49 pages • 1 hour read
David Henry HwangYellow Face
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 2007A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
DHH
DHH is the central protagonist and the alter-ego of playwright David Henry Hwang. DHH begins the play as a confident and respected playwright who has gained celebrity status from the recent success of his award-winning play, M. Butterfly. Initially, he fulfills the archetypes of the artist and trailblazer and sees himself as a preeminent figure in the Asian American and theater communities. Like the real Hwang, DHH is renowned for his innovative works that challenge racist stereotypes and promote the representation of Asian Americans in the arts. DHH takes pride in fighting The Historical Marginalization of Asian Americans. He is “the first Asian playwright to have a play produced on Broadway” (8). He boasts about his television appearances and capacity to launch the careers of young Asian American actors and “make some fresh Asian face into a Broadway star” (18). Hwang characterizes DHH as an activist and pioneer, but also as a flawed character who cares more about his status than about the complexities of Asian American identities and experiences.
As the play progresses, DHH becomes insecure about his identity and resentful of the success that his lies create for others. DHH’s ego takes a beating when he protests the yellowface performance in Miss Saigon and faces backlash from the press and his white peers who accuse him of racism and censorship. He is further demoralized when his next play, Face Value, is skewered by the critics and shuts down before its official opening. Both events challenge his ideals, revealing a conflict between Artistic Freedom and the Burden of Representation.
Desperate to hold on to his reputation, DHH covers up the fact that he has mistakenly cast a white actor to play the Asian lead in his play. He invents a background for Marcus G. Dahlman to allow him to pass for Asian instead of being accused of yellowface. The charade demonstrates DHH’s faltering integrity as he scrambles to maintain his image as an influential Asian American. Marcus’s success under his false identity prompts DHH to re-examine what constitutes Cultural Identity and Authenticity and how he has been perpetuating his own form of yellowface by performing the role of the authentic spokesperson for the Asian American community. At the end of the play, DHH learns that the diversity of Asian American identities cannot be essentialized into one true and real representation. The best he can do is be authentic to himself, and he concludes that he's still discovering who he is.
Marcus G. Dahlman (a.k.a. Marcus Gee)
Marcus G. Dahlman is the young, white actor whom DHH mistakenly casts for an Asian role in his play, Face Value. As DHH’s perceived antagonist, Marcus represents cultural appropriation and white privilege as he employs the rhetoric of “colorblindness” and the idealism of a post-racial society to evade questions about his own racist appropriation of Asian American identity. He symbolizes a hyperbolic form of yellowface wherein he lives a life pretending that he is of Asian descent both on and offstage. Marcus’s freedom to choose his racial identity demonstrates that the idea that you can “be anyone you want” in America applies to white people more than to people of color.
Near the end of the play, Marcus reveals that he is a narrative construct and confronts DHH to explain why he created him. The metatheatrical moment highlights how Marcus functions as a double of DHH, who himself is a double of David Henry Hwang. Through the character of Marcus, Hwang projects his anxieties about the pressures and ambiguities inherent in representing a community as diverse as Asian Americans. Marcus upsets what it means to be authentic and draws attention to how the logic of such binaries can reinforce stereotypes. Through Marcus, Hwang also explores the benefits of self-definition and identity politics by depicting the supportive community of Asian Americans who experience empowerment and advocate for change through a collective voice.
HYH
HYH is DHH’s father. His character is loosely based on Hwang’s father, Henry Yuan Hwang. HYH represents assimilation and faith in the American dream. He regards himself as an exemplar of the immigrant success story. DHH regards his father’s optimism and patriotism as naïve and believes he risks perpetuating the dangerous myth of the model minority. Their disagreements over the impact of race in American society represent the generational divide in Asian American families. HYH believes that he can become whomever he wishes in America “through sheer will and determination” (67), whereas DHH writes plays about American imperialism and orientalism and has protested against yellowface performances.
HYH’s hyperbolic worship of American capitalism often functions as the play’s moments of comic relief. HYH frequently exasperates his son by extolling wealth and materialism and celebrating DHH’s fame rather than the substance of his literary works. Despite their political and ideological differences, DHH recognizes that his father’s bank serves the needs of the Asian immigrant and refugee population, and Hwang represents their differences as emblematic of the diversity of Asian American identities. At the end of the play. HYH becomes disillusioned with his faith in the American dream after the US government targets him and other Asian Americans for disloyalty. Although he is a secondary character, HYH is the prominent tragic figure of the play who dies heartbroken and betrayed by the country that he loves.
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