| The 'Official Asian American' |
| David Henry Hwang is one of the movers and shakers in contemporary Asian American writing. "Hwang is one of the first generation of Asian American dramatists--along with writers like Frank Chin, Wakako Yamauchi, Velina Hasu Houston, and Philip Kan Gotanda--to have had [a] noticeable impact on American theater," says Angela C. Pao, an expert on race and gender in twentieth-century American drama who teaches at Indiana University's Bloomington campus. Hwang is at ease among such company. "The network is surprisingly supportive, considering that we're basically competing against each other," he says. "A lot of my closest friends are other Asian American artists. When we first started doing this, it was a new thing that only people who really believed in it would do. It's useful to have other people not thinking you're nuts." They have also taken turns being the "Official Asian American," Hwang says. "Maxine [Hong Kingston] was for a while. Then I was. Then Amy Tan was." But, he cautions, it makes no sense for any one of them to reflect the opinions of an entire community. "It behooves us to have others out there with competing perspectives and aesthetics, working towards the same goal and doing it in new ways." Certainly, they don't have the same viewpoint. They don't even view their Asian American-ness in any uniform way. While some may be unable to detach ethnicity from their core sense of being, Hwang has said before that his Chinese American heritage has been a "minor detail, like having red hair." Indeed, when he lists his literary influences, most of the writers he names--Sam Shepard, Ntzoke Shange, Bertold Brecht, Tom Stoppard, George Bernard Shaw, Hong Kingston, and Chin--are not Asian American. But his most successful works do come from the distinctive perspective of a hyphenated Asian-American. "I discovered I was Asian American by writing," Hwang explains. "Writing really tells me where I am as a person on some deeper level." The question of identity came up in his first professional play, F.O.B., and has continued to assert itself in his work since then in a variety of ways. Yet, Hwang seems to have escaped from that trap of being a one-trick "ethnic writer"--of being stuck in telling one kind of story of "being black" or "being Asian." Hwang switches gears easily from tragedy to comedy to mythology to national or personal history. F.O.B. (accepted for production at the National Playwrights Conference while Hwang was just graduating from Stanford University) tells the story of a young, "Fresh Off the Boat" Chinese immigrant who finds himself in a funny, complicated triangle with two Chinese American students also struggling with assimilation in Los Angeles. A showcase for Hwang's developing wit, the play is most notable for his use of Chinese theatrical techniques to turn the characters into mythological figures in the second act. Hwang then took the epic and historical in his next play, Dance and the Railroad, which looks at the frustrated expectations of railroad workers in the mid-nineteenth century. In his next play, Family Devotions, Hwang was more personal and satirical, examining how Christianity changes an immigrant's search for his ethnic traditions. But Hwang has not only made a name for himself playing on the hyphen between Chinese and American (or Asian and American, for that matter). Like many writers (W.B. Yeats among them), Hwang experimented with stylized Japanese plays, writing two one-act plays called (together) Sound and Beauty. Hwang's most critically acclaimed play, M. Butterfly, brings together a story Hwang read in a 1986 New York Times article and Giacomo Puccini's 1904 opera Madama Butterfly. In Puccini's opera, a Japanese woman is so completely devoted to her American navy lieutenant lover that she commits suicide in the thralls of devotion. Hwang's play punches that story inside out, based on the Times story in which a French diplomat was convicted of leaking secrets to his Chinese mistress, a man who disguised himself as an actress in the Beijing Opera. The diplomat's refusal to believe, even in court, that his mistress was actually a man, furnished Hwang with an opportunity to ponder the power of Asian stereotypes. The result was a play with the bite of a true story, deepened by fantasies about the exotic East, femininity, and masculinity. Hwang's most unsuccessful play was his one and only stab at creating non-Asian characters. Although the play was based on his own family, Rich Relations did not specifically require Asian actors. While we can argue about whether the failure resulted from an audience problem -- that is, whether it resulted from American audiences being not yet ready for a non-Asian American play by an Asian American writer -- or whether the show is actually as "tired" as critics say it was, the fact is, the play was not successful. With a laugh, Hwang calls the 1986 play "my favorite failure." All of his previous plays had won the praise of critics, so the young playwright had yet to encounter failure. "I had begun to question whether my most successful plays were about the more Oriental elements. I started to think I was just creating Orientalia for the intelligentsia. So I tried to create a play with no Asian characters and made all the characters in the family white. I had to do it." But the failure of Rich Relations ultimately proved to be good for his craft. His next new play was M. Butterfly, arguably the finest of his career. Unafraid of failure now that he had confronted it, Hwang was now willing to do more experimentation. In the years following, Hwang even dipped into science-fiction in a 1988 collaboration called One Thousand Airplanes on the Roof with composer Philip Glass and scene designer Jerome Sirlin. It is interesting that it took M.Butterfly, the play in which stereotypes are most savagely portrayed, to make Hwang an American playwright. Starting in 1988, magazines like Time began running articles in which critics called Hwang "the first U.S. playwright to become an international phenomenon in a generation," and a writer with "the potential to become the first important dramatist of American public life since Arthur Miller, and maybe the best of them all." Indeed, when Madeline Puzo, assistant producer for Flower Drum Song at the Taper, talks about the reasons behind bringing Hwang's play to her theater, she doesn't speak of him as an "ethnic playwright." "The Taper's mission is the development and producing of new American plays. This re-thinking of Flower Drum Song was a perfect choice for the Taper," Puzo says. Stepping to the beat of a different drummer The 'Official Asian American' 'We can put Chow Yun-Fat in that' |