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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.