SOURCE: Moy, James S. “David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly and Philip Kan Gotanda's Yankee Dawg You Die: Repositioning Chinese American Marginality on the American Stage.” Theater Journal 42, no. 1 (March 1990): 48-56.

[In the following essay, Moy compares representations of Asian characters in M. Butterfly to those in Yankee Dawg You Die, by Philip Kan Gotanda, arguing that while both playwrights attack stereotypical Anglo-American representations of Asians, their plays ultimately reinforce these stereotypes.]

One thinks one is tracing the outline of the thing's nature over and over again, and one is merely tracing around the frame through which we look at it. … A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.

—Wittgenstein

The point of intersection of the popular unconscious and the self-conscious, seriously intended work of art has always been problematic. The extent to which socially conscious drama, for example, can emerge from the morass of the bourgeois perception of the world is questionable at best.¹ For over a hundred years popular representations of Asian populations in America have remained at a level perhaps best described as stereotypical. Employing various strategies, Anglo-American playwrights have portrayed the Chinese in America as collections of fetishized parts and as exotics. In the nineteenth century, for example, Bret Harte and Mark Twain, both serious writers, in seeking to provide sympathetic views of the Chinese, could offer, finally, little more than a stereotypical character consisting of fragments that articulated the most obvious aspects of difference.² Some fifty years later, Eugene O'Neill, often regarded as the father of American playwriting, sought to provide a positive image of “Oriental wisdom” in contrast to a corrupt western commercialism but could do little more than offer a tourist view of an exotic “heathen” Orientalist China.³

Not until the new cultural awareness of the 1960s did this situation change as playwrights made conscious attempts to dispel stereotypes. As Asian American playwrights emerged, the earlier comic or exotic treatments offered by whites were replaced by Asian self-representations. Rarely popular with the dominant-culture audiences, some of these plays have provided incisive examinations of what it is to be Chinese or Asian in a familiar yet alien land. Notable among these are Frank Chin's The Chickencoop Chinaman (1972), the first Chinese American offering on a major New York stage; Philip Kan Gotanda's The Wash; David Henry Hwang's FOB (1979), The Dance and the Railroad (1981), Family Devotions (1981), and M. Butterfly (1988); and Benny Yee and Nobuko Miyamoto's Chop Suey (1980), a musical comedy that invited its audiences to look beyond the surface realities of colorful Chinatown.

Significantly, Hwang's M. Butterfly, which is currently enjoying Broadway and worldwide success, won the Tony award for best American play of 1988.⁴ In addition, 1988 saw successful runs of Philip Kan Gotanda's Yankee Dawg You Die in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago, with an Off Broadway production in New York during 1989.⁵ Both written by Asian Americans, these plays feature Chinese characters as major figures and have received generally favorable press in America.

Against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, China's Cultural Revolution, and the events of May 1968, M. Butterfly enacts the true-life tale of French diplomat Bernard Bouriscot's twenty-year affair with a Beijing Opera performer. The liaison results in the birth of a child and a trial for espionage. Through the character René Gallimard, Hwang stages Bouriscot's story. As Gallimard's narrative unfolds, it is revealed that his lover was not only a spy but a man. Accordingly, the audience is left to ponder how a sophisticated western diplomat could fall victim to so amusing a case of gender confusion. Responding to this question, Hwang uses Puccini's Madama Butterfly as a backdrop for the diplomat's first encounter with his “mistress,” which takes place at a performance of scenes from the Puccini opera in the German ambassador's residence in Beijing. Gallimard compliments the performance: “You were utterly convincing. It's the first time … I've seen the beauty of the story.”⁶ In response, Song Liling, soon to become his lover, assails the silliness of the western stereotypes:

It's one of your favorite fantasies, isn't it? The submissive Oriental woman and the cruel white man … Consider it this way: what would you say if a blond homecoming queen fell in love with a short Japanese businessman? He treats her cruelly, then goes home for three years, during which time she prays to his picture and turns down marriage from a young Kennedy. Then, when she learns he has remarried, she kills herself. Now, I believe you would consider this girl to be a deranged idiot, correct? But because it's an Oriental who kills herself for a Westerner—ah!—you find it beautiful.⁷

Despite this harangue, Gallimard embarks on entrapping his “butterfly.” The audience looks on as he manipulates the emotions of Song Liling, all the while unaware that he himself has fallen into a trap of his own delusions regarding their relationship: “I stopped going to the opera, I didn't phone or write her … and, as I wickedly refused to do so, I felt for the first time that rush of power—the absolute power of a man.”⁸ As Gallimard feels the “power of a man,” Song explains: “All he wants is for her to submit. Once a woman submits, a man is always ready to become ‘generous,’. … Now, if I can just present him with a baby. A Chinese baby with blond hair—he'll be mine for life!”⁹

Gallimard's conquest of his butterfly complete, he applies his newly found wisdom to the conduct of international policy: “If the Americans demonstrate the will to win, the Vietnamese will welcome them into a mutually beneficial union. … Orientals will always submit to a greater force.”¹⁰ This, of course, was the mistake of the Vietnam War:

And somehow the American war went wrong. … Four hundred thousand dollars were being spent for every Viet Cong killed; so General Westmoreland's remark that the Oriental does not value life the way Americans do was oddly accurate. Why weren't the Vietnamese people giving in? Why were they content to die and die and die again?¹¹

As he miscalculated the Vietnamese will to resist, so Gallimard fell hopelessly in love with a Song Liling created in his own imagination. When Song exposes the deception, Gallimard dismisses him, “You, you're as real as hamburger. Now get out! I have a date with my Butterfly.” Gallimard explains that he is “a man who loved a woman created by a man. Everything else—simply falls short. … Tonight, I've finally learned to tell fantasy from reality. And, knowing the difference, I choose fantasy.”¹² Gallimard's fantasy merged the Orient into one indistinguishable mass, eliminating the differences among Chinese, Vietnamese, and Japanese. It is a vision of

… slender women in chong sams and kimonos who die for the love of unworthy foreign devils. Who are born and raised to be the perfect women. Who take whatever punishment we give them, and bounce back, strengthened by love, unconditionally. It is a vision that has become my life.¹³

As Gallimard's unworthy life interpenetrates that of his imaginary lover, he realizes that the only course open to him is the same as that chosen by Puccini's Cho Cho San, “Death with honor is better than life … with dishonor.” As the diplomat commits suicide, Song, making explicit an ironic role reversal, declares Gallimard his “butterfly” as the lights fade to black.¹⁴ Although there is a curious conflation of “imperialism, racism, and sexism,”¹⁵ Hwang's indictment of the West is clear. If it has not been made clear through the development of Gallimard's character, then Song's words make explicit Hwang's attack:

The West has a sort of international rape mentality. … The West thinks of itself as masculine—big guns, big industry, big money—so the East is feminine—weak, delicate, poor … but good at art, and full of inscrutable wisdom—the feminine mystique. … Her mouth says no, but her eyes say yes. The West believes the East, deep down, wants to be dominated—because a woman can't think for herself.¹⁶

Resonances of Puccini's Madama Butterfly likewise permeate Philip Kan Gotanda's Yankee Dawg You Die. Where Hwang's M. Butterfly cinematically spans some twenty years, the Gotanda piece examines the first year in the evolving relationship between a young aspiring Japanese actor, Bradley Yamashita, and an older, more established “Chinese” actor. It uses a stereotypical cinema portrayal of a Japanese soldier to represent the prevailing perception of Asians in the popular consciousness. The opening scene of Yankee Dawg You Die, which attacks this standard view of the Japanese, sets the tone for the rest of the play. The lead character, Vincent Chang, is a “Chinese” actor, later revealed to be a Japanese man who had changed his name to find work after World War II. In the industry, then, he is a Japanese man pretending to be a Chinese actor to get work portraying Japanese stereotypes.

If M. Butterfly attacks Anglo-American representations of Asians, Yankee Dawg You Die reinforces the attack with a discussion of its impact. For example, Bradley exposes the effects the mediated castration of the Asian male has had on his life while accusing Vincent of perpetuating it:

Vincent … All that self hate … Where does it begin? You and your Charley Chop Suey roles. … you think every time you do one of those demeaning roles, the only thing lost is your dignity … Don't you see that every time you do a portrayal like that millions of people in movie theaters see it. Believe it. Every time you do any old stereotypic role just to pay the bills, you kill the right of some Asian child to be treated as a human being. To walk through the school yard and not be called a “chinaman gook” by some kid who saw the last Rambo film.¹⁷

Gotanda sensitively measures the depth of the Asian-American desire to find role models. In his misplaced identification with Neil Sedaka, a Jewish pop singer with a Japanese-sounding name, Bradley Yamashita mistakes Sedaka for America's first “Japanese American rock'n roll star.”¹⁸ Finally, Gotanda seems to suggest that, having failed to find an adequate model, many Asian Americans have turned to the Japanese movie monster Godzilla as a source of cultural pride and perhaps even identification.¹⁹ Gotanda's piece shifts back and forth between the issue of identifying proper role models on the one hand and the practicalities of employment in the theater/film industry on the other. The desire to show “real” Asians is always suspended in tension with the stereotype of Orientals required in the industry, and the latter usually wins out. Vincent's claim to be a “leading man” is repeatedly undercut by vignettes displaying the mechanics of his stereotypical portrayals. Early on in the play, Bradley complains that the only roles open to Asians are “waiters, viet cong killers, chimpanzees, drug dealers, hookers, sexless houseboys. … They fucking cut off our balls and made us all houseboys on the evening soaps. ‘Get your very own neutered, oriental houseboy!’”²⁰ Thus, this piece seems more overt than M. Butterfly in its attack on the theatrical institutions that work to subjugate the representations of the Orient.

Vincent makes clear the cognizance of his own complicity with theatrical institutions by relating an early episode in the life of Martin Luther King:

They came and took him away. Told him they were going to kill him. He said he never felt more impotent, more like a slave than that night. After that, he realized he had to fight not only the white man on the outside, but the slave inside of him … It is so easy to slip into the ching-chong chinaman.²¹

Central to Yankee Dawg You Die, then, is the issue of how to deal with the force that would seduce Asian Americans into the kind of cultural complicity required to “survive”—the impulse to surrender to the cultural hegemony of Anglo dominance. In response Gotanda offers the contrast between the older Vincent Chang, who has “sold out” by accepting stereotypical roles, and Bradley Yamashita, the aspiring young actor, full of radical rage with demands that Asians be allowed realistic stage presences.

The popularity of both plays with Anglo-American audiences raises the question of whether their acceptance signals, finally, an end to the marginalization of the Chinese or Asians in general. Even a superficial examination of the social dimensions of the texts reveals that this is not the case. A close scrutiny of the playscripts reveals an interesting system of literary subversions with significant impact for the social.

Obviously, both Gotanda's Yankee Dawg You Die and Hwang's M. Butterfly set out to dispel stereotypical perceptions of Asians. While Gotanda makes this aim explicit in his text, Hwang has said that he set out to do a “deconstructivist Madame Butterfly.”²² Toward this end Hwang employed a strategy described in an interview/essay appropriately entitled “Smashing Stereotypes”:

I am interested in cutting through … all the crap about the way people write about characters from the East. I mean, when these people are written about, it's always in this inscrutable poetic fashion. It's so untrue, and kind of irritating. So my tendency is to go to the other extreme and make it so slangy and contemporary that it is jarring.²³

Hwang's hope, then, is to offer a truer view of what it means to be Asian in the space created by the tension between the audience's stereotypical perception and his “slangy and jarring” contemporary reality. Unfortunately, however, the characters he creates more often seem to subvert his stated intention. For example, the specifically Asian technical aspects of Hwang's M. Butterfly, the kurogo, do not serve as characters but rather exist as mere absent presences without voice who silently move stage properties about the acting area. Matters get worse as Asian characters are given voice. Comrade Chan (and the other characters played by the same actor) is perhaps even more stereotypical and cartoonish than the worst of the nineteenth-century stereotypes. Chan, then, serves as a sort of caricature of the stereotype whose “jarring” language alienates while establishing a provisional position for this traditional view of the Orient.

Against this background the character of Song Liling is of paramount significance, because it is in the tension between this role and the stereotype that a new, hoped-for vision of Chinese or Asian identity will emerge. But it is here that Hwang's project falls apart, for here he offers at best another disfigured stereotype. As racial and sexual confusion both dominate one character, Song Liling functions as a vehicle of massive self-doubt. S/he claims to be working as a spy for the state but admits enjoying the life of a transvestite. While s/he stands in for the role of the victimized Chinese character, the claim is made false as Song's manipulation of Gallimard is revealed in the role reversal at the end of the play. Accordingly, s/he finally comes across as little more than a disfigured transvestite version of the infamous Chinese “dragon lady” prostitute stereotype.²⁴ After the proud revelation of manhood to Gallimard, Song covers up with great embarrassment as his/her Armani slacks are tossed offstage. This pattern of subversion is not an articulation of Asian desire; rather, it affirms a nefarious complicity with Anglo-American desire in its representation of otherness, both sexual and racial. Moreover, by setting the action in the neutral space of France, the author deflects any need for consideration of race relations in America. In this anamorphic intersection of race and gender, only obvious questions can be apprehended. As audiences leave the theater, then, racial/sexual identity is not an issue; rather, most are simply incredulous at how for twenty years Gallimard could have confused Song's rectum for a woman's vagina.

Gotanda also uses what could be called “jarring” contemporary language to demythologize the stereotypical portrayals of Asians established in the first scene of Yankee Dawg You Die. A somewhat more mature writer, he successfully contrasts the attitudes of the two actors as they confront the dilemmas of working in an essentially racist industry. Vincent Chang is revealed to be a Japanese man pretending to be Chinese to gain employment, but the clear linkage between racial disguise and economic imperative makes this acceptable. Indeed, it serves to emphasize the handicaps under which Asian American performers must work. Difficulties arise when it becomes evident that Vincent is gay and obviously ashamed of this situation. In light of America's gay/lesbian liberation movement, this amalgamation of race and gender confusion is almost enough to crush the unwitting Chinese/Japanese/closet-gay Vincent Chang into the space of aporia, subverting the most positive aspects of the play before it. Between the cinema stereotype and this disfigured character, little space exists for a new “real” Asian American since it is suggested that Bradley, too, will succumb to Chang's fate. Indeed, before the end of the play the once radical Bradley already has accepted stereotypical roles, had a nose job, and been warned that within thirty-five years he may be just like “Chinese” actor Vincent Chang.²⁵

Clearly most problematic are the stage characters that both Hwang and Gotanda deploy to replace the earlier stereotypical portrayals. Their positions in tension with traditional standard portrayals create the opportunity for a new Asian stage presence. Unfortunately, the figures self-destruct at the very moment of their representation, leaving behind only newly disfigured traces. In David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly and Philip Kan Gotanda's Yankee Dawg You Die the genesis of a new representational strategy has emerged, one in which the words offer a clear indictment of the cultural hegemony of the West while the characters empowered to represent and speak on behalf of the Chinese or Asians are laughable and grossly disfigured. Thus marginalized, desexed, and made faceless, these Asian characters constitute no threat to Anglo-American sensibilities. Instead, they provide a good evening's entertainment and then float as exotic Oriental fetishes articulating Anglo-American desire, now doubly displaced into the new order of stereotypical representations created by Asian-Americans.

Most troubling is the possibility that this rupture in the representation could be strategic and intentional—a way of exploiting a jarringly contemporary Orient in a manner quite common in the fashion industry. In a public forum like the theater, writers ultimately must seek validation in the marketplace, and the market here is clearly Anglo-American.

The popular acceptance of these disfigured Chinese characters despite their Asian-American authorship does not signify an assimilation of the Chinese or Asians into the American mainstream. Rather, it offers a mere repositioning of their marginality and the creation of new “play” figures for the West. It would appear that both writers have fallen into the trap of complicity that Martin Luther King had admonished against, for it seems that while their mouths say no their eyes say yes.²⁶

Notes

1. For a detailed treatment of this, see Donald M. Lowe, History of Bourgeois Perception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).

2. See my “Mark Twain and Bret Harte's Ah Sin: Locating China in the Geography of the American West,” in Frontiers of Asian American Studies: Writing, Research, and Commentary, ed. Gail M. Nomura and Stephen H. Sumida (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1989), 187-94.

3. See my “Eugene O'Neill's Marco Millions: Desiring Marginality and the Dematerialization of the Orient,” published in Chinese, Drama, Central Institute of Drama (Beijing), 1988.

4. M. Butterfly premiered on 10 February 1988 at the National Theatre in Washington, D.C. and opened in New York City on Broadway on 20 March 1988 at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre. All references to the playscript are from the first publication of the piece, which appeared as an insert (with independent internal pagination) between pages 32 and 33 of American Theatre (July/August 1988). Hereafter this playscript will be referred to as M. Butterfly.

5. Philip Kan Gotanda, “Yankee Dawg You Die,” Typescript, provided by the Wisdom Bridge Theatre Company of Chicago, which produced the piece during the fall of 1988. Hereafter referred to as Yankee Dawg You Die.

6. M. Butterfly, 4. The use of Puccini's Madama Butterfly (1904) for a point of departure is intriguing, as the Italian opera was an adaptation of an earlier American play entitled Madame Butterfly (1900) by John L. Long and David Belasco.

7. M. Butterfly, 4.

8. Ibid., 7.

9. Ibid., 12.

10. Ibid., 9-10.

11. Ibid., 13.

12. Ibid., 16.

13. Ibid., 16.

14. Ibid., 16.

15. David Savran, In Their Own Words (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1988), 127.

16. M. Butterfly, 15.

17. Yankee Dawg You Die, 33-35.

18. Ibid., 27.

19. Ibid., 41-44.

20. Ibid., 36.

21. Ibid., 60.

22. David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly (New York: New American Library, 1989), 95.

23. Gerard Raymond, “Smashing Stereotypes,” Theatre Week (11 April 1988): 8. See also David Savran, In Their Own Words, 117-31.

24. For a treatment of this stereotype as it developed in the American cinema, see Renee E. Tajima, “Lotus Blossoms Don't Bleed: Images of Asian Women,” in Making Waves: An Anthology of Writings By and About Asian American Women, ed. Asian Women United of California (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 308-17.

25. Yankee Dawg You Die, 60.

26. It is interesting to note here that in responding to “leftist element[s], which might accuse me of selling out,” Hwang has said “I think the [Chinese American] community by and large is very success oriented and is more likely to embrace one of their own on the basis of having got to Broadway, no matter what the play was—as long as it was not horribly critical of the Chinese-American community.” Gerard Raymond, “Smashing Stereotypes,” 8.