CHAPTER 1
Understanding David Henry Hwang
Sitting across from me in my American Drama class was David Henry Hwang. Surrounding us were students who had studied his play M. Butterfly the previous two class sessions and were ready to hear the real meaning of the play from the author instead of the interpretations of their teacher and fellow classmates. Hwang, though, like his play, surprised the students by asking each one to tell him what he or she found problematic in his Tony-Awardâwinning work. In other words, he wanted college students to tell him, a playwright for more than thirty years, what was wrong with his work, and in doing so he changed the discourse of the classroom from students listening to an expert to critics sharing their thoughts with a writer. In one subtle move he informed the students that their opinions and voices mattered to him. His opening question triggered a conversation that covered a wide range of topics, including whether the play was a love story, how each one of us inhabits multiple faces throughout our lives, and the changing nature of East/West relations, all with M. Butterfly as a background, but, equally, each studentâs life and experiences also became part of the discussion. After Hwangâs visit to our class one student confided in me that it was one the most incredible experiences he had had in college.
The same level of excitement existed for all the students with whom he came in touch when he visited Rollins College in February 2010, as he led workshop sessions with new playwriting students, examining their work with a professionally keen eye as well as with great compassion; conducted a writing workshop with a group of students; and amiably made himself available to students with questions, comments, and advice. In the latter case his visit was an epiphany for an Asian American student, who shyly asked me if she could just have ten minutes to talk to Hwang, to which he gladly agreed. I later came to learn that she, like Hwang, was born to immigrant parents from Asia and wanted to write about her experience of bridging the American way of life with her parentsâ protective Cambodian perspective. The words of encouragement and advice he gave her provided her with the confidence to write a full-length screenplay about a first-generation girl with strict Cambodian parents. Her story is just one of many that came up during his three-day visit to our campus. As for me, watching his amiable interaction with our students, coteaching the playwriting workshop with him, chatting about the casting difficulties for his new play, Chinglish, and discussing the merits of the varying flavors of crunchy Cheetos inspired me to write this book so that I could understand more about the playwright who had such a profound experience on my students as well as on contemporary American drama.
David Henry Hwang is a first-generation Chinese American, having been born in California on August 11, 1957, to his two immigrant parents. His father, Henry Hwang, the second son of his family, was born to a Chinese peasant who had relocated from the Chinese countryside to Shanghai, where he became wealthy and where Henry was born. Feeling confined by the limitations placed upon him as the familyâs second son, Henry immigrated to Oregon in the late 1940s in order to study business at Linfield College before eventually transferring to the University of Southern California. His decision to leave China should not have come as a surprise to his family and friends. According to Hwang, his father ânever much liked China, or the whole idea behind China or Chinese ways of thinking. Heâs always been much more attracted to American ways of thinking. He feels Americans are more openâthey tell you what they thinkâand heâs very much that way himself.â1 Henryâs attraction to America in part grew out of the American movies he watched growing up. Hwang would incorporate his fatherâs love of classic American movies and its stars to comedic as well as dramatic effect in Yellow Face.
His mother, Dorothy Huang, also had a Chinese background. Her grandparents had lived in Amoy but moved to the Philippines, where they became successful merchants. Her family members were devout Protestant fundamentalists, and the religious faith of his motherâs side of the family would significantly influence his two plays Family Devotions and Golden Child. Following in the footsteps of her brother, who had come to the United States to go to college, Dorothy immigrated in 1952 in order to study concert piano at the University of Southern California. Dorothy met Henry at a university dance, and they hit it off. In order for Dorothy to accept Henryâs proposal of marriage, he had to convert to Christianity, which he willingly did. Henry and Dorothy seamlessly assimilated into American culture, so much so that their three children grew up with a fairly stereotypical American childhood, rather than navigating the intricacies of a mixed cultural experience. Hwang admitted that his parentsâ assimilation was a crucial component of his personal and artistic progress. He explained, âMy whole personal political development is largely a reaction to the fact that my parents did assimilate. If they had been more traditional and tied to the root culture, I would probably be a completely different person.â2
David Henry Hwang is the eldest child and only son of Henry and Dorothy, who also had two younger daughters, Mimi and Grace. The three Hwang siblings were raised in the comfortable enclave of San Gabriel, California, in the San Gabriel Valley. Hwang has admitted that he never really attributed any significance to being Chinese because he and his sisters were not raised with that mindset. âWe were raised pretty much as white European Americans in terms of the things we celebrated. Thereâs an odd confluence in my family between a father who decided to turn away from things Chinese and a mother whose family had been converted to Christianity in China several generations back. Consequently between the two of them there was no particular desire for us to speak Chinese or celebrate Chinese holidays at all.â3 For a short period of time, the Hwangs did enroll their children in a Chinese-language course, but, shortly thereafter, they pulled them out, fearing that if they learned Chinese their English studies would be disrupted. While Hwang knew that he was of Chinese heritage, âit never occurred to me that that had any particular implication or that it should differentiate me in any way. I thought it was a minor detail, like having red hair. I never got a lot in school to contradict that. My parents brought us up with a rather nice sense of self.â4
And yet, while in some interviews Hwang described his childhood as a Chinese American in the 1960s and 1970s as fairly idyllic and painless in terms of racial issues (he noted at one point that he never experienced any racism until he first went to New York City), at other times he admitted being aware of racial stereotypes and bigotry tied to popular perceptions of Asians and Asian Americans, especially when Hollywood was involved. He experienced âa certain discomfort while watching Asian characters portrayed in film and television. Whether it was âthe enemyâ in Japanese, Korean, or Vietnam War movies or the obsequious figureâBonanzaâs cook, Hop Sing, for instanceâall of these people made me feel embarrassed, frankly. You could argue that that was the beginning of some impulse that led me to create my own Asian characters later in life.â5 His discomfort with these broad and, at times, nefarious depictions had an effect on his interaction with these stereotypes, as âI would go out of my way not to watch movies or television shows featuring Asian characters. If asked to explain, I might simply have replied that they made me feel âicky.â They were consistently inhuman: either inhumanly bad (Fu Manchu, Japanese soldiers) or inhumanly good (Charlie Chan, Asian ingenues who died for the love of a white B-movie actor).â6 This contradiction between his own experiences as an Asian American and those of characters on his television screen would prove to be driving fodder for most of his plays as he constantly questions the nature of identity (whether it be ethnic, familial, religious, national, or societal) through the use or disruption of stereotypes, while also exploring the challenging question of what makes someone authentically ethnic. âAs a playwright, I find that much of my work has involved a search for authenticity; if I could discover more truthful images to replace the stereotypical ones of my youth, perhaps I could also begin to understand my own identity. As part of this exploration, I have often taken older stories and reinvented them on my own terms.â7 And, in having such a pursuit throughout his career, âI have become less interested in seeking some holy grail of authenticity and more convinced of the need to create characters who burst from the page or stage with the richness, complexity and contradictions of real people.â8
While he lived in an assimilated household and was engaged in a typical American childhood, he still maintained connections to his Chinese heritage through stories shared with him by his parents and his grandparents. When he was ten, he learned that his maternal grandmother was sick. âI remember thinking that if anything happened to her, our familyâs history would be lost forever.â9 In order to prevent such an occurrence, he received permission from his parents to travel to the Philippines to see her. While there, he recorded his grandmotherâs stories about their family and transcribed them into a ninety-page history of his motherâs side of the family. âI distributed it to the family and it was well received. I suppose that was the first real writing I did.â10 This piece of juvenilia would later become the basis for Hwangâs second Broadway play, Golden Child, which dramatized his motherâs familyâs conversion to Christianity as well as the aftershocks of their embracing Western religion. Because of their motherâs faith, the Hwang children were raised with a fundamentalist background, which included attending church during much of the weekend (at a fundamentalist church that had been founded by his great-uncle), Bible study in the middle of the week, and prayers at every meal. He described their worship as a âweird Chinese American Baptist evangelical fusion.â11
As the children grew up, Hwangâs mother taught piano at Azusa Pacific College and at the Colburn School of the Arts, while also performing professionally in the Los Angeles area. His motherâs piano playing was what introduced Hwang to the theater for the first time. When he was eight years old, his mother played the piano for a production of Gian Carlo Menottiâs The Medium at East West Players, and Hwang accompanied her to rehearsals. While his mother taught and played piano, his father was a successful accountant. In the early 1970s Henry had his opportunity to achieve not only greater financial success but also the American Dream by becoming one of the founders of the Far East National Bank, the first federally chartered Asian American bank in the continental United States. In a bizarre twist, which Hwang would use as a comedic centerpiece of Family Devotions, shortly after the bank opened, his father was kidnapped and held for a three-hundred-thousand-dollar ransom. His abductors drove him around Los Angeles until the money was paid. Once the kidnappers received the ransom, he was released. The police never apprehended the culprits.
During elementary school, Hwang took up the violin, which he still plays today. Like his mother with her piano playing, Hwangâs skill at the violin connected him to the theatre. As a high school student, he played in the orchestra for various musical productions. About these early experiences in the theater, Hwang remarked, âThe only thing that was strange was that I liked to stay after rehearsal and listen to the director give notes.â12 In college he switched from classical violin, which he found boring, to jazz violin. In addition to his musical skills, Hwang was also a champion debater in high school. He first attended San Gabriel High School and then, because of his debating prowess, was recruited by Harvard School, to which he transferred. Hwang has credited both these activities with being beneficial to his later career as a playwright: âMusic really helps in terms of developing structure and dramatic growth, and jazz in particular helps with theatrical improvisation. As a jazz musician you get used to peaks and valleys and tensionsâand these same things occur in theater which, like music, is a time art. And my early interest in debate no doubt contributed to my theatrical interest in the opposition of ideas and the interplay of ideas in many plays.â13 However, because of his musical background, he approaches playwriting with a slightly different perspective than that of many of his contemporaries. âI still donât pay that much attention to particular words, just like you donât pay attention to the individual notes on a score: Itâs about the movement that they create.â14
After graduating from high school, Hwang attended Stanford University, assuming that after graduation he would enroll in law school. Expecting him to follow in the path of his father, his parents wanted him to earn a business degree, which would have been difficult since Stanford did not offer a degree in business. By the time he graduated, though, he knew he would not be pursuing either profession. While at Stanford, Hwang had three epiphanies, all of which would prove instrumental to his writing career. The first epiphany occurred when, in his sophomore year, he began to question his religious upbringing and eventually threw off his familyâs Christian beliefs: âI have to say that breaking away was one of the things Iâm most proud of in my life. It really was something I had to do to get my muscles to work for me. But because my family was monolithically Christian, I thought it would separate me from my family forever,â which did not happen.15 Despite his personal choice to leave the church, religion played an important element in three of his plays. In addition to Golden Child, with its focus on his own familyâs religious conversion, Family Devotions focuses on the visit of a relative from China who has a profound effect on not only the religious identities of the family members but also the entire religious basis of the familyâs history, while Rich Relations explores the concept of resurrection, as one character comes back to life after being dead for an hour and another character attempts to restart his identity.
The second epiphany revolved around his ethnicity. As a student, he began to seek answers to that awkwardness he had felt as a child when watching depictions of Asian characters on television. He immersed himself in an exploration of Asian and Asian American issues. He lived in an all-Asian residence hall; played the electric violin, which he took up in college, as a member of an all-Asian rock band called Bamboo, whose sole existence was to play âAsian-American protest musicâ;16 âbecame involved with these Asian, Marxist oriented, consciousness-raising groupsâ;17 and studied works by Asian American writers. In the process of this submersion in all things Asian, he became a professed âisolationist nationalist.â18 One of the most influential works he read was Maxine Hong Kingstonâs The Woman Warrior. Kingstonâs work âmade me feel that I could find my own voice. As an Asian-American, she was the first author who spoke in a voice that seemed special, directly related to me. Before reading her work, I didnât think it was possible to write about my own parochial concerns; they didnât seem to have a place in litera...