dan in the summer of 2009. It was the summer after my freshman year at Duke University, and I had traveled to Beijing to study Mandarin Chinese. While I was there, I also volunteered at a nonprofit that worked with Beijing’s migrant women and children through community theater and art. This nonprofit was Hua Dan.
Hua Dan’s work with participatory theater, grounded in the pioneering work of Augusto Boal, helps their participants better understand themselves, others, and the world around them. By day, I participated in community workshops; by night, I translated participant testimonials. That summer gave me a taste of something incredible: a community using art as a medium for social change. I knew that I had to return.
After graduating from Duke University, I moved to China to work with Hua Dan again. That year was both a lesson and a gift—of humility, growth, and love. I met and listened to mothers who traveled thousands of miles from home, toiling tirelessly to create a better future for their children. The Hua Dan family taught me that stories, when conscientiously created and beautifully told, are a powerful form of communication. They create space for transformation—bringing a room full of strangers together to share stories, laugh, cry, and simply be with each other, until they are strangers no longer. These collective experiences deepened my belief in the power of art in building relationships and facilitating understanding between individuals and communities.
Linda Yi is TIP’s China Program Coordinator.