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."