Evolving a Multicultural Tradition

Abstract

I want to go through a sort of personal progression that has taken place in myself and is also reflected in my work. I think I evolved from a place where I had a complete and honest non-awareness of issues of people of color, to the place where I am now-which is continuing to evolve, but is closer to some sort of multicultural model. When I first started writing plays I had no particular desire to write about myself as an Asian American or as a person of color. Perhaps as a result of that the first few plays I wrote, which are either in a drawer of mine or buried someplace, nobody's ever seen. At a certain point I started to awaken to issues of color, in the late '70s when I was an undergraduate in college. Partially this was through the awareness of works by Asian Americans who had come before me. Directly as a result of people like Frank Chin and Maxine Hong Kingston and other non-Asian writers like Ntozake Shange, I became aware of the possibility of opening up this side of myself in my work. When I wrote my first play, F.O.B., to some extent it was an attempt to validate the existence of a previous Asian American literary tradition, through an exploration of two mythological characters: Fa Mu Lan, from Maxine Hong Kingston's book The Woman Warrior, and a character named Kwan Gung, the god of the writers, warriors, and prostitutes from Frank Chin's play Gee, Pop. I thought it was interesting to try to bring these two characters together in Torrance, California, in the same way that Stoppard took Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from Hamlet and made another play out of it, bringing about a certain cross-fertilization. At the same time I became very interested in trying to create a form which would make sense, in terms of this new content. At the time my choice was to create some kind of fusion of Asian and Western theater.