Wangs, and their struggle with two common prob-
lems in San Francisco’s Chinatown: the generation
gap and the imbalance between the numbers of
men and women. While Old Master Wang’s hob-
bies are gardening and coughing, younger son
Wang San prefers baseball and comic books. Elder
son Wang Ta’s problem is more serious. He hopes
to find a wife, but Caucasian women are out of
the question and appropriate Chinese women are
scarce. Vivacious Linda Tung turns out to be a for-
mer dancing girl with a slew of boyfriends; sisterly
Helen Chao, desperate for a husband due to her
pockmarked face, drowns herself when Ta rejects
her. Old Master Wang and his wife’s sister conspire
to arrange a marriage for Ta, but he finds his own
wife, May Li, a sweet and polite (yet not shy and
retiring) new arrival from Peking.
Though it was the first Chinese-American
novel to be published by a major publisher, The
Flower Drum Song has not always been favored
by Chinese-American critics; Frank Chin, for ex-
ample, considers the novel’s sensibility to be white
supremacist, not Asian American. Despite being
the first Broadway show starring Asian-American
actors, the musical adaptation by Rodgers and
Hammerstein was considered inauthentic, a rep-
resentation of Chinese life by non-Chinese, and
the novel was forgotten. However, the play was re-
vised in 2001 by David Henry Hwang, who argues
that The Flower Drum Song contains many non-
stereotypical features. One of the novel’s central
concerns is Asian male sexuality, and neither Miss
Tung, Miss Chao, nor May Li falls into the com-
mon stereotypes of Chinese women.
Lee’s works in English include The Flower Drum
Song (1957), Lover’s Point (1958), The Sabwa and
His Secretary (1959), Madame Goldenflower (1960),
Cripple Mah and the New Order (1961), The Virgin
Market (1964), The Land of the Golden Mountain
(1967), Days of the Tong Wars (1974), China Saga
(1987), The Second Son of Heaven (1990), and
Gate of Rage: A Novel of One Family Trapped by the
Events at Tiananmen Square (1991). Some are set
in the United States, but many are set in China. His
memoirs have been published in Chinese by Tr a -
ditional Magazine of Taiwan; an English edition is
forthcoming.
Bibliography
Shan, Te-Hsing. “Redefining Chinese American Liter-
ature from a LOWINUS Perspective: Two Recent
Examples.” In Multilingual America: Transnation-
alism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American
Literature, edited by Werner Sollors, 112–123.
New York: New York University Press, 1998.
Shin, Andrew. “ ‘Forty Percent Is Luck’: An Interview
with C. Y. (Chin Yang) Lee.” MELUS: The Jour-
nal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic
Literature of the United States 29, no. 2 (Summer
2004): 77–104.
Jaime ClelandLee, Don (1959– )
A third-generation Korean American, Lee is the
author of Ye l l o w (2001), a collection of short sto-
ries, and the novel Country of Origin (2004). As the
son of an officer of the U.S. State Department, Lee
spent most of his childhood in Seoul and Tokyo.
He graduated with a degree in English from UCLA
in 1982 and received an M.F.A. from Emerson
College in 1986. Since 1988 he has worked as the
editor of the literary journal Ploughshares. Yellow
has received numerous awards including the Sue
Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American
Academy of Arts and Letters. His stories have also
won an O. Henry Award and a Pushcart Prize.
Ye l l o w is a short-story cycle set in the fictional
town of Rosarita Bay, California. Using a nar-
rative strategy similar to Sherwood Anderson’s
Winesburg, Ohio, Lee creates his place by present-
ing independent but interdependent stories about
characters who deal with being Asian in America
and reflect upon issues such as race, identity, fam-
ily, loyalty, and love. Each of the stories focuses
on diverse issues through prose that is alternately
funny, poignant, or somber. The characters in Lee’s
stories are as complex as the place they live in—a
post-immigration Asian America, where issues of
ethnic identification are complicated by social po-
sition, personal idiosyncrasy, and missed chances.
Lee manages to avoid falling into stereotypical rep-
resentations of Asians in America precisely because
his characters are themselves painfully aware of162 Lee, Don