STORY STUDY - MEDIUM: THEATRE - “The Year of the Dragon”
What do you do when you’re torn between the two countries that define you as a person? Is choosing at all the right decision?
Written by Frank Chin, The Year of the Dragon is the story of the Eng family. Fred Eng runs his father’s tour guide business, a decision he loathes because that meant giving up his dreams of being a writer and dropping out of college. What’s worse is that his father, Wing doesn’t understand that he dropped out of college just for him.
Another plotline that runs is that Wing has brought over his first wife (Fred’s birth mother) from China (thanks to new immigration laws), which makes his current wife feel betrayed. Regardless, Wing has announced that he wants to split his family and wants his first wife and Fred to be with him, favoring his “Chinese” family over his “American” one, which consists of his second wife, a daughter, and a younger son.
The play is meant to break the stereotypes that white audiences at the time (1974) had believed in Chinese Americans: Children and wives are not obedient to their fathers, and Chinese-American children have no desire to move to China.
Personally, I’m unaware of the latter being a stereotype, but as for the former, I’m very aware of it. Luckily, as generations go by, having to make your own path and not be tied down to making decisions solely because they are “family” is getting easier. It’ll still be tough, but we do see more cases of it.
One of the tropes I hate in stories is the overbearing parents. I know it comes off as whiny when children say “parents don’t understand”, but his actions are just selfish. Because he thinks he’s the patriarch, he thinks that his first-born son is dedicated to him and that he doesn’t have (or even deserve) a life of his own. It’s even to the point where he doesn’t understand or appreciate he made sacrifices for him. In an antagonist, you want him to be formidable and just deplorable, and this play got it.
I actually took an Asian-American in film class in college, and I came across not this play, but Frank Chin himself when I was shown a documentary that had him being interviewed. He stood out because he was the only one who had a voice that was unfiltered when it came down to the racism of Asians and Asian-Americans in Hollywood, and this was a documentary that came out (I believe) in the 1990s.
After looking him up, I found out that he was an author and a playwright of two plays: The Chickencoop Chinaman and The Year of the Dragon, both having similar themes.
I have not seen the play, and frankly, it’s not a play that’s performed very often. However, the play was filmed for television in 1975, and that’s the production I watched. You get the situation right away, with Fred doing his tour guide to American tourists in San Francisco, and right after leading them into a Chinese restaurant, he switches his voice to that of bitter disgust for these tourists.
The Year of the Dragon is a harsh play written by a controversial author, and performed so heartbreaking and good, so it is definitely not for everyone. In fact, there’s even going to be a generation that probably disagrees with the intention of the play’s existence. However, I feel that the play’s characters within the context of the plot resonate throughout many generations, therefore making it easy to relate to.
Take the tour, and check it out.
