distaste for rigid, inflexible views about race: He
deplores Western assumptions about its cultural
superiority over the “Orient.”
Hwang is a second-generation Chinese Ameri-
can. His father, Henry Hwang, came to America
from Shanghai in 1940; his mother, a daughter of
well-off parents who had lived in China and the
Philippines, was sent to the University of South
Carolina to study the piano. Henry Hwang, a
dedicated businessman, established and became
the first president of the East National Bank based
in Los Angeles. Living in the affluent Los Angeles
suburb of San Gabriel, the Hwang family spoke
English and, since David’s maternal grandparents
had converted to Christianity, disregarded Chinese
feast days.
While attending Stanford University as an Eng-
lish major, David Hwang became interested in
playwriting. Immersed in American capitalism,
however, Henry Hwang was very skeptical about
his son’s professional playwrighting ambitions
until he was moved to tears by a performance of
FOB. David Hwang married the Chinese actress
Ophelia Chong in Toronto in 1984, but they were
divorced in 1989. Hwang married his current wife,
Kathryn Layng, in 1993.
Hwang developed a particular concern for his
Chinese roots at Stanford University, an interest
that developed in tandem with his interest in nat-
uralistic and nonnaturalistic drama, particularly
that of Harold Pinter and Sam Shepherd. Hwang’s
plays betray his interest in a wide, catholic range of
dramatic genres. His plays incorporate elements of
naturalism and realism (he has adapted a version
of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt), quasi-Brechtian agit-prop
(one play-within-the-play in M. Butterfly shows
Maoists staging a Party-approved, didactic play
about the re-education of the bourgeoisie), and
Chinese opera (Lone, a character in The Dance and
the Railroad, is a frustrated opera performer).
Hwang’s public reputation was established by
the time of the award-winning run of his first play,
FOB, at New York’s Public Theater. FOB demon-
strates a major theme in Hwang’s dramatic corpus:
the insistence that Asians in America do not nec-
essarily share values of culture and identity. This
disparity of experience is evident in the hostility
shown to a “fresh off the boat” Chinese, Dale, by
an American-born Asian, Steve. Hwang’s second
play, The Dance and the Railroad, was first pro-
duced in 1981 at the New Federal Theatre in New
York City. John Lone played the 20-year-old Lone;
Tzi Ma played his naïve, 18-year-old friend, Ma.
These are the only characters in the one-act, five-
scene play set in 1867 as the Chinese immigrants
are working on American railroads. Ma is taught
some harsh lessons by Lone: His insouciant belief
that he could gain instant expertise in Chinese
opera is quashed, as is his pie-in-the-sky belief that
working in America will bring unlimited prosper-
ity. After uproarious comedy (Ma must pretend to
be a duck and then a locust) and upbeat peaks of
excitement, the play ends on a downbeat note, as
Ma realizes that he must work within the realities
of American, immigrant-exploiting capitalism. He
and his fellow workers can negotiate with their
bosses, but no Chinaman will get rich as a laborer
in this ungrateful foreign land. In the drama of his
unremarkable life, Ma comes to terms with being
a minor player, not a Gwan Gung-like figure of
heroic importance. Another play from 1981, FAM-
I LY DEVOTIONS, demonstrates Hwang’s discomfort
with religious fanaticism. The play satirizes “born-
again” Christianity with its hyperbolic depiction
of two crazed, China-born sisters who set up a
bizarre Californian clan. The play is a comedy of
farce and misunderstanding: The sisters’ uncle,
an atheistic communist from China, cannot com-
prehend their way of living. Family ties and racial
links cannot in themselves provide any common
ground for these dysfunctional, mutually uncom-
prehending Asians.
Hwang kept busy during the 1980s, producing
more full-length plays as well as shorter plays such
as the two one-act works, The House of Sleeping
Beauties and The Sound of a Voice. These two plays,
performed together in one entertainment entitled
Sound and Beauty, were a departure for Hwang in
that the plays are set in Japan and do not feature
Chinese Americans. Hwang’s plays from this pe-
riod, including Rich Relations and As the Crow Flies
(both 1986), were performed to moderate com-
mercial success in mid-sized theaters. M. Butterfly
(1988) was a massive breakthrough for Hwang; heHwang, David Henry 119