David Henry Hwang's Chinglish

[pylduck.livejournal.com]

David Henry Hwang's recent play Chinglish (Theatre Communications Group, 2012) follows in the footsteps of many of his early plays that examine contrasts between Western and Chinese worldviews.



The context of Chinglish is contemporary China and involves a white American businessman, Daniel Cavanaugh, in the sign-making business who tries to drum up business with the local government with the consulting help of a British expatriate who has in many ways "gone native." Daniel meets with a local official, Minister Cai Guoliang, and his assistant Xi Yan, about brokering a deal to produce bilingual signs. As you might be able to guess from this set up, the play is very much about exploring translation and cross-cultural communication. The play is a comedy, playing up the humorous side of mistranslation and misinterpretation (rather than the more tragic side such as in Hwang's earlier M. Butterfly). As with his earlier plays, too, Hwang brings to Chinglish a very insightful and cheeky exploration of how sexual politics intertwine with racial politics. There's a fair amount of good old fashioned cultural misunderstanding and language issues as well as outright deception by some characters, all of which raise questions about our (American) willingness to perceive Chinese in certain ways.

I would be very interested to see this play performed because much of the dialogue is in Chinese, and everything (according to the published stage directions) is captioned in both English and Chinese. The ideal audience for this play would be someone who is fluent in both languages as well as in the particular critical perspective of an Asian American who sees the humor in both Chinese cultural self-presentation as well as American/Western perceptions of Chinese people. In many ways, I love this very specific perspective but also feel like it is probably not really understood by most audiences (something I felt particularly to be true of Hwang's previous play, Yellowface, especially in the context of watching a performance in Minneapolis, MN, with a predominantly white, Midwestern audience).