Play Guide

Other people find a golden ring in the stomach of a fish.
Other people find a diamond in long grass.

A young Chinese man is in agony, beside himself in pain with a toothache. In the kitchen of The Golden Dragon Restaurant, his four fellow cooks try to soothe him as the orders stream in and the kitchen bustles.

Above this friendly neighbourhood haunt rise the buildings where most of its diners live. They look down on its welcoming red lanterns and muse about the goings-on in the kitchen – the one place in the restaurant they never see. The kitchen staff, however, they don’t have the time (at least not now) to look up and wonder at the world above them. Their hands are full:

THE MAN: In the kitchen of THE GOLDEN DRAGON: it’s cramped, it’s very cramped, there’s no room, but there are still five Asian cooks working here. One of them’s got a toothache: the boy, the one who’s looking for his sister. The new one.
THE MAN OVER SIXTY: Don’t scream, don’t scream
THE MAN: Screaming will use up all your energy.
THE YOUNG MAN: We call him the boy because he’s new.
THE WOMAN OVER SIXTY: Because he’s not been here so long. He’s still new. And he’s got no money. And he’s got no papers. So a dentist is out of the question.

As the orders fly in, some of the cooks work frantically to fill them while the others decide to cure the young man’s toothache themselves. His family back home is counting on him to find his sister, and they’re determined that that a rotten tooth won’t stop him!

Two stewardesses order warm bowls of Thai soup at The Golden Dragon after (literally) a world tour. As they eat, and as the cooks scavenge the kitchen for something – anything – to ease the young man’s pain, a host of quiet and unseen dramas unfold in the highrises above them. A grandfather contemplates his young granddaughter and the promise of youth. The man in the striped shirt wonders where it all went wrong. A young woman redecorates her apartment for an impending arrival. The shopkeeper next door stashes his greatest prize deep in his tightly-packed apartment to the horror and delight of his company.

Each is on the cusp of a life-altering moment like the young man with the toothache in the restaurant below. And each is somehow intimately tied to that restaurant. They could never know this in their secret worlds stacked on top of each other, the same way the young man could never know that the key to his quest is much closer than he could possibly imagine.

Articles

• Anusree Roy gets to roar in The Golden Dragon
  by Glenn Sumi, NOW Magazine, January 5 2012.