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.
Themes
The Historical Marginalization of Asian Americans
One of the major themes in Yellow Face is the marginalization of Asian Americans on the theatrical, political, and national stages. The play deals with protagonist DHH’s struggles to articulate an Asian American identity during the 1990s, a decade marked by the promise of progress for Asian American representation but also by the racist stereotypes and prejudices that have historically rendered invisible Asian Americans in the national imagination. As DHH navigates his role as a cultural producer, he challenges the ways that Asian Americans are either non-existent or depicted as minor players, perpetual foreigners, and the “yellow peril.”
The play begins with an acknowledgment that events that are pertinent to the Asian American community often remain invisible or peripheral to mainstream culture. DHH contends that although many Asian Americans wonder what happened to Marcus, in “mainstream culture, […] Marcus, like most Asian American celebrities, remains virtually unknown” (8). The theme of the invisibility of Asian American identities continues when DHH flashes back to a decade earlier when he protested against Jonathan Pryce’s yellowface performance in Miss Saigon. Despite having recently won national recognition and praise for his play, M. Butterfly, a drama that criticizes Western imperialism and orientalist stereotypes, DHH finds few allies from the mainstream media or among his white peers.
The invisibility of Asian Americans in the dominant culture is comically demonstrated when DHH confronts the Miss Saigon production team about their casting choice. The team contends they found no Asian actors who suited the part and claim, “We have searched literally around the world” (10). Hwang’s joke that the group was unable to find an Asian actor despite the Chinese being the largest ethnic population in the world emphasizes the absurdity of their defense. DHH recognizes that they chose to cast Pryce out of willful indifference to both the racist history and offensiveness of yellowface and the consequence of depriving Asian American actors of opportunities to play lead roles. As the character Jane Krakowski notes, most Asian actors are typecast to play “waiters and laundrymen and take-out delivery boys” (22). DHH learns that the celebrated visibility of his success as “the first Asian playwright to have a play produced on Broadway” (8) and B. D. Wong’s breakthrough performance in M. Butterfly were only temporary and anomalous advances in diversifying theater.
The representation of Asian Americans in politics is equally fraught by stereotypes of the perpetual foreigner and the yellow peril which keep Asian Americans at the fringe of American identity and on the verge of enemy territory. In his encounters with NWOAOC, DHH notices how frequently the reporter conflates Chinese with Chinese American. As DHH repeatedly insists, “There’s a difference” (60). When the reporter makes a comment that implies being Chinese and American is incompatible, DHH connects the marginalization of Asian Americans in theater to their exclusion from the national imagination: “You look at folks like my dad—like Wen Ho Lee—and suddenly their eyes might as well be taped up and covered in piss-colored makeup. Cuz all you see are all those bad guys in the movies who ever put on yellow face” (61). DHH draws a parallel between the reporter’s investigations on potential Asian American espionage and the outdated and offensive “yellow peril” propaganda that depicted Asian people as foreigners and suspicious outsiders who threaten national security and American identity.
DHH contextualizes his protest against Miss Saigon and the discriminatory investigations against his father in the historical marginalization and exclusion of Asian people. By addressing the pervasive and persistent stereotypes and prejudices against Asian people, Hwang highlights the importance of visibility, agency, and representation for Asian Americans to combat racial discrimination.
Cultural Identity and Authenticity
Through the farce of mistaken racial identity and Marcus’s success at playing an Asian American, Hwang explores the complicated and problematic concepts of cultural identity and authenticity. At the core of his exploration is an understanding that race and ethnicity are social constructs and that the label “Asian American” comprises diverse identities that can resist as well as strategically employ essentialist definitions.
When DHH’s casting director Miles Newman interviews Marcus for the first time, their encounter parodies the essentialist notion that all Asian Americans share certain fixed and identifiable traits. Newman’s questions to determine whether Marcus is Asian or not echo racist inquiries Asian Americans often face, such as where they “really” come from and how good their English is. These types of questions imply that Asian Americans are perpetual foreigners despite being native or naturalized US citizens. Hwang has Newman ask Marcus these questions to point out how ineffective such questions are in determining race and ethnicity. Marcus’s answers—that he originally hails from Seattle and does not speak a foreign language—are too vague to rule out the possibility that he is of Asian descent. The scene exposes the absurdity of these questions by having one white man ask them of another white man and conclude that the second white man must be Asian American.
Although the questions and answers between Newman and Marcus are played for laughs, the interview scene also emphasizes that the category of “Asian American” is composed of various ethnic and national backgrounds that white Americans lump together without regard for their differences. When Newman tries to pinpoint Marcus’s ethnicity by asking questions about Asian holidays, he first asks about Filipino festivals and then asks, “Or the Indians! Do they have any—? Or how ’bout the Vietnamese? Koreans? Hmong?” (20). These scenes highlight what theorist Lisa Lowe argues are the important considerations of “heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity” when conceptualizing Asian American identity and differences (Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 1996). Rather than conceive of a singular and uniform representation of an authentic “Asian American,” Hwang names the many definitions and contexts that the term can encompass, while also demonstrating through Newman the way that they tend to be conflated.
DHH sometimes argues for Asian American diversity and at other times appeals to cliched and essentialist signifiers of Asian identity, depending on what is most advantageous to him at that moment. In his desperation to cover up Marcus’s whiteness, he chastises Rodney for assuming that all Asian people look alike, then later invokes geography and physiology by using a map of Asia’s proximity to Russia and a picture of a Siberian model with “very Asian features” (31) to affirm Marcus’s “Asianness.” Hwang satirizes DHH’s hypocrisy and his construction of an Asian American identity that relies on essentialist notions of biology and national boundaries. Yet Hwang also acknowledges that emphasizing similarities over differences can be an empowering way for those who have been marginalized to feel a sense of community and belonging. Postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak coined the term strategic essentialism to describe the way groups define themselves under a principle of shared experiences such as lineage or ethnicity to build solidarity and resistance (Bell, Avril, “Strategic Essentialism,” Wiley Online Library, 23 Apr. 2021). Although he is not Asian, Marcus recognizes and is drawn to the unconditional support, political unity, and empowerment that the category “Asian American” can offer. The social construction of race and ethnicity does not entail that these categories of identity are not real with no real-world consequences, but rather, that they are discursively formed and institutionally enforced.
At the end of the novel, DHH goes “back to work” on his writing and continues “searching for [his] own face” (69). Hwang shows how DHH’s quest to find or create an “authentic” Asian American identity leads him in circles of essentialist assumptions as well as productive and critical discursive practices that empower that identity and challenge discrimination.
Artistic Freedom and the Burden of Representation
In Frank Rich’s Foreword to the play, he comments that though he is “inevitably labeled an Asian American writer, Hwang has actually been among the quintessential playwrights, period, of his time” (vii). Hwang, like many artists of color, contends with the tension between being an artist full-stop versus an artist who represents a specific community. In Yellow Face, Hwang delivers a play that acknowledges the historical erasure of Asian Americans in arts and popular culture and the difficulty for Asian American cultural producers to satisfy the needs for Asian American visibility and representation.
Hwang plays with the concept of “representation” in Yellow Face, frequently reminding his audience that what they are watching is not a representation of reality but the act of representation itself. DHH often breaks the fourth wall to speak to the audience, and the stage directions instruct that all the actors remain seated on stage when they are not delivering their lines to emphasize the transparency of their role-playing. Although the play dramatizes Hwang’s personal experiences during the 1990s fairly accurately, including verbatim quotations from newspapers, politicians, and Hwang himself, Hwang refers to the genre as a mockudrama or unreliable memoir to upset the assumption that artists of color must adhere to accurate representations of their community. By blending reality with fiction, Hwang shows that “representation” itself is a performance. The play emphasizes that it may be less important to determine whether a representation is truthful than to analyze what the representation signifies and the context of its production and reception.
Hwang employs non-traditional casting for the secondary roles in Yellow Face to demonstrate that actors are not necessarily restricted to playing only certain parts, just as cultural producers of color are not restricted to writing only about their ethnic background or community. Aside from the two leads, five other actors play a range of roles that encompass different genders, ages, and Asian and non-Asian identities. At the same time, the play begins with a direct critique of yellowface and the objection to white actors performing as Asian characters. The contradiction forces the audience to confront the ambiguities among artistic expression, cultural appropriation, and racial representation. Hwang addresses some of those ambiguities by re-enacting the backlash around the Miss Saigon protests. The play suggests that the core problem is that most Asian roles themselves are racist caricatures, regardless of whether white or Asian actors play them. Yellowface, as well as blackface, brownface, and redface, are not exercises in non-traditional casting but rather are practices that uphold the white status quo by perpetuating racist stereotypes. By contrast, non-traditional casting and the ending of yellowface performances provide historically marginalized performers with more opportunities. By having actors portray characters of various races as they re-enact a scandal about cross-racial casting, Hwang forces the audience to consider what it means to “represent” a person of a particular ethnicity and what the implications of that representation really are.
Hwang also explores the burden carried by Asian Americans like DHH to “represent” an entire group. Hwang deploys both positive and negative Asian stereotypes to push back against the expectation to present only idealized versions of Asian American identity. Hwang’s fictional stand-in, DHH, is egocentric, hypocritical, petty, and uncritical of his position as an “Asian American role model” (34). Though his play M. Butterfly critiques the exoticization of Asian women, DHH personally enjoys Asian fetish porn. He is willing to take a stand against racism but only if it garners him accolades. In the play’s most explicit critique of the burden of representation, DHH is hired as a consultant for Margaret Cho’s sitcom, All-American Girl, to make it “more Asian.” Cho’s program from the mid-1990s was celebrated for representing one of television’s first Asian American families but was also criticized by some Asian American viewers for its inauthentic casting and use of accents. DHH takes on the responsibility of representing his community but ends up peddling images and props that reduce Asian American identity to cliches like chopsticks. By creating a deeply flawed protagonist like DHH, Hwang offers representation of the struggles many Asian Americans face as they navigate a society that pressures them to conform to racist stereotypes. DHH fights against racism and perpetuates it; he is both a hero and a villain. He is not a representation of an entire group, but a single human being, trying to forge his experiences into art.
Related Titles
By David Henry Hwang
