student; Gallimard is berated aggressively by ex-
pense-cheating French agents; and there is a scene
set in the sumptuous interior of the Paris Opera.
Location work is important in the film because of
its detailed construction of China during the Cul-
tural Revolution. In the film, but not in the stage
play, we see the aggression of Mao’s Red Guards;
a bonfire that destroys supposedly decadent rem-
nants of bourgeois, pre-Socialist China; the hard-
ships of the Communist labor site endured by
Song; and the regime’s housing of many families
in living quarters once enjoyed by Song alone. The
film, then, stresses the pressures faced by Song and
indicates more acutely the material dangers that
force him to gull Gallimard. Puccini’s heroine was
a mere geisha, but Hwang’s Song is motivated by
very real dangers, as well as a righteous insight into
the assumptions and prejudices that fire Western
men’s libidos. In the film, Gallimard commits sui-
cide, not alone but in front of hundreds of fellow
French prisoners, thus heightening the elaborate-
ness of the theatrical ritual that Gallimard acts out.
For Puccini, such a ritual seemed appropriate for
a Japanese geisha; in Hwang’s and Cronenberg’s
visions, however, a ritualized demise is appropri-
ate for Rene Gallimard, a proponent of unseemly
Western notions of superiority and political and
sexual dominance over the so-called Orient.
Bibliography
De Lauretis, Teresa. “Popular Culture, Public and
Private Fantasies: Femininity and Fetishism in
David Cronenberg’s M. Butterfly.” Signs 24 (1999):
303–334.
Kondo, Dorinne. About Face: Performing Race in
Fashion and Theater. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Pao, Angela. “M. Butterfly by David Henry Hwang.”
In A Resource Guide to Asian American Litrature,
edited by Stephen H. Sumida and Sau-ling Cyn-
thia Wong, 200–208. New York: Modern Language
Association of America, 2001.
Wiegmann, Mira. The Staging and Transformation
of Gender Archetypes in A Midsummer Night’s
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N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 2003.
Kevin De OrnellasMcCunn, Ruthanne Lum (1947– )
Author and teacher Ruthanne Lum McCunn,
known as Roxy Drysdayle when she was growing
up, was born in San Francisco, across the street
from the Chinatown public library. Born to a Chi-
nese mother and a Scottish-American father and
having lived in both Hong Kong and the United
States, McCunn’s personal identity has been intri-
cately connected with the two cultures, a connec-
tion that is reflected in her writing.
McCunn’s mother came to San Francisco from
Hong Kong to attend the 1939–40 World’s Fair
and soon found herself unable to leave due to the
breakout of World War II. She and McCunn’s fa-
ther, a merchant marine, met and married during
the war. When McCunn was one year old, her fam-
ily decided to move to Hong Kong. For the next
five years, McCunn’s father was away at sea, while
McCunn lived in a Chinese neighborhood with
her mother among her mother’s extended family.
McCunn’s first language was Cantonese, and she
attended Chinese school and played with neigh-
borhood children, never feeling that she was not
Chinese, even though she did not look like the
other children. Those years of living in the Chinese
neighborhood later became the source of inspira-
tion for her writing. Her novel The MOON PEARL, is
based on the history of the self-combers movement
in southern China, in which women combed their
own hair up instead of waiting for marraige, lived
in communities of women, and supported them-
selves by working in the silk industry. McCunn
acknowledges the “many spinsters, concubines,
widows, and wives” who used to visit her home in
Hong Kong when she was young, and who allowed
her to listen as they told their stories.
McCunn had her first painful confrontation
with her bicultural identity at the age of six. Her
father returned home from sea, but McCunn did
not recognize him. As a result, her father decided
that it was time for her to attend British school.
Even though she now looked like her classmates,
she did not speak their language. Her classmates
at the British school taunted her, calling her a
“Ching Chong Chinaman.” In the meantime, the
children in her neighborhood had also stopped
playing with her, for she was now a “white devilMcCunn, Ruthanne Lum 187