Filipino woman being interviewed as a potential
mail-order bride; a Japanese child in Hiroshima,
running scared as the bombs drop. In the process,
she finds herself as a sansei Japanese American,
able to address her own past and to identify with
members of other contemporary Asian-American
communities.
In Stories Waiting to Be Told, Narita performs
plural Asian-American identities—as Japanese,
Chinese, Korean, and Cambodian women. In-
cluded among the issues addressed by these de-
pictions of the immigrant and postimmigrant
generations of Asian women living in America
is the trauma of internment camps on Japanese
Americans. In this play, Narita plays a daughter
who catches a glimpse of her mother’s psychic
wounds from the camp. The daughter does not
see a victim but a woman of great strength. The
play also portrays a lesbian coming to terms with
her sexual and ethnic identity as well as with the
conflicting demands made by her community.
In Celebrate Me Home, Narita exposes racism
perpetuated in thoughtless media images and in
cultural stereotypes. This one-woman show uses
comedy to address the serious issue of how to de-
velop self-worth and pride in one’s identity amid
the limiting stereotypes and limited representation
of Asian women (less than 1 percent) in American
media and other cultural productions.
Narita takes on the media again in Walk the
Mountain (directed by her daughter Darling Nar-
ita), focusing on the effects of the Vietnam War on
women in Vietnam and Cambodia. In this play,
Narita’s broad project is clearly to humanize “the
faceless enemy” of the United States during the
war and to reveal the effects of the misinformation
provided to the public by the U.S. media and Hol-
lywood. Narita’s performances are usually minimal
productions, but Walk the Mountain shows slides
of burned victims of napalm, the bombing of vil-
lages, sobering statistics, and provocative quotes.
The production of With Darkness Behind Us,
Daylight Has Come was originally funded by the
California Civil Liberties Public Education Pro-
gram (CCLPEP) and the Los Angeles Cultural
Affairs Department to broaden awareness of the
history of Japanese Americans before, during, and
in the wake of World War II. Again Narita uses
actual archival footage of the internment camp at
Heart Mountain and photographs of the camp and
of families in it as the backdrop to this play about
the effects of internment on three generations of
Japanese-American women.
Beverley CurranNative Speaker Chang-rae Lee (1995)
For Henry Park, the Korean-American protago-
nist of CHANG-RAE LEE’s Native Speaker, identity is
a central concern. His estranged wife, Lelia, labels
him as a “surreptitious, B+ student of life,... ille-
gal alien, emotional alien,” but Henry resists clear
identification, claiming that he “could be anyone,
perhaps several anyones at once.” This protean
sense of self serves him well in his job of private
investigator, in which he invents detailed personae
for himself as he uncovers the personalities and
motivations of his subjects. Assigned to report on
a city councilman and mayoral candidate, John
Kwang, who shares the same ethnic background,
Henry confronts issues of identity through the lens
of language in what he calls the second Babel, New
York City.
Henry and his family come to New York when
he is an infant. His father starts a citywide chain
of grocery stores, becoming successful enough to
leave Queens for the suburbs, but he still consid-
ers his job shameful because in Korea he had been
trained as an industrial engineer. Henry’s mother
dies when he is 10 and she is replaced by a silent,
anonymous Korean woman called Ahjuhma, or
“aunt.” As the narrative moves the Park family into
the next generation, Henry marries Lelia, a WASPy
speech therapist whom Henry’s father loves but
Ahjuhma cannot tolerate, and the two of them have
a son, Mitt, who dies in an accident on his seventh
birthday. The death causes tension between Henry
and Lelia; she cannot hide her emotions, while he
is too good at concealing his.
Henry is also on probation at work, paradoxi-
cally for becoming too personally involved on his
last assignment: to infiltrate the political office
of John Kwang. Kwang asks Henry to coordinateNative Speaker 211