Word: hwang
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...might an aggressive panhandler who, through assistance and negotiation, can be coaxed into becoming a good citizen; and they see America's hard-line policy as a needless provocation of unpredictable dictator Kim Jong Il. "There is a totally different threat perception between South Koreans and Americans," says Balbina Hwang, a Korea expert at the Heritage Foundation in Washington...
...Nahye Hwang...
...show starts from the original point of departure--a Chinese girl, Mei-Li (Lea Salonga, who starred in Miss Saigon), gets off the boat and arrives in San Francisco's Chinatown--but Hwang has taken all the pieces apart and put them back together in a new configuration. The tradition-bound patriarch (Randall Duk Kim) is now the owner of a Chinatown theater, where he stages Chinese opera to sparse crowds, while his son (Jose Llana) tries to modernize the place with glitzy American-style shows. Some of Hwang's rewrite is too clever by half: midway through the evening...
...Hwang has made the show a richer, more nuanced exploration of the immigrant experience. One new character, a laborer who wants to take Mei-Li back to Hong Kong ("They try so hard to fit in," he says of his assimilation-minded countrymen, "they don't even know who they are"), reminds us that there were many left out of the American Dream. Hwang is more respectful of the old characters too: the sexy nightclub singer Linda Low (Sandra Allen) was a conniving man eater in the old show; now she's a warm, sisterly and surprisingly full-blooded character...
Finally, the show works because it doesn't condescend. Hwang confesses that Flower Drum Song was always a guilty pleasure: for all its stereotypes, it portrayed the Asian experience as no show had before and few have since. "Many things about it remain revolutionary today," says Hwang. "You don't see on TV or movie screens in American pop culture a romance between an Asian man and an Asian woman. I'm still amazed by the fact that there was a Flower Drum Song." And we should be amazed that this Song is back in tune. --With reporting by AmyLennard...