A DIFFERENT POND: A Conversation with the Author & the Playwright
To hear all about Bao’s inspiration and experiences, Jessica’s playwriting process, and the themes that stuck out to both of them, check out this video podcast of their conversation.
Across 32 pages in the Caldecott-honored children’s book, A Different Pond, Twin Cities author Bao Phi tells the story of a father and son who go fishing one early morning on a Minneapolis lake. Through the little details, he and illustrator Thi Bui show us parents who are refugees from Vietnam, a child who grows up with strangers pointing out his family’s differences, and a household that comes together over a dinner made from the same fish they caught that morning, drizzled in sauce flecked with carrots and chili pepper.
A Different Pond is a simple tale but a profound one, and for the first time, it’s coming to the theater in a world premiere by Stages Theatre Company in collaboration with Theater Mu. The 60-minute play opens Sept 30 and runs through Oct 23, and fans of the book can expect the same center story but with an expanded world created by playwright Jessica Luu Pelletier.
A missing story
Stages Theatre Company had approached Bao back in 2019 about a stage adaptation of his story, but because of COVID-19 delays, it wasn’t until 2022 that they connected with Luu Pelletier through the Vietnamese writers’ group, the Sống Collective. Luu Pelletier’s No. 1 request? That she be able to talk with Phi about his book and what he wanted to see in the stage adaptation.
In Phi’s opinion, he didn’t ask for much. “I feel like the book already exists, right?” he says. “What can other Vietnamese artists pull from the story that I haven’t seen, or that I don’t even consciously know is there?’” The one thing he did ask for, though, was for the script to not shy away from the systemic racism the boy faced in his daily life.
Despite the book’s optimistic and peaceful tones, Phi had written A Different Pond while thinking about how his parents had to fight to get where they were in America, and how the “model minority” didn’t apply to them in the ‘80s—just as it doesn’t apply to the many Asian Americans today.
“I wrote A Different Pond back when … [my former partner and I] were reading a lot of picture books to our kid,” Phi says. “And it just seemed like a lot of the Vietnamese picture books were either teaching language, like Vietnamese language, or were talking about folktales. And that stuff’s important, obviously, but I wanted something more. I was kind of like, ‘What about the story of people like my parents?’”
Creating a reflective world
Hieu Bui and Benji Stoebner are father and son in A Different Pond. Photo by Amy Rondeau Photography.
The whole focus of the story, the fishing trip, exists because of the experience Phi had growing up in a family of Vietnamese refugees. Most kids who come across this story can easily latch onto the idea of fishing. The difference is that for the boy in the book—and for Phi—the pastime wasn’t for fun. It was to make sure the family had food to eat.
To bring all these themes into the play, Luu Pelletier addresses bilingualism, just like Bao does in his book. She also made sure that her conversations with Phi, cultural consultant and Mu managing director Anh Thu Pham, and the local community looked at refugee family dynamics, like how the youngest sibling’s relationship with Vietnam and with their parents may be different than their oldest sibling’s, or how an extended family member would become part of the household out of necessity and love.
“And then I was also thinking a lot about how to adapt all of that for today’s children because being a child today is so vastly different from being a kid in the ‘80s in Minnesota,” Luu Pelletier says, noting that many children who will see the play don’t have firsthand experience being a refugee.
What love can look like
This communication, this passing down of history, was important to both Phi and Luu Pelletier.
Phi remembers growing up and seeing the local newspaper spreading rumors about a pool hall, reporting that it was overrun with Vietnamese gangsters who would kill people for looking at their women, or another newspaper that claimed the Vietnamese in the area were stealing pets and eating them. And whether it’s talking about those past injustices or talking about children’s very real fears of today’s world, Phi believes you have to confront that reality.
He says, “You’ve got to have these conversations with them. Otherwise, they’re going to be even more scared because they’re going to fill in the blanks themselves. And so the challenge, I think, for us as parents or creators, is how to have these conversations with young people in a way that’s productive and isn’t, you know, traumatizing or scarring for them.”
Luu Pelletier models some of these conversations in the play, and while these scenes help the story unfold, she also hopes that parents in the audience can use those moments to examine how they want to talk with their children. “Preparing children and giving them the tools for the world that you’re putting them into, I think, is expanding on our idea of what love is,” she says.
“I really want to encourage this idea, especially of familial love, that also integrates respect. And I feel like showing as a parent, showing your child that you respect them and that you trust them to a certain degree with the history and with the information that you're going to give them—I think it's something that in my own life I would like to encourage.”
You can catch A Different Pond at Stages Theatre Company from Sept 30-Oct 23, including a special author book signing and post-show talkback on Oct 1.