Word: hwang
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Success exacted its most customary price. Hwang's wife Ophelia stayed back in Los Angeles through most of the months of rehearsals and tryouts, and the fledgling marriage broke up soon after. Ever since, Hwang has lived a luxurious if somewhat work-obsessed life in Manhattan, in a rented midtown apartment with spectacular wraparound views. The place came furnished -- not even the throw pillows are his -- but he vows to decorate in style a newly purchased Manhattan triplex to which he will move in October. He rarely cooks or eats at home; instead he deftly table-hops at fashionable restaurants...
...Hwang is keenly aware of the F. Scott Fitzgerald dictum that American lives have no second acts, that youthful success leads to mid-life burnout and embitterment. A few months after M. Butterfly opened, he and avant-garde composer Philip Glass mounted 1000 Airplanes on the Roof, a multimedia oddity that proved too abstruse for the masses yet too tabloid for intellectuals; it centers on an apparent close encounter with aliens from space. In multiple productions it showed scant commercial potential. In addition to the screenplay for M. Butterfly, which Hwang will write himself, he is working on three other...
...richest literary material available to Hwang may be his own family. His mother's forebears moved from China to the Philippines in the 19th century and founded a trading company that at one point owned the national franchises for Coca-Cola and General Motors. "Basically," he says, "they were plutocrats and oppressors. The whole history of Chinese merchants in Southeast Asia is ambiguous. They provide prosperity but also isolate themselves and take profit from the local population." His mother grew up in a walled family compound until the Japanese commandeered it during World War II. Then the clan moved into...
...While Hwang's mother's family refused to do business with the Japanese, he says, "My father's father was something of a collaborator." Later on, in Taiwan, that grandfather went to jail in a financial scandal. Hwang's own father decided as a boy to leave China; as a younger son, he foresaw few opportunities, and as a believer in technology and progress, he was at odds with a traditional culture. After writing to Harvard and Yale for applications and receiving no reply, he wound up at Linfield College in Oregon. "When I was little," Hwang recalls, "my father...
...elder Hwang, by then a C.P.A., launched Far East National Bank, which specialized in loans to Asian immigrants and which now has four branches in California. Two years after the bank opened, he was kidnaped for ransom, then released within a few hours after the money was taken. Says the son: "I was in college at the time and did not hear about it until the crisis was over. The case was never solved, and some people have suggested that my father staged the episode as a publicity stunt. My father may be a little weird...