Hunted by the Triad, which fears her husband’s
testimony, she finds safety with a former suitor,
who is now a successful entrepreneur.
Qiu’s third book, When Red Is Black (2004),
revolves around the murder of Yin Lige, a col-
lege teacher and author of the novel Death of a
Chinese Professor. Yin wrote about her love af-
fair with renowned professor Yang Bing in the
cadre school during the Cultural Revolution. Yin
also edits Yang’s poetry translation and keeps the
manuscript of Yang’s novel in English, from which
part of her novel is borrowed. The murder is com-
mitted purely out of greed by Yang’s poor grand-
nephew from the countryside, who wants to seek
his fortune in the royalties of Yang’s works.
Yan YingQueen’s Garden, The
Brenda Wong Aoki (1992)
The Queen’s Garden, a one-woman play, is a love
story and a coming-of-age tale centered on a char-
acter named Brenda Jean, a girl of mixed Japa-
nese, Chinese, Mexican, and Scottish descent. The
play opens with the narrator, an older version of
Brenda Jean, recalling her childhood on Los An-
geles’s Westside. These reflections are interspersed
with scenes from her adolescence and early adult
years, as the narrator assumes various personas
and voices in order to present the audience with
glimpses of key moments in Brenda Jean’s life: her
first encounter with the neighborhood matriarch
Aunti Mari, her blossoming romance with Aunti
Mari’s handsome surfer son, and her eventual
escape from the poverty and crime of the inner
city. Yet, although Brenda Jean is able to leave the
Westside to attend college, her past continues to
haunt her, and she is thrust back into the escalat-
ing gang violence that has enveloped the lives of
her childhood sweetheart, Kali, and other friends
from her past.
Partly autobiographical, The Queen’s Garden
draws on BRENDA WONG AOKI’s early life and later
experiences as a community organizer and teacher
in Los Angeles and San Francisco. According to
the artistic statement that introduces the pub-
lished version of the play in Contemporary Plays
by Women of Color (1996), The Queen’s Garden
was written in response to the Los Angeles riots of
1992 in an effort to “humanize” the experience of
life in areas like South Central. By presenting her
audience with sympathetic portraits of individuals
whose lives might otherwise be understood only
in terms of their illegal behavior, Aoki challenges
pervasive views about the moral degeneracy of
inner-city youth while drawing attention to the
rich cultural diversity of Los Angeles. Aunti Mari’s
thriving rose garden in the poverty-stricken West-
side suggests that beauty and human decency en-
dure even under adverse conditions.
In October 1992, The Queen’s Garden pre-
miered at the Climate Theatre in San Francisco
under the direction of Jael Weisman with musi-
cal accompaniment by Mark Izu. It has since been
performed in theaters in Honolulu; San Diego;
Washington, D.C.; Santa Monica; and New York
City; and at universities across the country. In
1996 The Queen’s Garden was included in the an-
thology Contemporary Plays by Women of Color. In
1999 a recorded version of the play was released
by Asian Improv Records as a spoken-word album
with music. Aoki’s performance of the play gar-
nered four Dramalogue awards and a San Diego
Critics Circle Award. The recorded version went
on to receive an Indie award for best spoken word
recording in 1999.
Rachel Ihara248 Queen’s Garden, The