For the last decade, award-winning playwright Lloyd Suh has been excavating, with wit and heart, the forgotten pasts of Asian American history. The Chinese Lady, The Far Country, Charles Francis Chan Jr.’s Exotic Oriental Murder Mystery, and The Heart Sellers invite the spectator and reader into expansive life worlds and experiences by staging Asian American history from the 1830s through the 1970s. Once in the Countryside, which is contracted with the Methuen Drama imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, is a critical edition of these four plays, along with Bina’s Six Apples, a play for young audiences. Each of the six history plays is accompanied by a critical preface by a scholar of Asian American studies and a postscript by a creative collaborator, a theatre artist who worked on the original productions. This edition will serve as a guide for theatremakers, teachers, and students. It is unique in offering both scholarly context and insight into the production process. The plays explore the complexities of found families, migration, and resistance. They counterbalance the weight of their topics with the ridiculousness and radiance of life. If an aphorism of empire is that “we are here because you were there,” Suh’s plays are defiant in acknowledging that we are here because our ancestors miraculously once were. They dared to dream – and crossed oceans to make those dreams real.