Having appeared in films (The Last Emperor, Little Buddha) and on stage (Death of a Salesman) both East and West, the actor, director, translator and vice-minister of culture (1986–90), Ying Ruocheng (1929–2003) may appear to need little introduction. Yet, in light of the burgeoning scholarship on the role of modern drama in the shaping of the cultural discourse and political events of modern China, an autobiography of a key figure in post-1949 China is a welcome addition to enrich our understanding of how theatre came to be a vital institution in modern Chinese life. Readers looking for such insights will be intrigued by this idiosyncratic autobiographical account, not least because it sheds new light on Ying Ruocheng's dual role as government informant and cultural ambassador in East–West relations.

The autobiographical project documented in Voices Carry is unusual on a number of scores. First, it is a collaborative undertaking between Ying Ruocheng, one of the founding members of and long-time contributors to Beijing People's Art Theatre, China's premier modern drama company, and an American academic, translator and director with expertise in modern Chinese drama, Claire Conceison. It is their shared passion for drama, particularly their interest in intercultural performance, that appears to initially have drawn them together. First meeting each other in 1991 at Ying's production of a Shaw play at the Beijing People's Art Theatre, they contemplated a collaborative autobiography in 1996. Thereafter, month-long visits by Conceison to a terminally ill Ying Ruocheng during the summers of 2001, 2002 and 2003 resulted in over 100 hours of taped interviews. After Ying's death, using oral-history methods, Conceison assembled the materials into a memoir, enriching Ying Ruocheng's first-person narrative with an introduction, a timeline and a carefully researched set of notes in a delicate balancing act between honouring and historicizing an admired friend.

Secondly, rather than representing a translation, the English version of Voices Carry is the original text. In other words, Ying chose English over Chinese as the medium for his musings about his childhood, his life in prison (1968–71) during the Cultural Revolution, and his career in the post-Mao China. The introduction notes that from the inception of the project, the autobiography was intended for a global audience. Beyond the hopes for an implied readership, however, the reader can only speculate about the motivations for the language choice. Was it an act of linguistic showmanship of the sort that the memoir itself recounts time and again? Or did the language create the desired psychological distance to the events, particularly the three harrowing years spent in prison? Did it enable the telling of a story, that according to Ying, was “not easy to tell” perhaps because of all the political and personal ramifications for himself and for those he had known? Did Ying hope to enshrine himself as a fundamentally upbeat, upright and cosmopolitan traveller between Chinese and Western culture? Did the existence of an English version ensure that a Chinese translation would not get lost in whatever political turmoil might take place? Did it betoken ambitions for the kind of popular audience that other Chinese memoirs about the Cultural Revolution had attained? However, while many of the latter adopted the voice of a victim overcoming adversity, Voices Carry, thanks largely to the presence of two narratorial voices, paints a more complicated picture of Ying's life.

Accordingly, third, in Voices Carry, Conceison's introduction competes with Ying's memoir proper for attention. Were it not for her introduction, much of narrative proper would remain obscure, as noted by a Chinese reviewer of the authorized Chinese edition that omitted a key section of Conceison's introduction. Most importantly, Conceison reveals that both Ying Ruocheng and his wife Wu Shiliang, the daughter of an eminent administrator who had studied abroad in the US, were lifelong government informants. Both regularly submitted lengthy reports on the many foreigners that they came into contact with in the course of their lives. In fact, starting as early as 1951 and by 1958, Wu's main work unit was the Beijing Public Security Bureau Section Two, where, at her funeral in 1987, she was commended her for the “counterespionage and intelligence work” over the course of 30 years. Conceison is at pains to contextualize Ying and Wu's continued service as informants in terms of patriotic motivations common among intellectuals of their generation.

The issue of Ying's dual roles obviously merits further investigation. For example, in addition to procuring obvious perks such as access to foreign publications, better material conditions, and Party membership for Ying's family, did the intelligence work of a knowledgeable informer enhance the likelihood for potentially transformative international collaborations? Or did such secret labours secure a modicum of manoeuvring space for risqué domestic theatrical productions as some passages of the memoir imply? For the time being, without extensive access to the classified files that Ying and Wu produced, no matter how one rationalizes their actions, knowledge of Ying's dual life as enthusiastic cultural ambassador and willing and eager government informant haunt one's reading of all the memoir's encounters with foreigners, Ying's protestations of deep friendship and odes to the oneness of humanity notwithstanding.

Readers who, in light of the facts disclosed in the introduction, might expect a Catholic mea culpa confessional stance in the memoir, will be disappointed. Ying Ruocheng's own account gravitates towards the ingenious, comic, and exhortative rather than the apologetic and reflective. In the first two chapters that cover the three years in prison during the Cultural Revolution, Ying dwells on how he made the horror and tedium of prison life more bearable with pranks, clever inventions, and ingenious assignments. In an attempt to figure out how he and his wife came to be imprisoned, he does touch upon the personal request by Peng Zhen, the erstwhile mayor of Beijing, to keep tabs on foreigners, but repeatedly emphasizes how little he found out and how much less he communicated to the authorities. In the two chapters on his childhood, he traces the careers of his prominent grandfather (Ying Lianzhi, a Manchu Catholic, newspaper magnate and president of Furen University) and father (Ying Qianli, a drama aficionado, overseas student, and anti-Japanese KMT official), prior to 1949. In the final two chapters devoted to his stage career, apart from comments about his work with other well-known theatrical figures (Cao Yu, Boris Kulinev, Jiao Juyin, Yu Shizhi, Gao Xingjian, Bob Hope, Arthur Miller, Bernardo Bertolucci among others), one of the most interesting aspects concerns how audiences reacted to many different performances staged at the Beijing People's Art Theater over the course of a half century.

In short, this curious memoir is bound to attract as much attention for what it covers as for what it leaves out. Given that revelations of being even an occasional informant for the Stasi have irreparably tainted the reputations of former East German cultural icons, it will be interesting to see how Ying Ruocheng's reputation as a cultural ambassador, “a man of double consciousness,” as Arthur Miller heralded him, fares both East and West. But irrespective of the impact on the legacy of a single individual, Voices Carry invites us to look beyond the happy facade of international dialogue and understanding and raises interesting, yet largely unanswered questions as to how the gossamer webs of the theatrical imagination are tangibly tethered to the political, diplomatic and cultural encounters between China and the West.