Elyse Ribbons '99 helps bridge cultural gap with humor

Beijing ‘Chinglish’ Theater Finds Humor Where West Meets China

By Kathleen Kearns
Carolina Alumni Review

The beauty of living in China as a starving artist, says Elyse Ribbons ’03, is that you never actually have to starve because food is so cheap. You can set up your life around the arts and know you’re still going to eat.

Ribbons knows what she’s talking about. The Asian studies major has lived in Beijing since 2003 and – after an early teaching gig and three years as webmaster for the American embassy – has established herself as a playwright, actor, radio host, newspaper columnist and theater producer.

She formed what she calls “the world’s first Chinglish theater company,” Cheeky Monkey, which has made a name for itself with such bilingual, cross-cultural productions as the semi-autobiographical I Heart Beijing and an adaptation of Taming of the Shrew called Kung Pao Shakespeare.

Just before the Chinese New Year, she planned to launch a festival of short plays called ShiFen or Ten Minutes. “It’s a collection of 10-minute performances from artists from all over the world, some performing traditional Peking opera, you name it, in wacky, fun, bite-size pieces,” she said.

Ribbons first went to Beijing as a UNC sophomore to study street life with a group led by medical anthropologist Judith Farquhar, and she went back again during the summer between her junior and senior years. After graduation, she took a detour to Guatemala with religious studies Professor William Peck to study the relationships between traditional Mayan medicine and traditional Chinese medicine.

Then she moved to Beijing, arriving at the tail end of the SARS epidemic and teaching English at a Chinese university. As many expatriates do, she patched together short-term jobs teaching, translating and writing. In 2006, while working at the embassy, she took a random opportunity to dabble in theater, something she enjoyed at Carolina and before that at the N.C. School of Science and Mathematics.

“I did a Chinese play and through that I realized that I’m not cut out for government work,” said Ribbons, a leader of the China Carolina Club. Fluent in Mandarin and fascinated by language, she wrote I Heart Beijing during a three-week trip to Paris. “The theme is the cultural differences between China and the West,” she said. “There are two frames of existence, and both sides can’t see why the other is reacting as they are. A lot of humor comes out of this.”

When she and some friends put on the play, it met with an enthusiastic reception. “I realized that maybe I don’t need to work to support my theater habit,” Ribbons said. “I thought maybe I can make theater my job.” Cheeky Monkey was born.
“It’s not a big moneymaker, but it’s a brand known in Beijing. I feel very proud about that.”

CitiBank sponsored the company for a play about financial literacy for children in four Chinese cities – it starred Agent Penny and Will Power. Ribbons is working on an English version of Green Eyes on Chinese, a play she wrote in Mandarin about a girl struggling to learn that language and trying to explain why.

In the tradition of artists everywhere who have no real intention of starving, she also has a number of other projects in the hopper. She hosts a Mandarin-language radio show on China Radio International and writes occasional columns for a Chinese newspaper. She is researching a book on Chinese female sexuality. And she is working on a documentary about waitresses.

“In China, wait staff are treated as third-class citizens, almost as slaves – by clients, not by restaurant owners,” she said. “They’re from the country, and they generally come from big families.” Though more sober than some previous projects, the film continues Ribbons’ interest in the ways cultures can collide.

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