Theatre performance "Tong Men-g" illustrates identity struggle of immigrants in Italy

Shi Yang Shi's ultimate goal sounds both poetic and challenging: he would like to be "a brick in a bridge that connects two cultures, and completes a mosaic."

Yet, the 35-year-old actor could boast a very good starting point: his own identity.

Shi was born and spent his childhood in China, but it was in Italy that he grew up and built his future.

Shi's life reflects the typical struggle of so-called second- generation immigrants, who are "forced to find a synthesis and a new balance" between two identities and two worlds.

How did he do that? With a theatre performance unique in its kind.

His play, named "Tong Men-g," was performed at the Brancaccio Theatre in Rome on Monday. It was the first theatre piece ever to take place in two languages simultaneously, Italian and Chinese.

"The play resulted from my double needs: to search better inside myself, and understand more of the social conflicts that I have seen around me as I grew up," Shi told Xinhua.

The artist lives in Prato, the Tuscany's city where one of the largest Chinese communities in Europe settled down since late 1980s.

Indeed, the two and a half hours double-language monologue was sort of a journey for the people, both Italians and Chinese, who came to watch the play.

In the first part, the actor retraced some of his ancestors' stories in order to discover family's roots: his great-grand-father, member of the Communist Party of China, who was killed in fighting against the Japanese invaders in 1942 and declared a national hero; his grandparents, who lived through the Cultural Revolution; and his own father, who was a Red Guard.

"This research about my ancestors helped me greatly," he said, explaining that discovering how some of them sacrificed their young lives for ideals of equality was both painful and illuminating.

In the second part of "Tong Men-g," the artist led the audience through his experience as an 11-year-old boy suddenly uprooted from a pleasant life in China to be sent with his mother in a new country, Italy, which was just starting to cope with the first inflow of foreign migrants.

"I wanted to tell the path of a person with a mixed identity, such as I am," the actor explained.