Coming Home : Tony Nominee David Henry Hwang Revisits His San Gabriel Roots

David Henry Hwang is a playwright whose work is consumed by the spooky misconceptions that people have of each other. Racial stereotypes, sexist distortions, colossal international misuderstandings--all of these show up in Hwang’s sharply chiseled works, which have made him one of the most praised playwrights in America.

Here, then, is a young man whose ideas were shaped in the harsh crucible of the Big City, right? Wrong. The 30-year-old dramatist--whose current Broadway production, “M. Butterfly,” has been nominated for seven Tony Awards, including one for best play of the season--was born and raised in the safety of suburban San Gabriel.

“There’s an intimacy to this place,” Hwang said last week on a rare visit to his childhood stomping grounds, glancing pleasurably at the street scene on the far side of a restaurant window on Mission Drive. “The fact that you know so many people that you see on the street--that eases the process of growing up.”

But does a suburban childhood produce modernist playwrights?

If you grew up like Hwang did, suggested the playwright, a slim man who moves around these days with a coltishly buoyant stride.

Scandalous Affair

“M. Butterfly” is the story (based on an actual incident) of a hapless French diplomat who has a scandalous 20-year love affair with a Chinese opera singer, only to discover that she is both a spy and a man (“It was dark, and she was very modest,” explains the Frenchman).

A spokesman for the New York production of the play said it will eventually come to Los Angeles, though he could not say when.

Hwang, who learned of the relationship between the diplomat and the opera singer from news reports, uses the farcical story for a “universal meditation” on deep misunderstandings between men and women and between East and West, according to New York Times critic Frank Rich.

Hwang’s San Gabriel childhood was, of course, worlds away from such dark, shifty realities. His life in San Gabriel “was very uneventful, frankly,” the playwright said, but it nevertheless straddled some big contradictions.

Gregarious Student

The son of a certified public accountant and a piano teacher, Hwang lived on a quiet block on Alhambra Road. He was a good student, though unswervably gregarious, his teachers say. “He was never the little genius who hides his head beneath the desk,” recalled Elizabeth Fenton, Hwang’s ninth-grade English teacher at San Gabriel High School.

He sailed through Calvin Coolidge Elementary School and Jefferson Intermediate School, where teachers remember him as a boy who “was in everything, very socially active,” Principal Jonathan Greenberg said. He served as Jefferson’s student body president one year and joined the San Gabriel Youth Commission, advising the City Council on issues concerning young people.

In high school, he was an accomplished violinist, concertmaster for the San Gabriel Valley Youth Symphony, an aspiring pop musician (“Some friends and I used to play sometimes at Shakey’s Pizza on Valley Boulevard,” he recalled with amusement) and a member of the debating team.

It was debating that sent him to the Harvard School in North Hollywood for his senior year before he moved on to Stanford University.

“My friends had all graduated, and (the Harvard School) recruited me for debating,” he said.

Susan Dietz, producing co-director of the Pasadena Playhouse, was his English teacher there. “I thought this guy was going to find a cure for cancer or something, he was so smart,” Dietz recalled. “I knew he’d be doing something terrific, but I never thought it would be writing plays.”

The playwrighting began after an inspiring few days in 1978 at the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival in Claremont, Hwang said. There the young man, who until then had thought he was destined to be a lawyer, met such theater luminaries as Sam Shepard and Maria Irene Fornes.

“I had seen a couple of plays in San Francisco, and I thought, ‘I can do this,’ ” he said.

In the kind of happy-go-lucky environment he experienced in his youth, with soaring achievements rolling in like waves, being Chinese-American seemed incidental. “I knew I was Chinese, but I thought it was a minor detail, like having red hair,” he told one reporter recently.

That may have been partly because San Gabriel was an ethnically diverse community, Hwang said, but mostly it was because of the way his parents raised him. “My parents’ attitude was, recognize the fact that you’re Chinese but also that it’s not that big a deal,” he said. “I never knew when it was the Chinese New Year. That’s a bit unusual for Chinese parents. Some tell their kids that they have this 5,000-year-old culture which is superior to everyody else’s.”

Chinese School

Hwang has two younger sisters: Mimi, a cellist in the Franciscan String Quartet, which made its debut at Carnegie Hall last year, and Grace, an Alhambra elementary school teacher. The three of them spent the requisite three hours every Saturday morning at Chinese school in Monterey Park. But language and culture didn’t stick as much as “learning the essential cuss words” from other students, Hwang said.

Henry Hwang, David’s father, chairman of Far East National Bank, was not inclined to force an ancient culture on his children. “He was never attracted to China,” Hwang said. “He felt closer to America.” Henry Hwang and his wife, Dorothy, still live in Pasadena.

Freedom from tradition-bound thinking gave Hwang confidence. “You can take on a risky career, like being a playwright,” he said. But it also left him grasping for identity. “I was really unaware of what I had come from. The search for that expresses itself in my work.”

Take his first play, “FOB,” which he wrote while still a student at Stanford. It’s the story of a “fresh-off-the-boat” Chinese newcomer to California who is treated as a hick by his California cousins, interwoven with another story about some legendary characters from Chinese history. One critic described the play as a blend of “scattershot anger” and “a sense of fathomless loss.”

Won Obie Award

The play, which was produced by the Public Theater in New York in 1979 and won the Obie award that year as the best new Off-Broadway play, expressed the kinds of ideas that Hwang still broods about.

“In America as a whole, there’s a fast-food culture,” he said. “It’s a young country with no understanding of the past.” A frightening thought, he suggested. “Here’s a country with the capability to end the world, with no understanding of the past or the future.”

Hwang, who lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Ophelia, and a pair of Welsh corgi puppies, took the occasion of his visit to San Gabriel to delve briefly into his own past, with a whirlwind tour of his hometown. He barely recognized San Gabriel, where multi-unit apartment buildings have replaced many of the single-famly homes.

“All the stores are changed,” he said. Monterey Park, next door, is even more drastically transformed. “The movie theaters I knew as a kid are all Chinese theaters now,” Hwang said. “The buildings that have gone up dwarf anything that was there before.”

Ironically, it has been an influx of Asians in the past 10 years that has transformed cities like San Gabriel and Monterey Park, the nation’s first suburban Chinatown, where more than 50% of the population is of Asian extraction.

Anti-Asian Racism

The turmoil that those demographic changes have introduced, including examples here and there of anti-Asian racism, concerns Hwang. “Asians are in the position that, say, the Jews were in 40 or 50 years ago,” he said.

“There’s the potential to exert an influence disproportional to our numbers. But with all the Asian kids winning the science awards, there’s the suspicion among some people that maybe they’re doing too well.”

He worries, for example, about the 1986 ballot measure establishing English as the state’s official language and about moves by Monterey Park City Council members to place restrictions on business signs with Chinese characters.

“I don’t know what to make of (the sentiment behind such measures),” Hwang said. “I found the English-only initiative sort of racist, a way of venting racial aggressions. But then, my father is totally pro-English. He says he’s an immigrant and he did it, and why shouldn’t we have a national identity?”

Rough and Tumble

The playwright and his wife are considering moving to back to New York, where Hwang lived when he was launching his playwrighting career. A rough-and-tumble place, the Big Apple, Hwang conceded. “I never heard racial slurs until I got to New York,” he said.

“But sometimes I feel I need a change every few years or so.”

“M. Butterfly” is Hwang’s fifth play, but the first to be produced on Broadway. His early career was closely tied to that of John Lone, the adult Pu Yi in the film “The Last Emperor,” who starred in many of Hwang’s early plays. Hwang’s “A Thousand Airplanes on the Roof,” a musical work (co-written with avant-garde composer Philip Glass) about people who claim to have been abducted by space aliens, debuts in Vienna in July, and he is working on several screen projects.

“You’re stretching different muscles (when writing for the screen),” he said.

But, then, the essence of drama is the same. It’s one of the hardest lessons for a suburban kid with lofty aspirations to learn. Hwang explained it like this: “Your subconscious makes your characters come to life. Structure your play too closely and you squeeze the life out of it. At a certain point, you have to let the characters take over.”