The Story of a Family

It is never easy to tell the story of a family, especially your own family, and even more so when it is fraught with tension and intrigue and conflict – as I imagine most family stories tend to be. I have often been asked – being one of the few writers in a family of business people – to write my family’s story, and I must admit I have on occasion been tempted to do so, especially when I began to look deeper into the labyrinths of both my paternal and maternal families and found stories of the stuff television series and soap operas are made of.

Fortunately – for me as well as for my family – a far better writer has taken on the task. A nephew has written three plays – so far – based on our family, and happily, one of those plays will be staged in Manila next month.

Golden Child, by Tony and Obie award-winning playwright David Henry Hwang, will open on the auspicious day of August 8, 2008 at 8 p.m., as the season opener of Tanghalang Pilipino at the Cultural Center of the Philippines. Golden Child is the third of three “family plays” David has written; the other two are Family Devotions and Rich Relations.

The Golden Child refers to David’s grandmother – my second aunt – and it tells the story of her father’s conversion to Christianity and the complications that arose from the clash of traditional Chinese culture and a new Western belief system. The play was written in 1995 and was first staged in 1996; in the dozen years since it has been re-worked and rewritten, and has seen many stagings, including a run on Broadway in 1998 where it received three Tony nominations.

But the play really started many years ago, when David was about ten years old and spent a summer in Cebu with his grandmother, who was then critically ill.

“She was the only one who knew the family history and I didn’t want to see that lost,” David says in an earlier interview. “I basically did an oral history which I compiled into a 90-page ‘novel’,” which he titled “Only Three Generations” after the Chinese proverb, “The wealth of a Chinese family lasts only three generations.” Xeroxed copies of the “novel” were distributed to his relatives, “who showered it with excellent reviews.”

In 1995, as an almost forty-something playwright, David “returned to my manuscript as a middle-aged man, and began to collaborate with my ten-year-old self to create a new play. At ten, could I have known that my adult self would one day return to this work? Probably not. But something at that young age did compel me to record these stories, to ensure that my life as an American would exist in a context more real and human than the ‘Charlie Chans’ or ‘Fu Manchus’ I saw on television or in the movies.”

David readily admits that this play – as did most if not all of his plays – started out as an attempt to answer a question, to resolve a personal quandary. He says in an interview, “Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that Kathryn and I were thinking of having a child at that point, and, like the contemporary character in the bookend scenes of Golden Child, I needed to reconcile myself with my family history… I felt alienated from my family history (and) somehow it was important for me to put that piece back in my life before becoming a parent.” David and his wife Kathryn Layng, who is also an actress, are parents of Noah, 12, and Eva Veanne, 7.

David Henry Hwang is best known as the au-thor of M Butterfly, which ran for two years on Broadway and swept the theater awards in 1988. It was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. David also wrote the screenplay for the movie starring Jeremy Irons and John Lone.

He has won a string of Obie and other playwriting awards, including one for Golden Child in 1997 for playwriting. He also wrote Disney’s international hits Aida and Tarzan, and the 2003 production of Flower Drum Song starring Lea Salonga.

He has also written opera librettos, including three for renowned composer Philip Glass: 1000 Airplanes on the Roof, The Voyage and The Sound of a Voice. Other operas to his name include The Silver River, Ainadamar, and Alice in Wonderland.

His play Yellow Face, currently playing on Broadway, won the 2008 Obie for playwriting.

David is working on several new projects, including a new Broadway musical, Bruce Lee: Journey to the West; an opera, The Fly, based on David Cronenberg’s movie; and Daughter of Shanghai, based on the memoirs of and starring actress Tsai Chin.

David served on the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities from 1994 to 2001 by appointment of President Clinton, and in 1998, the oldest Asian American theater company, East West Players, christened its new mainstage The David Henry Hwang Theater. 

I saw a production of Golden Child in Seattle many years ago, with a beautiful set by award-winning designer and director Loy Arcenas. Since then I had wanted to have the play staged in Manila, where the playwright as well as the characters in the play have roots. But, like all good things I suppose, it took a while for the project to actualy get on stage.

Last year, things began to take shape. I was thrilled when David not only agreed to have the play staged here, but found time in his oh-so-full schedule to come over to Manila (they will be visiting Cebu as well). Things became even better when Loy agreed to direct the play.

The Manila staging of Golden Child will serve as a homecoming for David and his family – including his mother, uncles and aunts – as they join the first clan-wide reunion which will gather members of six generations of the Yu family, ranging in age from less than a year to one hundred years.

We all have questions – about our family, our history, and ourselves – that need to be answered, pieces that need to be put in place in the puzzle of our lives. For many of us, this will be as good a time as any to do so.

Golden Child will be staged at the Tanghalang Aurelio Tolentino of the Cultural Center of the Philippines from August 8 to 31, with matinee (3 p.m.) and evening (8 p.m.) shows. For tickets and other information, call Tanghalang Pilipino at tel 832-3704 or visit www.tanghalangpilipino.com