While researching On the Shore Dimly Seen, I also came across another sound work—Wyllis Cooper’s 1947 radio drama series Quiet, Please. There’s an episode in the series called Nothing Behind the Door, and the opening stopped me cold the first time I heard it. No dramatic sound effects, just a man speaking in a low, tense voice. It sounded like he was wrestling with himself, or maybe facing off against something unseen. The whole passage was almost empty of sound. The background was bare, just the faintest electrical hum here and there. The rest was all breathing and pauses. I remember thinking, why does nothing happening make me turn the volume up and lean in closer?

That was the most immediate thing Quiet, Please gave me—it showed me that silence doesn’t have to be emptiness. It can be a presence with its own weight. Cooper practically made the listener’s imagination a co-writer. He didn’t fill everything in. He left space, and let the person listening do the guessing, the fearing, the filling. There was nothing behind that door, but every listener painted the most terrifying thing there in their own mind. That kind of courage—the courage to not give you something to hear—felt completely new to me. I hadn’t realised that a sound maker could trust the audience that much.

Later, when I started writing the script for Best Partners, I kept coming back to that thought. Our piece is a light comedy, not horror, but I really wanted to use that same sense of “leaving room.” After the grandmother reveals the truth, I insisted on a moment of total silence. Ken worried that if it went on too long, listeners would think the audio had cut out. QDY also reminded me that it would affect the timing of the music’s re-entry. I told them that what I’d heard in Quiet, Please had taught me something—that kind of blank isn’t a mistake. It’s an entrance for the listener to step through. In the end, we settled on two seconds. Nobody said anything in those two seconds, but I think that’s the moment when Xiao Liang’s heart churns hardest, and it’s one of the things I’m most satisfied with in the whole script.

If On the Shore Dimly Seen taught me to use noise and silence as material, Quiet, Please taught me something else—to trust the weight of what’s left out, and to place it at the most crucial turning point. These two works, one from the 1990s avant-garde radio art scene, the other from a 1940s commercial radio drama, opened up two different directions in my understanding of sound, one after the other, before I ever started making Best Partners. And in those 12 minutes and 32 seconds that Ken, QDY, and I eventually made together, there are traces of both of them in many places.