When East And West Collide

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

When David Henry Hwang was a student at Stanford University, he and fellow residents of the "Asian-American theme dorm" used to refer derisively to any female peer who seemed overly deferential, too traditionally feminine, as "doing a Butterfly." Hwang, for one, had no actual complaint against Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly. In fact, he had never seen or even heard it. But what he had gleaned of the plot -- about a Japanese girl who kills herself for love of a faithless American sailor -- summed up for him many of the stereotypes Westerners imposed on Orientals. He and his ilk, he believed, were expected to be submissive and fawning, often deceitful, and to show scant regard for human lives, especially their own.

Hwang had not always been so sensitive, so ready to take offense. Although his parents were immigrants and he visited relatives in Manila and Taipei, this self-described "Chinese-Filipino-American, born-again-Christian kid from suburban Los Angeles" felt "scarcely more connection than the average white" between Asian life and his own. "I read Pearl Buck in high school and didn't see anything wrong. I still like Charlie Chan movies. The whole thing about being of Chinese descent seemed an interesting detail, as if I had red hair. But not everyone saw it that way." So Hwang embarked on Asian studies in an adolescent search for identity: "I got more and more interested in responding to stereotypes by painting our own portraits." From that political impulse, an artistic career was born.

After dabbling in student journalism and instrumental music, but never acting, Hwang conceived the notion that he was meant to be a playwright. His first work for the stage portrayed a musician asserting his own divinity. What the author remembers most about it is a professor's remark that he plainly knew nothing about creating plays. Undaunted, Hwang succeeded beyond an undergraduate's wildest fantasy with his next try, F.O.B., a reflection on the immigrant experience. Just over a year after the show was staged in his college dorm, it was performed at New York City's pre-eminent off-Broadway showcase, Joseph Papp's Public Theater. That 1980 triumph and the six modestly successful plays that followed led to foundation grants, movie and TV script deals and enough theater productions to enable Hwang to shuttle between New York City and Los Angeles while supporting himself entirely by writing.

Still, the productions were mostly brief and small-scale, the livelihood far from lavish. "The least hint of the starving-artist routine," he recalls, "did not behoove my immigrant legacy of belief in education and upward mobility." In 1983, when he was 26, Hwang suffered the sort of crisis of conscience that comes to many people whose success was quick and easy. "I lost belief in my subject matter -- I dismissed it as 'Orientalia for the intelligentsia' -- and virtually stopped writing for two years. I thought seriously about going to law school." After the anxiety passed, Hwang tried to broaden his horizons in Rich Relations, his first play not about Asians. To his disappointment but not surprise, critics took him to task. "There is in this country," he says, "a misguided belief that women should write about women, blacks about blacks, the Chinese about the Chinese, and so on. White males can write about anybody."

Then, at a fateful dinner party just after Rich Relations closed in 1986, Hwang heard the story of Bernard Boursicot, a French diplomat who for nearly two decades carried on an affair with a male Chinese spy he professed to believe was a woman. Boursicot even claimed to have thought he had fathered a child by his "mistress," and when confronted in court with evidence of his partner's true gender, refused to accept it. "I knew right away that this was for me," Hwang said. Where others saw in Boursicot's story one of the odd corners of human life, Hwang perceived in it -- or reinvented it to be -- a reflection of decades of megatrends, from the French fiasco in Viet Nam and the waning of imperialism to '60s Maoism in both China and the West, from feminism to male chauvinist backlash. "What interested me most from the start," he recalls, "was the idea of the perfect woman. A real woman can only be herself, but a man, because he is presenting an idealization, can aspire to the idea of the perfect woman. I never had the least doubt that a man could play a woman convincingly on the stage."

Having found an idea for a play with which he felt completely attunded -- "I also knew it would not hurt in commercial or career terms to be able to create a great part for a white male" -- Hwang struggled to find a structure that would keep his audience at a comfortable distance from the sexually threatening story line. One day, as he was driving past a Los Angeles record store, he recalled the opera whose title he and his friends so scornfully invoked in college. "I hit on the idea of deconstructing Madama Butterfly, and popped in on impulse. As soon as I looked at the libretto, I knew it would be fine." He finished a draft in six weeks, in Los Angeles and then in France, where he had gone to mark his first wedding anniversary.

M. Butterfly reached Broadway in March 1988, where it won the Tony Award as best play of the season, and has grossed $17 million so far. The show has also been mounted in London, where Anthony Hopkins is playing the character based on Boursicot, and in Buenos Aires and Hamburg. Remarkably for a nonmusical, it has been booked for major productions in Paris, Brussels, Oslo, Copenhagen, Rome, Madrid, Tokyo, Tel Aviv, Sydney, Auckland, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, San Juan and New Delhi. This makes Hwang the first U.S. playwright to become an international phenomenon in a generation, since the heyday of Edward Albee. Dozens of film companies have bid for the rights. Says Hwang: "I guess the play is the thinking person's Fatal Attraction, a reflection of the fear between men and women and a kind of intellectual striptease. It's also about the West's fear of how its relationship with the East is changing. Sophisticated American whites realize their group is in the process of changing from an outright majority to just a plurality in the U.S., and are beginning to be ready to hear what the rest of us think."

Success exacted its most customary price. Hwang's wife Ophelia stayed back in Los Angeles through most of the months of rehearsals and tryouts, and the fledgling marriage broke up soon after. Ever since, Hwang has lived a luxurious if somewhat work-obsessed life in Manhattan, in a rented midtown apartment with spectacular wraparound views. The place came furnished -- not even the throw pillows are his -- but he vows to decorate in style a newly purchased Manhattan triplex to which he will move in October. He rarely cooks or eats at home; instead he deftly table-hops at fashionable restaurants and dates "now and then." His "vice, if I have any," is clothing from Issey Miyake and other Asian designers.

Hwang is keenly aware of the F. Scott Fitzgerald dictum that American lives have no second acts, that youthful success leads to mid-life burnout and embitterment. A few months after M. Butterfly opened, he and avant-garde composer Philip Glass mounted 1000 Airplanes on the Roof, a multimedia oddity that proved too abstruse for the masses yet too tabloid for intellectuals; it centers on an apparent close encounter with aliens from space. In multiple productions it showed scant commercial potential. In addition to the screenplay for M. Butterfly, which Hwang will write himself, he is working on three other films: a TV movie for PBS, which he will also direct, about a love affair between an FBI agent and the daughter of a man he hounded to death; "a Victorian rock musical about Oscar Wilde"; and a semiadventure set in Tibet. For the stage, he and Glass hope to adapt Andre Malraux's novel of revolutionary China in the 1920s, Man's Fate, and Hwang is also writing what he opaquely terms a "multicultural farce."

The richest literary material available to Hwang may be his own family. His mother's forebears moved from China to the Philippines in the 19th century and founded a trading company that at one point owned the national franchises for Coca-Cola and General Motors. "Basically," he says, "they were plutocrats and oppressors. The whole history of Chinese merchants in Southeast Asia is ambiguous. They provide prosperity but also isolate themselves and take profit from the local population." His mother grew up in a walled family compound until the Japanese commandeered it during World War II. Then the clan moved into a "haunted house" in Manila. Legend had it that someone from each family who lived there would die in the place. "No one did in our family, which was attributed by my relatives to their fundamentalist Christianity. My mother's grandmother was a sort of exorcist, casting out demons. To say that 'so-and-so was dead until we prayed for him and he came back to life' was perfectly ordinary dinner-table conversation."

While Hwang's mother's family refused to do business with the Japanese, he says, "My father's father was something of a collaborator." Later on, in Taiwan, that grandfather went to jail in a financial scandal. Hwang's own father decided as a boy to leave China; as a younger son, he foresaw few opportunities, and as a believer in technology and progress, he was at odds with a traditional culture. After writing to Harvard and Yale for applications and receiving no reply, he wound up at Linfield College in Oregon. "When I was little," Hwang recalls, "my father literally owned a Chinese laundry."

In 1974 the elder Hwang, by then a C.P.A., launched Far East National Bank, which specialized in loans to Asian immigrants and which now has four branches in California. Two years after the bank opened, he was kidnaped for ransom, then released within a few hours after the money was taken. Says the son: "I was in college at the time and did not hear about it until the crisis was over. The case was never solved, and some people have suggested that my father staged the episode as a publicity stunt. My father may be a little weird, but he's not a criminal." More recently, the bank has been at the center of a political controversy: Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley accepted $18,000 as a consultant last year, then returned the pay after critics suggested it had been a quid pro quo for helping secure the bank a deposit of $2 million in city funds.

As a playwright, Hwang has his critics within the Asian-American community. Those on the left see him as having sold out to white ways. Those on the right criticize him for airing the dirty linen of the Asian subculture. He is particularly at odds with Asians who pride themselves on the reputation of being a "model minority," with low crime and high SAT scores. "To me," he says, "being stereotyped as superhuman is just another kind of dehumanization. What I love about America is its tradition, not so much of blurring distinctions or subsuming cultures as of different cultures coming to + live together side by side. If I have children, and I hope I do, I would be pleased if their mother happens not to be of Chinese descent. The child who is a mixture of different types represents the world's future."

In contrast to most American dramatists, who have excelled at depicting the struggles of home and hearth but not the larger world, Hwang thinks more shrewdly about mankind than about individual men and women. He has the steel- trap analytic grasp of the champion scholastic debater he once was, the lawyer he thought of becoming. The main weakness of his writing is that its purpose often seems more political than literary, more attuned to social issues than to the private struggles of the human heart. The final scene of M. Butterfly, when the agony of one soul finally takes precedence over broad- ranging commentary, is among the most forceful in the history of the American theater. Nothing else he has written comes close to it. If Hwang can again fuse politics and humanity, he has the potential to become the first important dramatist of American public life since Arthur Miller, and maybe the best of them all.