I've had the honor to serve as the dramaturg on two of the three productions comprising the "Summer of David Henry Hwang," the other being Silk Road Theatre Project's production of
Yellow Face. As a high school and college student, my discovery of Hwang's plays led to another, more personal discovery of my own ethnic background. Being half-Filipino, I had never considered myself to have had what some may call a "typical" Asian American upbringing, and the playwright's description of having undergone an "isolationist/nationalist" phase, in which you reclaim your cultural heritage and identity, fueled my own.
Needless to say, Hwang's work has been pretty important to me.
Having gone through the process of working on
Yellow Face, re-reading
Family Devotions was an odd experience for me. The newer play is an excoriation of identity politics and the multicultural movement. It undermines the notion of an inborn, essential cultural or ethnic identity. Marcus, the white fraud masquerading as an Asian, says to DHH, "David, are you familiar with the Chinese concept of 'face?' Basically, it says that the face we choose to show the world--reveals who we really are." This concept contrasts with the previously held assertion that Asian Americans needed to rally around an agreed-upon racial identity in order to stake a place in America. Marcus's notion actually aligns well with a Japanese saying (which I admit to have gotten from watching
Mad Men): "A man is whatever room he's in."
How strange it was, then, to revisit the now thirty year-old
Family Devotions, in which Di-gou, the uncle from the PRC, says to young Chinese American Chester,
"There are faces back further than you can see. Faces long before the white missionaries arrived in China. Here. [He holds CHESTER's violin so that its back is facing CHESTER, and uses it as a mirror.] Look here. At your face. Study your face and you will see--the shape of your face is the shape of faces back many generations--across an ocean, in another soil. You must become one with your family before you can hope to live away from it. [...] The stories written on your face are the ones you must believe."
Here is a much younger David Henry Hwang, telling me--reminding me--to take heed of what has come before me, that where I come from matters, even if I have to do some work figuring out where I came from. That those things define who I am. This is the very idea that modern day Hwang now dismisses. But is it any less valid? I don't think so. Family Devotions may be the product of the bygone multicultural era, but that doesn't means its insights are moot. Can I be who- and whatever I want to be? Sure. But can where I come from and the color of my skin also inform that? Also sure. This is America, dammit.
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