Golden
Child
David Henry Huang
Week 15
段馨君 副教授
國立交通大學
人文社會學系
David Henry Hwang
Asian-American playwright David Henry Hwang
was inspired to write the award-winning play
Golden Child based on his interviews with his
grandmother living in Cebu. Tanghalang
Pilipino is staging this two-act play until
September 7 at the Cultural Center of the
Philippines.
• David Henry Hwang (1957-)
was born in Los Angeles and
grew up in San Gabriel, as
the first generation of a
Chinese American
fundamentalist Christian
family.
• His father, a banker,
immigrated to the US from
Shanghai in the late 1940s,
and his mother, a pianist
and music teacher, although
born in China was reared in
the Philippines.
David Henry Hwang
• One of three siblings, David Henry
Hwang, a star debater and violinist,
attended an elite preparatory academy
(the Harvard School) in North
Hollywood and, on graduation in 1975,
went to Stanford University where he
graduated Phi Beta Kappa in English.
• In 1979, Hwang submitted F.O.B. to the
National Playwright Conference at the
O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, CT,
where the play was staged with
professional actors.
In The Golden Child, set in
the early part of the 20th
century, Hwang would delve
deeper into his family
history to create a portrait
of a traditional Chinese
family on the cusp of jarring
change.
David Henry Hwang
• The following season, the Henry
Street Settlement in New York City
commissioned a new play by David
Henry Hwang for a forthcoming
ethnic heritage series
• The Dance and the Railroad
transferred to the Public Theater
with actors John Lone and Tzi Ma
as two Chinese laborers hired to
build the transcontinental railroad
across the United States in the
mid-nineteenth century.
David Henry Hwang
• Having had four plays produced in three years, Hwang
took a break and traveled to Canada, Europe and Asia
to reassess his newly acquired status as an Asian
American voice in U.S. culture.
• Hwang returned to write Rich Relations, Bondage, Face
Value, and Trying to Find China Town, along with
television, screenplays, and the Tony award-winning M.
Butterfly, produced on Broadway in 1988, based on a
real-life espionage case involving a French diplomat
and a male Chinese agent masquerading as an actress
with the Beijing Opera.
David Henry Hwang
• More recently, David Henry Hwang joined as a
librettist with composer Philip Glass and stage
designer Jerome Sirlin to create a “science fiction
music drama” called 1000 Airplanes on the Roof,
followed by The Voyage, again with composer
Philip Glass, commissioned by the Metropolitan
Opera Company.
• Hwang turned again to his contemplations on
race, gender, and cultural identity in Golden
Child, produced on Broadway in 1998.
Critical Introduction to Golden Child
• Playwright David Henry
Hwang describes his
work as a personal
journey that just
happens to have a
“public dimension”.
• Golden Child combines
these dual facets of the
personal and the public
that characterize
Hwang’s writing.
Directed by Sandra Rockman
January 17 (preview) to
February 9, 2008 Nevada
Theatre, CA.
Critical Introduction to Golden Child
• Hwang’s play had its inception
in an unpublished novel, called
Only Three Generations and
based on tape-recorded
conversations with his maternal
grandmother about the family’s
history in China.
• On several occasions, Hwang
cites Anton Chekhov’s The
Three Sisters. Rather than the
sisters, Hwang’s play features
three wives (polygamy was the
norm of the time in China).
Golden Child went on to
Broadway and Julyana was
nominated for a Tony Award for
the role.
Critical Introduction to Golden Child
• Unlike Tennessee Williams’s The
Glass Menagerie where Tom
Wingfield, the narrator, plays a
younger version of himself in his
family story, the narrator of Golden
Child doubles as his greatgrandfather in scenes from 1918 to
1919.
• The inner play finds the actor
playing Andrew doubling as his
great-grandfather and the actress
playing his wife Elizabeth doubling
as Eling, a Chinese woman in her
early twenties.
Critical Introduction to Golden Child
• The inner play takes place in the
household of Eng Tieng-Bin in China
with his three wives (Eng Siu-Young,
Eng Luan, and Eng Eling) in various
states of conflict within a household
managed by the three women.
• It is not this playwright’s intention to
treat the encroachment of Western
ideals on China as an act that
contaminates or destroys a way of life.
• Instead, Hwang insists that the
exchange of ideas creates
opportunities for personal growth, for
new ways of thinking, and release
from such constraints as foot binding
and ancestor worship that keep
people anchored to the past, mired in
the present, and fearful of the future.
GOLDEN CHILD, by David
Henry Hwang. Produced by
Silk Road Theatre Project.
Opened March 2007 at Pierce
Hall Directed by Stuart Carden.
Critical Introduction to Golden Child
• Golden Child functions as an intercultural
text on several levels.
• In structure, it combines realistic wellmade playwriting with the familiar
dramatic frame of the memory play, thus
creating the outer and the inner worlds
of the play.
• As an intercultural text, Golden Child
blends cultural and theatrical traditions
of East and West in this story of familiar
change.
• In the intermingling of theatrical
traditions of Western writing and Eastern
lifestyle, David Henry Hwang speaks with
a universal voice on issues of freedom
and responsibility common to all
humankind.
Critical Introduction to Golden Child
• Golden Child, according to David
Henry Hwang, was a “problem
child”.
• Golden Child opened at the Public
Theater to mixed reviews but
producers stepped in and the play
went into development again with
an eye toward a Broadway
production.
• Golden Child reached the Longacre
Theatre on Broadway on April, 2,
1998, with director James Lapine
and designers Tony Straiges and
Martin Pakledinaz.
Film-clips
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•
•
•
Director: David Henry Hwang
Year:2008
Place: The Public Theater in NY
Content: David Henry Hwang on Asian American
racial identity and "the face we choose to show
the world “who we are" -- in his new play "Yellow
Face.“
• From 00:00 to 05:20
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdOvAP5QIT
U
Synopsis
• Andrew Kwong is visited in a dream by his longdeceased Grandmother, Ahn, who insists on telling him
the story of her father once again to give him one last
chance to make a new life.
• Eng Tieng Bin’s family in China awaits his return after
spending several years of doing business in the
Philippines.
• His three wives worry about the effect of his apparent
interest in Western ways on a household where
ancestor worship is observed and traditional rituals are
practiced, setting off a power struggle among them.
Synopsis
• After handing out gifts to his wives – Siu Yong, Luan and
Eling, Tieng Bin announces that he has invited Reverend
Baines, a British missionary, to visit.
• He later orders the unbinding of Ahn’s feet, contrary to
tradition. It becomes clear that Tieng Bin has decided to
turn his back on Chinese customs and convert to
Christianity, and his wives’ worries become more
pronounced: will he also choose just one woman as his
chosen wife?
• Tieng Bin’s decision results in unexpected consequences he
does not plan for nor remotely expects.
• It is his prized offspring, Ahn, his Golden Child, who
encourages him to go back to the Philippines and promises
to tell great stories about how he made them all born again.
Performing Golden Child
• Prior to its Broadway opening on
April 2, 1998, Golden Child had a
number of developmental
readings and workshops at the
South Coast Repertory Theater in
Costa Mesa, CA, the Trinity
Repertory Company in residence
at Breadloaf in Vermont, the
Singapore Repertory Theatre, the
American Conservatory Theatre in
San Francisco, and The John F.
Kennedy Center in Washington,
D.C., before its premiere at The
Joseph Papp Public Theater/New
York Shakespeare Festival in New
York City.
• Golden Child
• By David Henry Hwang
Directed by Stuart
Carden. March 1 - May 6,
2007
Critics’ Notebook on Asian American
Drama
• For many years the standard English-language
sources on Asian theater practice were written by
Faubion Bowers (Japanese Theatre, 1952) and
James R. Brandon.
• With the emergence of Asian American
playwrights in the nonprofit and commercial
theater on the United States in the last quarter of
the twentieth century, anthologies of plays and
collections of interviews have been added to the
literature.
Critics’ Notebook on Asian American
Drama
• Creating his most personal and emotional
work to date, David Henry Hwang draws on
the true stories told to him by his
grandmother of his great-grandfather's break
with Confucian tradition by his conversion to
Christianity, and the eventual unbinding of his
daughter's feet. Golden Child explores the
impact of these decisions on each of his greatgrandfather's three wives, and succeeding
generations.
The core of us Golden Child By Jeff Hudson
• David Henry Hwang’s Golden Child, however, is
something else—a story about modern/Western ideas
moving into traditional Chinese culture. Largely set in
1918, the play features a progressive landowner (Hock
Tjoa) who traveled abroad and embraced Western
notions about individualism.
• To the horror of his three wives (who don’t entirely get
along), the landowner is exploring Christianity, which
initially plays as light comedy but becomes more
serious as the play progresses (practicing Christians
acknowledge only one wife per husband).
• To make matters worse, the landowner—despite the
fact that he finds women with “huge feet”
unattractive—orders First Wife (Yukiko Ohse) to stop
binding the feet of their precocious pre-teen daughter.
• Tjoa taps into the landowner’s compassion and desire What could be worse than
for knowledge, and also his inner conflict, as he tries to
reconcile traditional ancestor worship with new ways. having one wife?
The core of us Golden Child By Jeff Hudson
• First Wife, an arranged spouse, retreats into opium when a “white devil”
Anglican missionary (John Fisher) arrives. Second Wife (Lisa Moon)
schemes to advance herself. Third Wife (Cacie Mularchuk), the pretty girl
that the landowner picked for himself, comes from poverty and can’t grasp
the depth of the change underway.
• Through it all, the playwright asks, “What is it that makes you Chinese?”
and “How do you adapt your identity in a time of rapid, radical and
inevitable change—coming from outside?” We Americans face a similar
situation today. Hwang presents this play in a historic context, but the core
agenda hits us where we live.
• The CATS production features an elaborate, multilevel set, depicting
Chinese pavilions supported by stately red columns. The costumes recall
silk fashions from 100 years ago. Last Friday’s opening performance
featured a few more line glitches and little snafus than other recent CATS
productions, which tend to be pretty polished. But director Sandra
Rockman’s take on the script is savvy, and the show grows on you as the
story unfolds.
Dorinne Kondo, from About Face:
Performing Race in Fashion and Theater
• Given this particular sedimented history, Asian
Americans have a specific relation to the notion of
home. For mainland Asian Americans, surely one of the
most insistent features of our particular oppression is
our ineradicable foreignness.
• Given the continuing confusion of Asians with Asian
Americans, perhaps it is not surprising that one of the
most insistent themes in Asian American literature and
theater is a preoccupation with the claiming of
America as home…
Revisiting Interculturalism
• Intercultural texts demonstrate the collision of
cultures as writers from minority cultures
living in the West explore the contradictions,
ambivalences, and difficulties of the struggle
to retain ethnic, social, and ideological
separateness in worlds that discourage
exclusiveness.
Revisiting Interculturalism
• Conflict has been the basis of drama since its
beginnings in the early Greek festivals.
Intercultural dissonances are one recent
source of dramatic conflict in new American
playwriting since the eighties.
• Within the context of cultural diversity, efforts
to combine the riches of various cultures into
new artistic achievements are also celebrated
under the label transcultural.
Revisiting Interculturalism
• Transcultural artistic expression and
intercultural writing are ways contemporary
writers and artists mirror their multicultural
society and address global issues that affect all
humankind.
Reference
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Henry_H
wang
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Child_(pl
ay)
• http://www.curtainup.com/golden.html
• http://www.pep.ph/guide/theater/2445/davi
d-henry-hwang-narrates-inspiration-forquotgolden-childquot