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Journal of Asian American Studies 3.3 (2000) 283-297



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Asians in America: Millennial Approaches to Asian Pacific American Performance

Karen Shimakawa

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What's Up With That Hair?

In the spring of 1998, San Francisco's Asian American Theatre Company (AATC) mounted a production of Frank Chin's The Chickencoop Chinaman, twenty-five years after that play inaugurated AATC. 1 The director had chosen to retain the original concept, setting the play in the early 1970s, and so sitting in an audience comprised largely of college students from my "Asian American Drama" undergraduate class--all of whom had been born well after the play first premiered--was, for me, a somewhat vertiginous experience. For while, in keeping with the "retro" style currently popular, many of these young people affected the idioms (clothes and musical tastes) of the 1970s, they were utterly baffled by this artifact of the era; and post-play discussions revealed that, to their eyes, this play had very little to do with "Asian American identity" as they understood that concept (or even a hetero-masculinist version of it). Certainly, protagonist Tam Lum's jazzy, beat-poetic/stream-of-consciousness style of oration was part of their difficulty ("why can't he just talk like regular people?!" one student asked in exasperation) but their discomfort and bewilderment went far beyond their unfamiliarity with a particular aesthetic: the critique centered primarily on the appropriation of (stereotypes of) African American culture and discourse (Tam's childhood friend goes by "Blackjap Kenji," for example), heterosexist [End Page 283] gender roles and simplistic, problematic renderings of multi-racial identity. Surely we had progressed beyond this level of identity politics, the students proclaimed; the Asian America represented in Chin's play, they insisted, was unrecognizable to them, discontinuous with the world they inhabited. 2

My point in beginning with this anecdote is not to suggest the irrelevance of Asian American theatre history (and it should be said in the students' defense that further discussion of the play teased out a more productive conversation about the historical significance of the gender and race politics of the play); rather, just the opposite: Asian Pacific American (APA) theatre has evolved and proliferated in many directions, but I want to suggest that, paradoxically, while in some ways contemporary APA performance seems light years away from Frank Chin's jive-talking Chinaman, in another way it is the logical result of the project AATC and its cohort launched a quarter of a century ago. 3

We Gotta Do Something

In order to understand how "we" got here from there, it is perhaps instructive to consider the historical trajectory of Asian American performance. Spurred by political/artistic movements in the Black and Chicano communities, as well as cross-racial "Third World" movements gaining momentum during the late 1960s and early 1970s, the first Asian American theatre companies emerged as a manifestation of a larger Asian American political consciousness and movement. Playwright Philip Kan Gotanda remembers the political climate of the period as a major creative influence: his early forays into music and theatre, he recalls, were "in concert with the whole Asian-American creation," that is, part of the project of creating the "political construct" of "Asian-American[-ness]" taking place at that time. 4 Other key figures in the establishment of Asian American theatre companies were similarly inspired by the heightened race-consciousness of the period: as early as the mid-1960s, remembers Mako, actor and founding member of Los Angeles' East-West Players, the younger generation of Asian American actors in Hollywood "were saying, 'hey, I've been taking shit from the white man for so long,'. . . and we said, [End Page 284] 'I don't want to fuck around with this shit, man--this is racist bullshit!'" 5 An established film and television actor, Mako and his cohort lamented the scarcity of (non-racist, non-stereotypical) roles available to them, which eventually led to their beginning a theatre company:

We started talking about...[how] most of us were caught being stereotyped in...

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