Tina Tran
The Paper Umbrella
Hello! Welcome to the scattered musings on my TSR journey. Although my reflections are roughly divided chronologically, do not be deceived, as my memory is notoriously unreliable. Instead, I hope you, the reader, are able to glean some amount ounce of satisfaction, amusement, and insight into why I chose to do a shadow puppet play, why I chose to do the topic of bipolar disorder, and how the process has impacted me and will continue to shape me.
Before we start from the beginning, let’s first jump to the end. Shortly following my performance, a feeling of unease snuck in. The Gordian knot grew into full-blown sadness at Sue’s closing words. No mingling with friends. No additionally glimpses at the artwork. All I could do was hover despondently over my set. Loss. I felt such a keen sense of loss. Was this what it meant to be an artist? Pouring countless hours of your sweat and heart into a project only to have it end and experience something akin to an amputation of a vital limb (although I suppose they are all vital). If that is the case, I hesitate to create art again, especially art that required me to bare my soul to myself and to others. The process requires too much of oneself. I have never felt this way at the conclusion of a final. Even at the culmination of a particularly harrowing class, my only reaction is to scream in ecstasy and then collapse into bed from exhaustion. Lest you think I am being dramatic, I assure I am most assuredly stoic but there is no other way to describe how I felt those hours right after the exhibit ended except in extreme terms. Of course, one can choose to invest as much or as little one wants into the creative process, but I tend to believe that my audience is very sharp and can see the heart behind a show or piece. Similarly, I think about how I will relate to my future patients, how to walk that fine line between sharing my life and becoming overinvested, opening up the danger of compassion fatigue.
Anyway, back to my bereft state. As I stood there under the guise of cleaning up, a woman and a little girl came up to me. The woman asked me if the little girl could take a look at my puppets. I excitedly showed her my sets and the puppets, explaining in excruciating detail (poor girl) for 10 minutes about each character and the plotline (she had missed the performance). The girl showed a level of enthusiasm and curiosity that greatly assuaged my anxiety. Those uneasy feelings diminished. Even if just that one little girl could derive so pleasure from my work, those hours were worth it. Of course, I was still worried about the mortality of my set and scene pieces. Unabashedly I had cornered a fellow TSR student and demanded that his dorm take in my creation and give it a good home. At one point, I attempted to get the little girl to take my puppets (she sadly did not take my hint of them needing a home). So all of this to warn you, if you are considering TSR, the chances of feeling loss after the end are quite great, but still the satisfaction of creating something far eclipses that. All the same, I salute those who do art continuously; the process requires bravery far surpassing what I initially thought necessary and possible.
Now back to the beginning. I never intended to do the medium, shadow puppetry, or the topic, bipolar disorder. As with most TSR journeys, mine was one of great meanderings, of initial resistance, begrudging acceptance, and finally embracing. In the fall, I took a course in which the professor, in the second lecture, talked about the possible pitfalls of overmedicating a bipolar or ADHD child. This lecture coincided with the call for project topics in TSR and because the material resonated so deeply (even without connecting it to my personal experiences), I pitched the idea of doing a radio podcast on the dangers of overmedication, particularly on bipolar children. Radio was a medium I had prior experience in and one that I wanted to gain more knowledge about. However when I presented the idea to my classmates during the first workshop, the reactions were mixed. Most were excited but unsure of my motivations. Similarly, through my professor, I contacted someone in the Pediatric Bipolar Disorder Clinic and arranged an initial meeting. The reaction of the contact at first was somewhat wary and one of the first questions was why exactly I was doing this topic in particular. At this point, I finally disclosed that my own father has bipolar disorder. At this admission, the contact eased up and shared some personal struggles. [A quick aside on vulnerability – Countless times throughout the process when I mustered up the courage to share about my personal connection, people responded in kind. For so long, I had thought that no one else could understand the memories and feelings I had watching my dad struggle through manic episodes. I was sorely wrong. The community exists and it is mighty and humbling.].
At this point, I present another caveat. The rawness of being a family member privy to moments of great self-destruction and grandiosity had faded at this point, but as for anything deeply personal, wounds exist so take caution lest you open up a scab. For a while, I strongly resisted tying in my personal experiences to the project. My family is intensely private. Why would I expose these painful memories to the entire world? But I couldn’t help myself. I kept gravitating back to this topic and to its connection with my life. What if another little girl could find out that she wasn’t alone? So I proceeded with caution. At first, digging back into those memories was difficult, but manageable so I proceeded and found that a senior capstone on bipolar disorder was exactly what I needed to do. An accumulation of my scientific training throughout four years and a chance to explore an aspect of my life that had shaped my view on healthcare, mental health, and the role of the family, these were the things waiting to be explored this year.
With the establishment of the topic, the medium remained undetermined. I knew that while I loved radio, I wanted my product to have visuals as well. While rifling through past student works, I was incredibly touched by one former TSRer’s sand animation performance. The medium captured beautiful storytelling and elegant visuals and was overall breathtaking. However, I did not necessarily want to do sand animation, just something in a similar vein with novelty and impact. Then I somehow stumbled across shadow puppetry. Again I lament my hazy memory because I do not at all remember the specifics of how I came across this medium. All I knew was that this was the right fit. It was only much later that I realized how steep the learning curve truly was for someone who had never much artistic training let alone shadow puppetry training. Thankfully at that point, I was too far long in the process to quit and the only course of action was to continue and pray for the best.
Something that I did not consider at all was the difference between a created piece and a performed piece. Just in case anyone reading is torn, let me tell you that the created piece means incredible stress for a period and then great satisfaction on opening day while a performed piece means mounting stress through the entire process, especially on the day of the performance. So choose wisely. Now looking retrospectively (in a position of relatively minimal stress), I am happy to have done a performance piece. The experience forced me to quench my sometimes crippling stage fright and stretched me an remarkable amount creatively, allowing me a glimpse into the world that performers create in. All the same, being able to envision the long-term trajectory of one’s own progress and project could be helpful but also inhibiting. Because I came in with no prior knowledge of shadow puppetry, there were long extended periods of waffling around and experimentation with possibilities limited only by my imagination.
The process of becoming somewhat of a mini-expert of bipolar disorder was perhaps the most surprising aspect of the TSR experience. Perhaps because I did not expect to do something so personal, I did not think that the research process could and would be healing. Prior to this year, I had very little medical understanding of bipolar disorder. My dad’s condition was whispered about and alluded to for years but not until a particularly difficult period after the summer before 10th grade did I finally have a name for the condition. Upon knowing the problem, I resolved to avoid learning anything about it for many years, choosing instead to wallow in anger and bitterness. In the fall as I started to talk to experts and do a literature review on bipolar disorder, I found out that there were different types and the chemical imbalances that occur inside the brain that helped exacerbate this condition. I was stunned. All those years and I had never been willing to see the disease from my father’s perspective. I had blamed him for what I considered to be his own weaknesses. But what I had just learned forced me to finally separate my father the loving man with my father with bipolar disorder. Thus began a more enlightened path of healing.
“The tipping point is that magic moment when a idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.”
–Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
The creative process (with the scientific process interwoven) I found to be supremely inconsistent. I went through long periods of stagnated ideas only to thankfully have flashes of inspiration at certain critical periods that made progress possible and helped preserve my sanity.
One of my challenges was to somehow stay true to the science but also present the information in a way that aligned with my medium. I struggled with how much explicit knowledge about bipolar disorder to include in my story. In fact, my first few drafts were fairly explicit in its explanation of the protagonist’s bipolar disorder and treatment. However the edits I went through, it became evident that a didactic portrayal of the condition was not what I wanted for my audience and certainly did not flow very well with the shadow puppetry medium. One rainy day in early winter quarter, I felt unexplainable melancholy sitting by my window and then the words, “a slow blue rain overtook Maribel,” flashed across my mind. It is well known that weather can affect a person’s mood so I played up this notion, finding the metaphor of rain for bipolar disorder to be the perfect substitute.
Another problem I faced was how to shape the storyline. Of course there is medication to help stem the worst effects of manic-depressive episodes, but how would I do them justice in my puppet show? Did I want to explicitly talk about pills? About family focused therapy? What about the multitude of other treatments available? Luckily a friend showed me a series of short films entitled, “Animated Minds,” which took the written experiences of several individuals, each with a different mental health problem, and created illustrations. I was deeply struck by the simplicity of the pieces and how they elevated the experience of the individuals without attaching any value judgment to them. That was exactly what I wanted to have in my story, a narrative free from as many biases as possible.
I did not start out with the genre of magical realism in mind but I am so glad that my story ended up containing elements of the real and fantastical. Perhaps the biggest challenge I encountered in developing the narrative was how closely to align my story to real life events. Throughout fall and winter quarter, I had amassed several interviews, all of which contained poignant stories that I wanted to honor in my own folktale. However, the good intention slowly morphed into an obsession that crippled my progress. I remember vividly sitting down with Sue and Andrew one afternoon where I was venting my frustrations and they just simply telling me to let my characters escape from the bonds of reality. They did not have to be my own story or even those from the interviews. That being said, the pink paper umbrella incident in the story is based on a true event, one that caused scars for many years. I never thought it would re-emerge as the symbol of my story but I am so thankful that its meaning has been appropriated into a symbol of hope, rather than a memory of despair.
Another major breakthrough I had was realizing that not all my characters had to be human. This might seem silly but I had somehow built imaginary boundaries on my imagination and they needed to be shattered in order for my story to be further developed. So Alta, the magical healing tree with an attitude, started out as an old wise woman in a village that later morphed in a young mentor named Esther who then became a bear and finally settled down as a tree. Reading through the various drafts that I have written, I can’t help but cringe at my initial ending. In fact during workshop time (without which this project would never have been possible), my classmates and Sue and Andrew called me out on the contrite, cookie-cutter ending that I had originally. I believe the original script had Maribel’s father professing that he would never change the fact that he had bipolar disorder because it was an essential part of him but no more important than the rest. I think the reason I had that ending was because there was a part of me that wanted to desperately believe that, to minimize the heaviness that bipolar disorder brings (that and also I have probably seen too many Hallmark made for television movies). I was also forcing a happy ending on my characters because I do not know the ending of my own story; there is no clear resolution for those with bipolar disorder and their families. Those words that Maribel confronts her father with at the end are all words that I have thought aloud at some point. But I quickly realized the grave disservice I was doing to my story by undercutting it with a neat, packaged ending; it was fake and my audience would definitely feel as empty and dissatisfied with the conclusion as I was.
The process of creating the sets and puppets was long (my roommate’s Exacto knife and I became best friends) but incredibly fun. Initially I almost gave up because of my limited drawing abilities. However with some unearthed patience and the use of silhouettes on Google images, I painstakingly constructed sets that could transport my audience to the magical land that I had envisioned in my mind. For a long time, I was fixated on the idea that the most impressive project would entail me doing all of the parts on my own. From the voices in the recorded audio to the set building to the puppet staging itself, I had wanted to do it all by myself. Thankfully, I was humbled on many occasions. There were countless scenes in my show where I needed at least two other hands and I had to ask for help. I learned to ask for help constantly throughout the process, help on building the set, help on the script, help on puppets. Again and again I was reminded of how crucial a creative mentor was to a project. Another piece of advice I would give is to find a mentor who you get along with, who has time to offer you dedicated advice, and who will challenge you artistically while helping you break misconceptions and assumptions. When I allowed the ideas to flow freely from mentor to mentee and from friend to friend, they became richer and more complex.
There are very few things in my life that have been more meaningful or challenging as The Senior Reflection. I hope to continue creating art and breathing life into empty spaces. As I was brainstorming, I realized that the impact of TSR did not start in the fall. My experiences at Stanford had equipped me to have a unique perspective and contribution. The impact of TSR definitely will not end now, even as graduation is looming ahead. The skills that I gained, the reflections I was forced to have, and the relationships I forged will forever perpetuate.
Thank you.