Andy Drachenberg – Spanglish, Franglais, and now Chinglish… when did this start and what does ‘chinglish’ mean?
David Henry Hwang – I think that we’re at a point in history right now where there’s more movement across borders. The old notion of individual nationalisms has started breaking down. You have a lot of people who know more than one language and who are familiar with more than one culture and you start to get these terms like ‘chinglish’ or ‘spanglish’ that refer to what happens when different nations and different cultures come together.
AD – What was the inspiration for Chinglish?
DHH – I have been going to China a fair amount for the past five or six years–I try to go once or twice a year–because China is very interested in Broadway musicals right now, and I happen to be the only nominally Chinese person who’s ever written a Broadway show. People kept asking me to come over and talk about projects. None of these ever materialized, but it was a good opportunity for me to learn more about China, which is fascinating. The amount of change and the rate of progress is astonishing – one year in China is like five in the outside world. I started to think about writing a contemporary play about what it is like to do business in China today.
AD – Can you describe the experience of developing and writing a story in multiple languages?
DHH – Well, I had this idea to write a play about China, but I didn’t know what the story was. One day I went to visit this brand new cultural center in Shanghai. It was just gorgeous…Italian marble… Brazilian woods… a sound system from Japan… and then there were these horribly translated signs in Chinese and English. The handicap restroom read ‘deformed man’s toilet.’ And I thought that might be a really interesting point to start jumping off from about doing business in China today, and I knew I wanted to deal with the language barrier. I am a Chinese American, but I don’t speak Chinese, so I always have to use an interpreter when I go to China. That is such a huge part of doing business with another culture, and you never see that represented in movies or plays.
So, I knew I wanted to do this play about business in China that had to do with language, and I’d seen these really badly translated signs. I started with the character of an American businessman who’s trying to get a deal to translate the signs properly in China. When I went into writing the play, all I knew was that at the beginning he would have a goal of trying to get this deal, and that by the end everything would work out well for him, but for all the wrong reasons.
AD – What sort of research have you done to create Chinglish?
DHH – A lot of the research was in traveling to China, traveling to Guiyang, a relatively small Chinese city of about five million (where the play takes place). But also, I feel like my whole life has been research – my parents are Chinese immigrants, I grew up with a lot of people for whom English was not their first language, and my Chinese was always terrible. I feel like I’ve spent my whole life trying to communicate across this language barrier.
AD – How is this different from your previous work?
DHH – I had the idea to do a bilingual play, and the principal problem was I am not actually bilingual. I’ve worked in opera a fair amount, so I’ve gotten used to seeing my words projected in supertitles. I thought…. Well, I could work with a playwright who is Chinese-speaking, and he or she could do the translations and we could project the English. I’ve known Candace Chong for a while, I met her here in New York at the Lark Theatre Center and we’ve become friends, and she is a very prominent playwright in Hong Kong who writes in Cantonese and Mandarin. I asked her if she would collaborate with me on this, and fortunately she agreed!
AD – What is at the heart of this show for you?
DHH – I think for me Chinglish is largely about communication, the difficulty of communication, and how easily we misunderstand each other. There are so many levels on which we can misunderstand each other. On the most superficial level there is language – we literally do not understand what people are saying. But sometimes across cultures, even if we understand the words literally, different concepts have different meanings.
For example, one idea that I think gets mistranslated across cultures in this play is love, and the notion of to what extent romantic love is a part of marriage. In America, we tend to feel love is very important, and that it needs to be present in a marriage at all times. Sometimes, when we feel it isn’t present anymore, we leave and move to another marriage. I think in a lot of old world cultures, there is the idea that marriage is an institution and that it won’t always have romantic love. Romantic love may be an impetus to start a marriage, but it doesn’t always last for the whole thing. This notion of ‘what does love mean?’ is something that’s explored in the play.
AD – How does Chinglish correspond with the real world today?
DHH – It’s exciting for me to look at how the US and China relate to each other, and where it looks like we are going. As a Chinese American I have a certain amount of understanding of both cultures (probably more of American than Chinese), and I’m fascinated how the image of China has changed so much in my lifetime. When I was born and during the 1960s, China was sort of the weak man of Asia, and now its supposed to be the next superpower. That’s an extraordinary amount of change in a relatively short period of time. To be able to explore that within a play that I hope is funny and that audiences will have a good time at, but at the same time lets us understand some of the challenges the US and China face in moving forward, that’s a very exciting thing to do right now.
AD – What has the guanxi with the show been like?
DHH – Guanxi is the Chinese term for a kind of a ‘bond.’ On the most basic level is the family bond and then it expands outward in concentric circles. I think all of us who worked on it in Chicago have wonderful guanxi with each other. We worked together easily and we all got along. It was one of the smoothest rehearsal processes I’ve ever gone through. Leigh Silverman and I have a great shorthand now, and I think all the actors were really excited to be working on a play about contemporary China and a play where they could use their English and Chinese skills, and bring all of themselves to the project. We’re really looking forward to moving forward together.
AD – What insight from your collaborative team, director, designers, surprised you?
DHH – I mistakenly did not think that this play was going to be as hard to cast as it turned out to be. For instance, I wrote the character of Peter, who is a Caucasian who been living in China for a decade or more and speaks fluent Mandarin. I thought that’s not going to be hard to cast… doesn’t everybody speak Mandarin these days? Well I was really wrong about that…
AD – Can you tell us about the unique experiences this show has presented?
DHH – We have been trying to recreate the world of Guiyang, as well as contemporary China, as accurately as we can. For instance Joanna Lee and Ken Smith, our cultural advisors, bring things from Guiyang to put on the set so that there is that degree of authenticity. And similarly, Leigh also encouraged them to do an end of rehearsals ceremony to seal in the good vibes from our rehearsal period and then an opening night ceremony with a big suckling pig and other things. There’s a lot we might have done on other shows I’ve worked on that involved China, but with Chinglish we’ve been trying to be as authentic as possible, and it’s been really fun to bring that into the rehearsal process.
AD – What do you hope audiences take away from Chinglish?
DHH – First of all I hope people have a good time and laugh a lot and realize that in this coming together of different cultures, there are a lot of things we have in common and there’s a lot of things we can find funny together. I also hope that they are able to think about some of the differences in the ways America looks at the world and the ways China looks at the world. Yes, these are in flux, and yes, they are changing, but these are the kinds of challenges we need to face as we’re moving together as two major countries in the world. There’s a line in the play about words that cannot be translated, and I hope that the play helps audiences to understand those things that are not so easy to translate.
AD – Do you personally ever dream in Chinese with English surtitles, or vice versa?
DHH – I do not dream in surtitles yet, mostly because I’m not bilingual, but also because it’s really hard to read in dreams… I still dream normally and working through this play doesn’t seem to have affected my dream life yet.
DAVID HENRY HWANG’S plays include M. Butterfly (1988 Tony Award, 1989 Pulitzer Prize Finalist), Golden Child (1998 Tony Award nomination, 1997 OBIE Award), Yellow Face(2008 OBIE Award, 2008 Pulitzer Prize Finalist), FOB (1981 OBIE Award), The Dance and the Railroad(1982 Drama Desk Award nomination), Family Devotions (1982 Drama Desk Award nomination) and Bondage. He wrote the libretti for the Broadway musicals Elton John and Tim Rice’s Aida (co-author), Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Song (revival, 2002 Tony Award nomination) and Disney’s Tarzan. In opera, his libretti include four works with composer Philip Glass: The Voyage (Metropolitan Opera), 1000 Airplanes on the Roof, Sound and Beauty(seen in Chicago at the Court Theatre), and Icarus at the Edge of Time; as well as Osvaldo Golijov’s Ainadamar (two 2007 Grammy Awards), Unsuk Chin’s Alice in Wonderland(Opernwelt 2007 “World Premiere of the Year”) and Howard Shore’s The Fly. Hwang penned the feature films “M. Butterfly,” “Golden Gate” and “Possession” (co-author), and co-wrote the song “Solo” with Prince. He sits on the Council of the Dramatists Guild, and served by appointment of President Clinton on the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities.