ater Company in San Francisco. Due to her active
participation in theatrical work, Barroga received
several awards: the Maverick Award from the Los
Angeles Women’s Festival, the Joey Award and the
Tino Award from TeleTheatre, among others.
Barroga’s plays mostly explore cultural, racial,
and ethnic issues. For example, Eye of the Coconut,
produced in 1986, examines the issue of assimila-
tion through a Filipino-American family in Mil-
waukee. Dad, who came from the Philippines, and
his three daughters, who like to date white men,
demonstrate that both Asian immigrants and their
children must confront the task of adaptation al-
though they deal with it differently. Produced in
1995, Rita’s Resources also depicts a Filipino im-
migrant family who pursues the American dream.
Set in the 1970s, the play especially represents the
materialistic American dream harbored by Filipino
immigrants through symbolic images of the Statue
of Liberty, the car, and Big Bird. These objects are
also sharply contrasted with the reality of the life of
a seamstress, Rita. Although America appears to be
a place of material success, this land for Rita signi-
fies labor, poverty, and anxiety.
Barroga’s other important play, Walls, pre-
miered in 1989 and was included in Roberta Uno’s
Unbroken Thread: An Anthology of Plays by Asian
American Women in 1993. In this play, Barroga
examines national and racial identity. Although
Maya Lin’s design for the Vietnam War Memorial
won the national contest, the war veterans resist
the project because they think the design does not
represent their patriotic ideas. While the play re-
volves around the conflict over the building of the
memorial, it raises questions about race, ethnicity,
and nationalism. In 1992, Talk-Story premiered and
was later anthologized in But Still, Like Air, I’ll Rise:
New Asian American Plays edited by Velina Hasu
Houston in 1997. The play examines Filipino im-
migrant history from a second-generation Filipina
American’s viewpoint. While recording the history
of her father’s and his colleagues’ sufferings in the
United States, Dee, a copywriter for a newspaper
company, discovers her Filipino identity. The racial
discrimination that Dee’s father has experienced is
juxtaposed with the racial prejudices of the present
day faced by Dee. Ultimately, an acknowledgment
and articulation of Filipino-American history em-
power Dee to resist racism in her society.
Barroga’s plays chiefly address the struggles of
Filipino Americans, problems of assimilation, lin-
gering racial prejudices in American society, and
the national identity of America in which diverse
races and cultures coexist.Bibliography
Barroga, Jeannie. Walls. In Unbroken Thread: An An-
thology of Plays by Asian American Women, edited
by Roberta Uno, 201–60 Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1993.
———. Talk-Story. In But Still, Like Air, I’ll Rise:
New Asian American Plays, edited by Velina Hasu
Houston, 1–47 Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1997.
Lee, Josephine. Performing Asian America: Race and
Ethnicity on the Contemporary Stage. Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1997.
Hyunjoo KiBlu’s Hanging Lois-Ann Yamanaka (1997)
LOIS-ANN YAMANAKA’s second novel, Blu’s Hang-
ing, juxtaposes the beautiful, Edenic landscape of
Hawaii against the portrait of a traumatized, de-
teriorated Japanese-American family. The novel
introduces readers to the voice of Ivah Ogata, the
13-year-old female narrator and the eldest of the
three Ogata children. Immediately, Ivah tells us
about the recent death of her mother (Eleanor), the
family’s poverty, and her father Poppy’s inability to
properly care for her eight-year-old brother (Blu),
and her five-year-old sister (Maisie). The mother’s
death is a catalyst that plunges an already hurting
family into deeper sadness: Poppy longs to die so
that he might join his dead wife; Blu compulsively
eats to fill the gap left by his mother’s death; Maisie
stops talking and frequently wets her pants; and
Ivah is forced to become a surrogate mother to her
siblings. As a bildungsroman, the novel hinges on
Ivah’s maturity; she must grow up quickly, care for
her family, uncover family secrets, save her brother24 Blu’s Hanging