Word: hwang
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Most U.S. playwrights focus on home and hearth, but David Henry Hwang (M. Butterfly) has become an international hit portraying political megatrends...
When David Henry Hwang was a student at Stanford University, he and fellow residents of the "Asian-American theme dorm" used to refer derisively to any female peer who seemed overly deferential, too traditionally feminine, as "doing a Butterfly." Hwang, for one, had no actual complaint against Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly. In fact, he had never seen or even heard it. But what he had gleaned of the plot -- about a Japanese girl who kills herself for love of a faithless American sailor -- summed up for him many of the stereotypes Westerners imposed on Orientals...
...Hwang had not always been so sensitive, so ready to take offense. Although his parents were immigrants and he visited relatives in Manila and Taipei, this self-described "Chinese-Filipino-American, born-again-Christian kid from suburban Los Angeles" felt "scarcely more connection than the average white" between Asian life and his own. "I read Pearl Buck in high school and didn't see anything wrong. I still like Charlie Chan movies. The whole thing about being of Chinese descent seemed an interesting detail, as if I had red hair. But not everyone saw it that way." So Hwang embarked...
...Republic, it has been intensified by the growing Chinese presence on campuses, in business and the arts. When Kingston published her first account, The Woman Warrior (1976), she was a soloist. Today she is part of a choir of writers concerned with the Chinese experience. On Broadway, David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly explores the boundaries of power, sex and race. In Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, published last month, Chinese mothers offer their children a series of poignant confessionals. China's repressive Cultural Revolution is the subject of a forthcoming autobiographical novel, A Generation Lost...
...wanted to explore," said John Hwang '92. "I just wasn't ready to commit...