Part of: The Kuling Project
Lecture-performance 2025
40 min, 4 scenes, solo cross-gender role,
Languages: English and Chinese, with short passages in German and Sanskrit
Li Deli’s Journey to the West is a speculative monologue-performance about the life and afterlife of missionary Edward Selby Little — known in China as Li Deli (李 德立), founder of the colonial resort Kuling. After his death, he does not enter Christian paradise, but arrives in the Chinese underworld, where he must defend what he did in Kuling before a court whose existence he spent his life refusing to acknowledge.
I perform the cross-gender role of the white male missionary. The work examines how fluency in a language can be weaponised and what it means to inhabit a perspective that was never yours.
Xy June Li 