Group targets Asian stereotypes in hit musical

The hit musical "Miss Saigon" is coming to the Boston area next month and bringing protests with it.

Ever since its 1991 Broadway opening, "Miss Saigon" has been synonymous with controversy. Asian-American groups and other critics, who took to the streets in angry protests during the musical's Broadway run, have charged that the show promotes all-too-familiar Western stereotypes of Asian women.

This year in Boston, a group of Asian-American artists intends to do something about it.

On June 10, 1999, Asian Americans gathered in front of the Ordway Theater in St. Paul to protest the return of the Broadway play, "Miss Saigon." It was the second time a group of Asian Americans and their allies protested the production. Unfortunately, I couldn't make it. But I was there in spirit.

When my editor and I were talking about the protest, I recalled how I loved the play when I saw it in New York as a 17-year-old in 1993. A mere one-and-a-half-years later, as a 19-year-old, I saw it again, this time at the Orpheum Theater in Minneapolis. I felt very uncomfortable with it. Perhaps it was the transition from high school to college, but my understanding of myself as a Korean adoptee dramatically changed the way I experienced the play the second time around.

I remember feeling pulled between being white and being Asian when I watched "Miss Saigon" the first time. I was with my choir group from Hastings, Minn. Most of my life I had spent trying to fit in with my peers, so the experience of watching a play that had an Asian American lead and was about Vietnam was disconcerting. The actors felt like the "other," not me. I didn't feel Asian, but as white as the friends who sat next to me. And yet the stirrings of identity were beginning, because I was emotionally drawn to the Asian American actors.

It's an odd fact of L.A. life that Chinese press conferences for Asian entertainers are held in the back room of a Japanese restaurant. The owner of Wonderful Restaurant in San Gabriel used to be in show business back in Taiwan, so his sushi-teria has become the place where Jackie Chan and his ilk promote their projects before the Chinese-language media.

But that didn't begin to account for Byron Yee's disorientation during his recent press conference there to publicize his one-man show, "Paper Son," which opens Sept. 23 at the Gascon Center Theatre in Culver City.

In the show, which has been warmly received by critics in San Francisco and Canada, the Oklahoma City-born comedian traces his emotional journey from super-assimilated American to self-acceptance as the son of a Chinese immigrant. So a press conference at Wonderful would seem an obvious stop. After all, there was the bond of shared cultural heritage, right?

Instead this initiative by VACT (Vancouver Asian Canadian Theatre) takes an idea from Seattle and brings it north of the border to help promote positive imagery of Asians. Producer Joyce Lam hopes the first episode of the comedy, loosely based on HBO's successful Sex and the City TV series, will not only give local Asian-Canadian actors some much-needed work but help dispel persistent stereotypes as well."

By Terry Hong
A. Magazine
November/December 1996

"Snow Drums of Mu Daiko" opens at Theater Mu on November 22, 2002.

Asian American theater in Minnesota? Well, it might sound like an anomaly, but take a quick look at the numbers, and Minnesota comes up as the state with the fastest-growing Asian American population (one which has almost quadrupled in the last decade), as well as the home for the largest population of adopted Koreans in the U.S. So what better place than the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul to start a new Asian American theater company?

It was May 1992 when a core group of four individuals -- Rick Shiomi, Dong-il Lee, Diane Espaldon, and Martha Johnson -- first got together and founded Theater Mu. The group's name comes from the Korean pronunciation of the Chinese character that symbolizes shamanistic theater. The actual ideogram mu represents the shaman/warrior/artist who connects the heavens and earth through the tree of life.

Suddenly out of nowhere, two different Asian American theater groups have sprouted in the Washington, D.C. area, each with their own visions of how to present the Asian American experience to the play-going masses. Tsunami Theatre presented David Henry Hwang's "F.O.B" last fall, unfortunately faltering in its presentation and further exhibiting the hackneyed Orientalism that plagues many literary works heralded by the mainstream.