"Making His Muscles Work For Himself": An Interview with David Henry Hwang - Asian-American playwright

Literary Review, Wntr, 1999 by Bonnie Lyons

A critic has said that you have "the potential to become the first important dramatist of American public life since Arthur Miller." Do you see yourself as a dramatist of American public life?

I don't see my work as consciously pursuing public themes like Tony Kushner's. I'm more caught up in my own perhaps self-indulgent personal journey. My own journey happens to have a public dimension to it in that it deals with some of the issues that the country is involved in right now. But I don't approach it from that direction; my personal concerns happen to spill over into the public arena.

The characters in your first play F.O.B. were in their twenties, that is, around your own age. Has it gotten easier to write about older characters as you've gotten older yourself?.

Because my work is personal, the plays tend to focus on characters that are about the same age I am. Even the great-grandfather who is the center of Golden Child is about the age I am now. The real problem is different. For example at this point in my life, if someone asked me to work on something that involved high school kids I'd have a problem. I don't know what it is to be a high school kid in the 1990s.

Your plays have been quite sympathetic to women characters and aware of sexism and gender issues. Any idea why?

I grew up with a lot of strong women. One of the funny things about being Chinese-American is that everyone else believes that Asian women are submissive and defer to men. My mom and aunt were both exceptions to that, and if everybody is an exception, then clearly something is wrong with the general rule. Traditional Chinese culture is really oppressive towards women; at the same time, growing up in a Chinese family, experientially you feel you are part of a matriarchy. I don't think Chinese women are victimized by their oppressive circumstances; I think they figure out a way to survive powerfully within those conditions. I grew up in a fundamentalist background; it was something I had to rebel against and get out of. Because of that I have been really sensitive to any kind of fundamentalism and have a kind of instinctive recoil. It seemed to me that if I was going to write about Asian characters and try to affirm their value vis-a-vis white culture, I would have to look at the entire picture, which involved me as a man trying to regard women with the same respect I would like white culture to regard me. It has never made sense to me to separate racism and sexism. Maybe that's the explanation for what you flatteringly call my sensitivity to women and gender issues.

In The Dance and the Railroad Lone says about the workers, "They are dead. Their muscles work only because the white man forces them. I live because I can still force my muscles to work for me." I thought that was a very powerful statement about the desire for autonomy and metaphorically spoke about many of your characters' desire to have their minds working for themselves rather than being controlled by cultural forces or other people's ideas.