The Year of the Dragon (review)

The Year of the Dragon. By Frank Chin. East West Players, Los Angeles, California. 10 February 2001.

The revival of Frank Chin's The Year of the Dragon directed by Mako at the East West Players (EWP) earlier this year brought a chapter of Asian American theatre history full-circle. When Mako and other Asian American actors founded EWP in 1965, Asian American drama was virtually non-existent. The EWP began an annual playwriting contest to encourage Asian American writers to write drama, and in 1971 Frank Chin's Chickencoop Chinaman shared the first prize with Momoko Iko's Gold Watch. A year later, Chickencoop premiered at the American Place Theatre, becoming the first Asian American play produced in New York City. Then Edward Hastings, the Executive Director of the American Conservatory Theatre (ACT), San Francisco, asked Chin to lead an Asian American theatre workshop that would develop new Asian American plays. Thus, the Asian American Theatre Workshop (AATW) was founded, for which Chin wrote his second play, The Year of the Dragon. In May 1974, the play was produced with Randall Duk Kim in the lead role at the American Place Theatre and, four months later, had its west coast premiere at EWP under the direction of Mako.

Set in San Francisco's Chinatown on Chinese New Year's Day, 1974, the play centers on Fred Eng, a forty-year-old Chinatown tourist guide who fakes pidgin English in order to create an "authentic" Chinatown experience for tourists. He fights his obstinate and traditional father to get his family out of Chinatown and to discourage his brother, Johnny, from becoming a tourist guide. Caught between cultural and generational clashes and contradictions, he finds no escape from the "Chinatown cave." Similar to Tam Lum in Chickencoop Chinaman, Fred Eng defies the stereotype of a quiet, self-effacing Asian: he is an angry, loud-mouthed "Chinaman" who refuses to identify as either the assimilated "Chinese-American" or the alien "Chinese." Although the play's reception was mixed, it came to represent Asian American theatre. In 1975, a television version of the play (with George Takei as Fred Eng) was produced by PBS as part of the "Theatre in America" series.

In 1978, Frank Chin left the Asian American Theatre Workshop to focus on writing novels and essays. For over twenty years, Chin has been openly critical of popular Asian American writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston and David Henry Hwang and has called them "racist" and "fake." Bolstering the gadfly image, Chin has refused to enter the EWP's theatre space because it is named after Hwang. Thus, it was not easy for Tim Dang, the Artistic Director of the EWP, to obtain Chin's permission to revive the play. In fact, it took some years and Mako to convince him. Chin nevertheless helped with the rehearsals, spending over two weeks with Mako and the actors, going over each line and scene in the play. Moreover, the cast included three actors from the 1974 production at the EWP: Shizuko Hoshi (China Mama), Keone Young (Fred Eng), and Dana Lee (Pa), who were now closer to their character's age than they were originally.

Designed by Yoichi Aoki, the set of the new production combined the realism of living room drama (Eng's apartment) and the symbolism of San Francisco's Chinatown in the 1970s. For instance, the apartment was framed by four enormous Chinese characters written in red, "Goong Hay Fot Choy" (Happy New Year), and other invasive images suggesting the world of Chinatown outside. The apartment set reflected the 1970s milieu with period kitchen appliances, a television, desk, and a dining set placed center stage. A small bathroom, where some of the most important scenes took place, was set stage left. While realistic, the set did not provoke the atmosphere of the "Old Frisco Chinatown apartment" described by Chin in the script; rather, it looked like a sanitized version of the apartment, without years of cooking, smoking, and burning...