Flower Drum Song

Flower Drum Song is a 1957 realist novel by C. Y. (Chin Yang) Lee, set in San Francisco's Chinatown of the 1950s. The author was born in Hunan, China, in 1917. He left in 1943 to pursue a masters of fine arts degree from Yale University. Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein's 1958 Broadway musical version and Joseph Field's screen adaptation in 1961 soon overshadowed Lee's novel. The musical was taken to London in 1961. In 2001, David Henry Hwang introduced significant modifications to his revival of the Rodgers and Hammerstein production, including an attempt to bring back some of the darker threads of the novel.

The popularity of the musical and film with audiences has lessened through the decades; scholarly reception of both versions has been consistently negative, specifically with regard to the racist stereotypes of Chinese Americans and the depiction of Chinatown as exotic and alien. Hwang's revival, despite its parodies of stereotypes and other attempts to bring the musical in line with contemporary attitudes toward race, seems not to have attracted much scholarly attention. The only book-length work to trace the four texts is David H. Lewis's Flower Drum Songs: The Story of Two Musicals, a compilation of newspaper reviews, interviews, hearsay, and reportage from trade publications.

All four works should be considered within the context of national and global political situations; the novel and the revival in particular afford insights into the evolution of Asian American self-representation and sense of social and political agency in relation to shifting national and global realpolitik. C. Y. Lee's novel predates such canonical literary texts as Louis Chu's Eat a Bowl of Tea, Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior, and Fae Myenne Ng's Bone; the most notable and recent addition to this list is Karen Tei Yamashita's multi-genre narrative, I Hotel. Actually, Flower Drum Song was not the first [Page 886]narrative on Chinatowns: Jade Snow Wong's Fifth Chinese Daughter was published in 1950, and Pardee Lowe's autobiography, Father and Glorious Descendent, in 1943.

Asian American scholarship, beginning with the rise of American “ethnic” activism in the 1960s and the emergence of postcolonial theory, critiques racist stereotypes of Asian American and other minority groups. Lee's novel, like the ones by Lowe and Wong, includes stereotypes of Chinatowns and Chinese immigrants and participates in reductive portrayals of the phenomenon of assimilation. However, the darker elements in Lee's novel, similar to Chu's or Hong Kingston's narratives, debunk the myth of Asian Americans as the model minority and the implications of that myth.

C. Y. Lee's novel depicts a bifurcated world: “white,” mainstream America and San Francisco's Chinatown, which constitutes the daily reality of Chinese immigrants, while their American-born children grow up “Americanized” and grow away from their parents’ heritage. Lee characterizes Wang Chi-yang, the main character, as a traditionalist, with both feet in prerevolutionary China. Wang Chi-yang and Wang Ta, the eldest son, and Wang San, the younger and even more Americanized son, epitomize the contrasts between the east and the West, between what is cast in the narrative as the old versus the new. In Lee's novel, assimilation into mainstream culture is as inevitable as the next generation succeeding the previous one. The existential angst is in Wang Chi-yang and not in his sons. For them, mainstream culture is their culture.

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