Yellow Face

“So I came to China, hoping to find—something real, true? I’m not even sure. All I know is, my life back home, it used to have purpose, a direction I really believed in—but I lost all that.”

After confessing to lying about his ethnicity, Marcus loses his standing in the Asian American community where he found a sense of belonging and purpose. He fetishizes China as a place of origins and authenticity, and the play explores the fluid and ever-changing dimensions of cultural identity and how claims to the “real” and “true” can end up reinforcing stereotypes and essentialism. Marcus feels that he has lost something he “really believed in,” but he fails to understand that he did not need to pretend to be of Asian descent to be an advocate for Asian Americans.

“One night in Shanghai, a city so futuristic it makes Blade Runner look quaint, another ‘waiguoren’—another ‘foreigner’—told me where I could find ‘the soul of China.’”

Marcus meets other foreigners in China who give him advice on where to find the “true” China. Shanghai, with its modern cityscape, upsets the tourists’ orientalist binary of the “East” as ancient and “exotic” and the “West” as modern and advanced. Marcus is directed to the remote highlands of the Dong as a location that represents the core of China’s identity with the assumption that because people in Shanghai live more modern lives, they are somehow less authentic.

“But for the most part, the story of a minor figure in a couple of discredited scandals disappeared after one or two press cycles. Blink and you would’ve missed it.”

DHH comments on how Asian Americans are rarely featured in the mainstream media and how the press and the general public can quickly lose interest in Asian American scandals.