Tokens?: The NYC Asian American Experience on Stage (review)

Tokens?: The NYC Asian American Experience on Stage. Edited by Alvin Eng. New York: The Asian American Writers' Workshop, 1999; distributed by Temple University Press, Philadelphia, PA; pp. 456. $69.50 cloth, $22.95 paper.

Those looking for innovative perspectives on making Asian American theatre will be amply rewarded by this new collection. Tokens? includes one-actor shows such as Aasif Mandvi's Sakina's Restaurant; Alvin Eng's The Last Hand Laundry in Chinatown, a "vaudevillian rock & roll" musical; comic sketches by the performance groups SLANT and Peeling the Banana; Muna Tseng and Ping Chong's distinctive blend of dance, visual arts, and live drama in SlutForArt, a tribute to the life and work of photographer Tseng Kwong Chi; as well as plays by David Henry Hwang, Han Ong, Ralph Peña, Jessica Hagedorn, and Chiori Miyagawa.

The volume grounds itself in the diverse perspectives prompted by a flexible, changing, and often contested notion of what constitutes "Asian America" and "Asian American theatre." Its selection of playwrights is much more resolutely pan-ethnic than earlier collections of Asian American plays; by emphasizing New York-based work, it also makes a conscious effort to repudiate the assumptions that "Asian American" means West Coast. Yet common ground here lies in the awareness that Asian Americans are still subject to the conflicted state of American racial politics, and that this is far from a colorblind world.

Individual plays consistently highlight the significance of racial and ethnic identity and affiliation; many take care, for instance, to specify ethnic and racial designations such as "an Indian (Asian) woman" or an "African American or Latino Man" in character descriptions. Hwang's Trying to Find Chinatown attempts to deconstruct such assumed linkages between racial and cultural identity, appearance and expectation. Here blonde-haired, blue-eyed Midwesterner Benjamin, adopted by Chinese American parents at birth, searches for the house in Chinatown where his father was born. He is confronted by street violinist Ronnie, who is insulted by Benjamin's attempts to hail him into an Asian American fraternity and instead establishes his lineage through the history of jazz violin. Even as he denies any connections with early Asian American history, however, his own playing begins to show "the influence of Chinese music" (12) while Benjamin is left musing on the importance of Asian Americans knowing "who they truly are" (12). Both "biological" and "adoptive" connections are affirmed as very much alive. Such an ending, juxtaposed with Hwang's own statements, teases us: "As our nation becomes increasingly diverse, traditional definitions of race become blurred, and, in the ideal world, we will choose our own identities" (4). In reading these plays it becomes evident that even seemingly obsolete notions of race are barely "blurred," never mind "dead." Instead such racisms are continually resurrected in ever more complicated ways.

The often broadly farcical sketches of SLANT's Big Dicks, Asian Men, and Peeling the Banana debunk racial stereotypes such as the emasculated and abject "Oriental" man or the exoticized passive Butterfly. At the same time, these plays do not repudiate the "fake" in favor of some "real," presumably more authentic characterization; rather, they stress how characters continually make themselves through the popular images of television, film, and advertising. Big Dicks, Asian Men re-envisions Asian American masculinity in vignettes featuring humorous and sometimes poignant figures: Chinatown vendors of fake European designer accessories, Chinese restaurant delivery boys, lovelorn sumo wrestlers, and three men contemplating the joys of penis enlargement. Particular excerpts from the performances of Peeling the Banana--including "Margarita's Kicking Racist Ass Workshop," an X-Files lampoon featuring "Asian Mulder" and "Asian Scully," and a scene in which waiters in a Japanese restaurant explode in a murderous rage against annoying customers--also play variations on stereotypes. These scenes offset more personal monologues about youth, family, and love. Other plays also stress how racial images borrowed from television, film, and other media intrude upon the psyche in less comic ways...