A road beyond ethnicity

IT SOUNDED LIKE a desperate groan, or maybe it was a guttural, exasperated “Oh, please.” But near the finale of a preview performance of David Henry Hwang’s new play, “Yellow Face,” which opened Sunday night at the Mark Taper Forum, an unidentified female audience member -- was she Anglo? Asian? -- made known her displeasure with one of the protagonist’s closing lines.

The offending words? They were relatively straightforward, if not utopian. After a successful career of both deconstructing and embracing the complexities of ethnic and racial identity, the lead character, a Chinese American playwright whose initials are, like his creator’s, DHH , throws up his arms and wonders aloud whether “we should take words like ‘Asian’ and ‘American,’ like ‘race’ and ‘nation’ ” and “mess them up so bad no one has any idea what they even mean any more. Cuz, really, when you think about it, has anything human ever been pure?”

Hwang, once an adept player at identity politics and best known for his Tony Award-winning “M. Butterfly,” has come to realize that the roles ascribed by our race or ethnicity are just that -- roles we play. In “Yellow Face,” his doppelganger DHH concludes that even though he may know a lot about being Asian American, “the real work of ... life -- figuring out who you are, how to live -- had barely even begun.”

It’s liberating to get beyond the confines of ethnicity, but it’s also lonely. And the groan incident suggests that some will resist it fiercely. Still, a generation ago, Hwang’s -- or should I say DHH’s -- epiphany would have been greeted with an entire chorus of groans. Back then, the U.S. was in the throes of an ethnic renaissance, and a generation of young, college-educated baby boomers chose to wrap themselves up in their minority identities -- racial, ethnic, religious or sexual. On the verge of his 50th birthday, Hwang wonders whether he and others in his generation overestimated the role of ethnicity in making them who they are.

“I think there was a point in my life when I felt that understanding my ethnic identity was the key to knowing who I am,” he told me in an interview in a grim, prison-like room at the Taper. “But now I think that’s a limited point of view. Sure, it’s an essential part of our overall identity, but it’s not the whole answer. You can get struck there.”

Hwang isn’t naive enough to think that race no longer matters. Indeed, he believes that as China increasingly becomes the U.S.’ primary competitor, Chinese Americans and other Asian Americans may be ever more vulnerable to charges of divided loyalties because of their physical appearance.

He says identity politics -- standing together along racial or ethnic lines -- still serve a purpose to protect people from incidents like the Wen Ho Lee affair, in which Lee, a U.S. scientist, was wrongly accused of spying for China.

Hwang has learned that race and culture are not one and the same. “In the past, it was easier to assume that someone was of a particular culture based on their race. But that’s less and less true,” he told me.

When Hwang began writing plays in the late 1970s and early 1980s, everyone was searching for the “authentic Asian American voice,” and to many, he was it. But over time, being the singular voice of authenticity not only became a burden but a hindrance to his growth as an individual and an artist. “If you think you already have the answer or the truth, it keeps you from learning,” he said.

Now he sees one’s “community” as optional rather than inherited and absolute. “People should be able to choose where they belong,” he said.

And as globalization makes racial, ethnic and cultural identities increasingly more porous and complex, more will. But entering this brave new world will not be painless.

“Attaching yourself to a traditional identity can be affirming,” Hwang said. “There’s even a certain joy in self-objectification. Like grown children with their parents, it’s easier to fall into a role where you feel safe.” But there’s a price to pay.

Some might say the nation’s preeminent Asian American playwright has entered his post-multicultural phase. And they may be right. But Hwang doesn’t see it that way. To him, challenging notions of authenticity and testing the boundaries of inherited identity represent more an extension of multiculturalism than a repudiation.

“In the same way that multiculturalism posits that different groups experience reality differently. I’m saying that there is no uniform Asian American, black, white or Latino experience. If you accept the existence of multiple realities, then you can acknowledge the contradictions and ambiguities that exist within any community.”

It’s an eminently reasonable point, I know, but it’s taken us so long to get here.

grodriguez@latimescolumnists.com