REVIEW: Dear Lihua

©️Dear Lihua

What happened to the world that was supposed to be connected? Written by Xinyi Chen and directed by Zhaoyi Ying, Dear Lihua is a witty and skilful piece of new writing that moves fluidly between several urgent, overlapping themes in a just fifty-minute fringe show. Bilingual in English and Mandarin, the production explores immigration bureaucracy, artistic precarity and the deep grief of identity loss through cultural assimilation, all folded into a premise that is absurd and satirical.

The story begins with demise. Qiuqiu dies suddenly of a 2 am cardiac episode, brought on by the stress of juggling her life while applying for a Global Talent Visa (GTV), currently one of the most viable routes for international artists to remain in the UK after graduation. The strain of that process is one many cultural workers recognise, myself included, and there is something darkly funny and uncomfortably resonant in the idea that the stress GTV induces might actually kill you.

To Qiuqiu's surprise, she can neither return to the living world nor find peace in heaven, but wakes into another bureaucracy, organised not by morality but by language. Assigned to English Heaven, she must earn her way home through a points-based system, dealing with a finance-manager-like God called GOD3456, and a loading robot named Barbara, who represents an idealised version of Qiuqiu: polished, polite, patient, legible. Barbara is nothing like Qiuqiu, but who she is expected to become in order to justify her presence in the UK as someone of value. That gap between self and required self becomes the emotional backbone of the play, and it is also where the satire bites hardest: the total absence of one's own voice when facing a bureaucratic selection system built around 'talent'.

To earn enough points, Qiuqiu is set to work in the Dead Letters Archive, sorting through decades of unanswered correspondence, much of it from a recurring sender: Li Hua, the fictional pen pal many Chinese schoolchildren have written to as an English-language exercise for decades. Li Hua was never a real person waiting to write back; the letters were graded, filed, then forgotten. As Qiuqiu reads, and finds her own letter written as Li Hua, her mother tongue, Mandarin, begins to erode, and so does her own sense of identity. Before she finally accumulates enough points, she finds her mother tongue has slipped beyond reach: the price of belonging turns out to be the slow erosion of the language that once defined her.

One of the most striking achievements of the performance is how it handles that bilingualism itself. Rather than relying on straightforward translation or surtitles sitting apart from the action, Xinyi Chen builds the translation into the relationship between Qiuqiu and Barbara, making it part of the show's living texture rather than a service run alongside it. The translation choices are not always the most literal option available, but the most contextually resonant one, so that meaning has to be actively negotiated between the two characters, Qiuqiu and Barbara, and by extension between the two languages, in real time. Performed in Mandarin and English, the production also gives audiences selected letters, wrapped in white envelopes and written to Li Hua, inviting them to imagine this fictional character into in-person activities, extending that same idea of language as an act of creating connection.

The performances carry all of these ideas around bilingualism as a perceived qualification for global citizenship, with real care and humour. Zoe Rowe, as Qiuqiu, captures both the fiery temper, stubbornness and exhaustion of a young emigrant artist determined to make her way through the dreadful UK immigration system, whatever it costs her. Naomi Crosby's Barbara is a vivid piece of character work, an AI figure whose glitches and programmed attempts at empathy are genuinely affecting; she cannot experience human feelings, nor can she speak Mandarin, but she can, in her own halting way, feel it. Rafi Essex's GOD3456 is drawn as an overworked middle manager, stretched thin between processing new arrivals and looking after long-dead heroes. Each performer brings something distinct, and they listen and respond to one another with real precision, so the show's central theme of connection, and its many small failures, erosions and repairs, is interwoven into every scene. The whole piece has a balanced bureaucratic-office feel and a dreamlike quality, underscored by sparse, melancholic piano and flickering lighting design.

The set strengthens this seemingly unmixable combination of heaven and an office. Built from what looks like a coloured wall of mailboxes and containers, it doubles as both a cramped international student's room, piled with boxes in too small a space, and an overstuffed, old-fashioned bureaucratic office. It is a clever, versatile image for a play interested in the space between the personal and the institutional.

What elevates Dear Lihua beyond familiar territory (immigrant struggle, language barriers, artistic hardship) is its willingness to interrogate the fantasy underneath all of it: the idea of a 'golden era' of globalisation, a connected world, a global village where communication happens smoothly if one speaks English proficiently and wants it enough. That fantasy, as the play suggests, is no longer tenable, and perhaps it never really was. And yet immigrant artists like Qiuqiu, and the friends and family they leave behind, keep going anyway, because there is no real way back, even as the optimism that once justified the journey quietly drains away. In the end, they are not so much different from Lihua: writers of earnest, hopeful letters to a connected future that never writes back.

Underneath its humorous tone, Dear Lihua asks serious questions about globalisation, the commodification of artistic 'talent', and the sheer effort and sacrifice it takes to build connection in a world where that connection may already be lost. That it manages all this without ever feeling heavy-handed or didactic is a clear sign of how well made it is.

★★★★

This show is performing at the Edinburgh Fringe. For more information, please visit: https://www.thespaceuk.com/shows/2026/dear-lihua

Creatives

Writer: Xinyi Chen
Director/Dramaturg: Zhaoyi Ying
Producer: Noah (Yinuo) Yang
Co-Producer: Eizo (Yizhuo) Zhao
Creative Producer: Elaine Li Quan
Set & Costume Designer: Eizo (Yizhuo) Zhao
Lighting Designer: Yuqing Wang
Sound Designer: Yu-Ting Yeh
Composer: Nancy (Yuning) Ma
Stage Manager: Yixin Zhang

Cast
Qiuqiu: Zoe Rowe
God3456: Rafi Essex
Barbara: Naomi Crosby

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