From Shore to Shore

Three stories, three lives, three journeys to find a place called home.Cheung Wing is escaping from war, Mei Lan's had enough of the potato peeler, and Yi Di wants the impossible - her parents' approval.Award-winning writer Mary Cooper and multilingual collaborator M W Sun have woven together stories of love and loss, struggle and survival into a powerful drama. Blending English, Mandarin and Cantonese, From Shore to Shore tells the untold stories of Chinese communities in the UK. Reviews Drawn from conversations with Chinese people living in West Yorkshire, the stories are compelling not for any high drama but for the rich detail of lives lived. They have the impressionistic quality of a dream. There's the boy separated from his mother during the Sino-Japanese war; the clever daughter born under China's one-child policy, never good enough for the father who wanted a son; and the girl suffering playground racism after an early childhood in Hong Kong. Their displacement is not just from one side of the world to the other. It's in the shifting attitudes of the generations, a clash of values as well as of cultures. What emerges is a quest for self-definition: what does it mean to be Chinese when being Chinese can mean so many things? **** The Guardian Authors: Mary CooperAward-winning writer, Mary Cooper, has written extensively for theatre, radio and television. She has written more than 30 stage plays which have been commissioned and toured by theatre companies throughout England and Wales. For radio, she has written seven single plays and a ten part series for BBC Radio Four. For screen, her short film Missing Out won the IVCA Award for Best Drama and for television she was a winner in the Granada/Yorkshire New Voices scheme. www.mary-cooper.co.uk MW SunMW Sun ¿¿¿ was born in Shanghai but grew up in Hong Kong. She is a former news journalist reporting for the BBC, CNBC and Radio Television Hong Kong in London, China, Hong Kong and Singapore. Her short play, Arachnophobia, was produced by Yellow Earth Theatre. She is currently working on a commissioned new play and a novel.