Artist interview Interview and text: Chen Wei-Chen "My body is a headless train, my body is a legless boat — how do I find my way? How do I find my way?" Two performers stand onstage, a white cloth linking their bodies and heads together. In the light, their silhouettes make a striking image of a body and head living apart from each other. Suddenly, like a figure at a shrine, the musician strikes the Southeast Asian gamelan and South Seas drums alone — the opening music stirs the performers' bodies into restlessness. A folk tune played on the duck-call flute pulls the two performers apart again. Mandarin threads through Penang Hokkien, and the story begins — a cross-century tale of Chinese women's diaspora, told through movement and music, traveling from the South Seas across the sea to Taiwan. Starting from "no story" Sun Son Theatre's members carry a deep Malaysian Chinese background, and the creative team behind Lament of the Wandering Head — beyond coming from Kuala Lumpur and Penang — includes Taiwan-based CHUANG Hui Yun, who first conceived the piece and co-directs with Kuala Lumpur-born CHANG Wei Loy. She also co-stars with Penang-born LOW Pei Fen. Building on the company's core spirit of "performance, music, and dance as one," this is the first time they've taken on a text with real historical depth. "We used to always look for a third force — a kind of bodily energy beyond the everyday. This time, a text came into it, and I think it's because as we got older, we started asking different kinds of questions, trying to find ourselves," says co-director CHANG Wei Loy. The making of Lament of the Wandering Head combined fieldwork with personal reflection, and grew into a text with real weight — one that traces the Chinese diaspora, nation and colonialism, and the fate of women, in real depth. The spark for Lament of the Wandering Head came from two lines Chuang Hui Yun wrote down one day: "My body is a headless train, my body is a legless boat." The words stayed with her, and she felt the pull to develop them into a full piece — so she invited LOW Pei Fen, who's from Penang, to build the work together, starting from her own life experience. But Pei-Fen's response was: "I don't really have a story." Having lived in Taiwan for so long, she'd come to feel her life just didn't have anything worth telling. "So this piece really did start from having no story." The story-less "Wandering Head" comes from a South Seas legend about a ghostly creature whose head and body live apart — the company turned it into a fable about women on the move. From plague control under colonial rule in the 1930s, to interethnic marriage in the 1950s, to the death of an overseas Chinese student in Taiwan in the 1960s, all the way to a Malaysian Chinese woman's accidental death in Taiwan in the 2020s — the company went looking for the women lost along the way in this diaspora, trying, piece by piece, to give them back a body (even one living apart from its head) and a story (even one told across different languages). On a stripped-down stage, these scattered Chinese women slowly take shape — not as ghosts anymore, but as a lineage of "outsiders from a distant land" — finally able to be told, to be seen, to be heard. Filling the gaps with two languages, and shaping the sound Someone who thought of herself as "a person with no story," performer LOW Pei Fen has always taken the stage through movement and music rather than words — she's never been comfortable with language. But working with CHUANG Hui Yun, she slowly dug up pieces of her own and her family's history. "Hui Yun, as an outside observer, asked me to write down the smells, the colors of home. As I slowly worked back through that, I remembered — when I was a kid, the adults used to scare us with stories about 'flying heads.' Maybe I don't really have what you'd call a story, but I do have a kind of energy, a resilience — always wanting to head out into the world. It's funny, looking at it against that legend — it really speaks to a kind of drifting identity, an energy that's always in motion." But with one performer from Taiwan and one from Malaysia, how do you put this tangle of nationality, colonial identity, and geographic drift onstage? In the end, the two of them exist almost like mirror images of each other, or like two halves of one body, each speaking a different language. It was LOW Pei Fen's first time using her mother tongue, Penang Hokkien, onstage, while CHUANG Hui Yun speaks crisp, clear Mandarin. Whenever something couldn't quite be said, she'd just sing it in Penang Hokkien instead — and that, almost by accident, captured with real precision the wordless struggle and inner split of someone living between a dominant language and their mother tongue. The live music is one of the piece's key threads. Music designer and performer Chen Zi Yin boldly blends ritual-feeling Southeast Asian gamelan with Taiwanese beiguan gongs and cymbals, weaving Taiwanese opera's "za nian diao" (rapid narrative singing style) together with Malay children's songs, and even bringing in the nearly-lost Malay oral storytelling tradition of Awang Batil. Asymmetrical rhythms build tension in the space, and ambient sounds drawn from mosques and temple festivals help voice the cultural memory — and the breaks in it — carried deep in the body. Even carrying such a heavy weight of history and diaspora, Lament of the Wandering Head ultimately comes back to something universal and deeply human. Both directors point to one moment as the most moving: near the end, the performer lies exhausted, as close to the ground as possible, and quietly chants — "sojourning, temporary, for now, provisional, someone living away from home, in someone else's land, secondary..." It's not just a footnote to historical ghosts — it points to something bigger, the way everyone, swept up in the flattening tide of modern life, keeps asking themselves "who am I?" "We have to keep encountering people who are different from us, keep encountering the 'other,' if we want to grow our capacity for empathy and stretch the edges of our imagination. And of course, that 'outsider' isn't always someone else in the end — maybe it's pointing back at ourselves too," Chuang Hui Yun said, once the performance was over.