The Flower Drum Song
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE FLOWER DRUM SONG
Chin Y. Lee was born in Hunan, China, in 1917. He received his B.A. from the National Southwest Associated University, Kunming, China, in 1940. He came to the United States in 1943 and attended Yale University, graduating in 1947 with his M.F.A. in playwriting. In San Francisco, he worked as city editor for the newspapers Chinese World and Young China, as well as a feature program writer for Radio Free Asia. The Flower Drum Song, published in 1957, was his first novel, and was the basis for a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical that ran on Broadway and subsequently became a film. Lee has published a number of other novels, and his stories and articles have appeared in The New Yorker, Theatre Arts, Writer’s Digest, and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, among others. He has worked as a scriptwriter for Twentieth Century Fox. His honors include a California Commonwealth Club Gold Medal Fiction Award, a San Francisco Press Club and Union League Annual Award, a Writer’s Guild Annual Award for Writing Achievement, a Box Office Blue Ribbon Award, and the key to the City of San Francisco. A C. Y. Lee Archive has been established at Boston University’s Mugar Memorial Library. Lee lives in Alhambra, California.
David Henry Hwang was awarded the 1988 Tony, Drama Desk, Outer Critics, and John Gassner awards for his Broadway debut play, M. Butterfly, which was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His other plays include FOB, which won a 1981 OBIE Award, and Golden Child, which received a 1998 Tony nomination and a 1997 OBIE Award. He co-wrote the book for the Broadway production of Aida; his libretti include two for composer Philip Glass; and he has written screenplays for M. Butterfly, Golden Gate, and Possession. Hwang wrote a new book for the revival of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Flower Drum Song, which premiered in 2001. He lives in New York City.
The
Flower Drum
Song
by C. Y. Lee
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in the United States of America by Farrar, Straus and Cudahy 1957
This edition with an introduction by David Henry Hwang and a new author’s note published in Penguin Books 2002
Copyright © C. Y. Lee, 1957, 2002
Introduction copyright © David Henry Hwang, 2002
All rights reserved
A portion of this book in a slightly different form appeared originally in The New Yorker.
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint selections from The Flower Drum and Other Chinese Songs by Shih-Hsiang Chen.
Copyright 1943 by Shih-Hsiang Chen and Chin-Hsin Yao Chen.
Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
CIP data available
ISBN: 978-1-101-66486-5
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Cover design: Jesse Marinoff Reyes
Cover painting by Hector Garrido based upon his painting done for the original Dell paperback edition
Version_1
To the Staff
of the Yale Drama School
and Drama 47
Table of Contents
Author’s Note
Introduction
PART ONE
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
PART TWO
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
Author’s Note
In the late forties, Chinatown in Los Angeles was a roofed bazaar the size of two football fields. I’d moved there after escaping China during the Second World War on a student visa and subsequently finding that the Master’s in Fine Arts I had from Yale wasn’t helpful in making me a successful playwright or getting a job at the U.N. as an interpreter.
One morning, as I was having my daily 25-cent bowl of noodles, I read an announcement in the Chinese World that would turn my life around. The paper was preparing to publish an English section and needed a columnist. I went home and wrote two sample manuscripts, naming my proposed column “So I Say.” A week later, I received a check for ten dollars and a letter from the editor asking me to submit five columns a week, for which he would pay me $5 each. I calculated on my fingers: $25 a week would buy a lot of noodles. I threw my arms into the air and cheered. For the first time in my life I could make money from writing.
I wrote about life, love, and emotions to appeal to the younger generation who could read English, and my column became quite popular. I was promoted to assistant editor and, in addition to my regular column, began translating some news stories from the American papers. The paper was based in San Francisco, and I could move there if I was interested. I moved immediately.
Mr. Li Ta-Ming’s Chinese World occupied a large upstairs room on Grand Avenue in San Francisco. It was crowded, busy, and noisy. My duties now included searching for some city scandals from the English papers—and inventing a few if necessary. I rented a little room above a Filipino nightclub on Kearney Street, a short walk from the office. The room was cheap because of the noise from the club. I settled into San Francisco life and began my first novel.
One afternoon, just as I finished that day’s column, I received a call from a man with a gravelly voice. He started asking me all kinds of questions, and I immediately thought he was from the Immigration Service. “Officer,” I said, “I’m all packed. Deport me any time.” The caller didn’t know what I was talking about. It turned out he was the editor of Writer’s Digest informing me that I had won first prize in their short story contest. He wanted to make sure I was the right Lee before he sent me the prize money of $750. When the editor’s formal letter and check arrived, I brought them to the Immigration Service to apply for an extension of stay. The pokerfaced officer studied my case, shoved some papers at me and told me to fill them in and sign. They were papers for permanent residence. If approved, I could become an American citizen in five years.
I finished my novel and found an agent, Ann Elmo, to represent it. Ann called one summer day to give me an update: my novel, The Flower Drum Song, had been turned down by almost every major publisher in New York. She hinted that after one more rejection, she would return it and I should think of another line of occupation. A week later she called again and said, “Keep writing, Lee. A highbrow publisher, Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, has bought your book.” She added that the publisher liked it because it was quaint and episodic—the very reasons the other publishers had turned it down.
A month later I took a trip to New York and had a chance to meet John Farr
ar, my editor and a senior partner at the publishing house. He told me that my manuscript of The Flower Drum Song had first landed on the sick bed of an eighty-year-old reader who worked for the publisher screening submissions. The elderly gentleman, having finished the book, didn’t have enough energy to write a detailed critique. With his last bit of strength, he scribbled on the dog-eared cover, “Read This,” and died. I especially enjoyed retelling this story when The Flower Drum Song climbed onto The New York Times bestseller list. Radio Free Asia soon offered me a job. I took it and resigned from the newspaper, but I still kept that cheap room on Kearney Street.
One late afternoon Ann Elmo called me from New York with some good news. There were quite a few nibbles for The Flower Drum Song, and two of them were very promising. A Broadway producer had offered $3,000 to option the book for two years to make a stage play, and an independent Hollywood producer had offered $50,000 to buy all the dramatic rights outright, including film. Ann wanted me to choose one of these two offers. I promised my agent that I would give her my answer the next morning.
That night I didn’t write. I returned to my room to think things over. If I took the $3,000 I could collect future royalties from the play. If the play failed, though, I wouldn’t get anything but the $3,000. If I accepted the Hollywood producer’s money, I would be quite rich for a while. I could move to Nob Hill, take a trip to Europe, and come home with plenty of money left in the bank. For a while.
I lay on my squeaky bed and stared at the ceiling. For the first time I didn’t mind the roof-shaking music; it gave my room a festive mood. I could have jumped at the guaranteed big money, and yet, something seemed to hold me back. My frugal nature and my desire for instant security were pushing me one way, but something else, maybe a gambling gene telling me to throw the dice, was pulling me the other way. Finally, I decided to get a drink. I went downstairs and bought a Budweiser, the best in the Filipino nightclub. Sipping my beer from the bottle, I began to relax, then I began to feel good. I even forgot I had a problem to solve.
I don’t know what happened to me that night. I might have gotten drunk and dozed off or made some drunken disturbance that was safely covered by the worse noises from downstairs. The next morning I woke up with a hangover, a little ashamed that only one beer could have conked me out. When I remembered my dilemma, the phone rang. It was Ann Elmo, calling to congratulate me on having made the right decision.
C.Y. Lee
Introduction
As a child growing up in Los Angeles during the 1960s, I developed a somewhat curious practice: if I heard that a particular movie or television show featured Asian characters, I would go out of my way not to watch it. I would not have been able to articulate a reason for my behavior, other than the fact that the images made me feel “icky.” This was a time when Asian characters in American popular culture could be generally characterized as “inhuman,” either inhumanly bad (e.g. Fu Manchu; evil Japanese, Korean, or Vietnamese soldiers, take your pick) or inhumanly good (e.g. Charlie Chan; the plethora of Asian women who died for the love of a white B-movie actor). Some of these odd creatures who looked like me served as the butt of derisive humor, due to their grotesque mannerisms, bizarre customs, and an endlessly amusing inability to distinguish between the letters r and l. Yet one work stood as an exception: I can’t recall the first time I encountered Flower Drum Song—not the novel or the Rodgers & Hammerstein stage musical, but the 1961 film version of that Broadway show. It was no doubt on some late-night television movie, and I was pleasantly shocked: here were Asians who spoke without an accent, in a love story between Asian men and Asian women, singing and dancing up a storm to beautiful, relatively hip music. For Asian American baby-boomers like me, this portrayal was, for its time, nothing short of revolutionary.
By the time I attended college in the late 1970s, campuses were buzzing with artists and activists representing Americans whose voices had been ignored or marginalized by mainstream society. We sought our own revolution, to shake up a literary establishment that considered, for example, the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald to be true literature, while those of Toni Morrison were merely ethnic works of limited appeal. We agitated for the right of Asian American writers to define our own identities and communities, rather than permitting these images to be drawn by the dominant (i.e. Caucasian) society, which had done such a poor job of portraying us in my youth. As part of this movement, we condemned (rather simplistically) virtually all portrayals of Asian Americans that had been created by non-Asians. So I ended up protesting Flower Drum Song, which had become associated almost exclusively with the movie and musical, as “inauthentic.” But even at such political gatherings, if I took a protester aside privately, he might well reply, “Actually, I sort of like it.” The movie remained a guilty pleasure for many of us, even at our most politically extreme.
By the early-1980s, the few who did recall that Rodgers & Hammerstein had drawn upon source material by an immigrant Chinese American chose to ignore it. As I began discovering my own voice as a writer, Asian American Studies classes were springing up around the country. We were searching for our own literary history, works neither white American nor foreign Asian, but specifically Asian American. Writers and scholars rediscovered John Okada’s No No Boy (1957) and Louis Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea (1961). C.Y. Lee’s The Flower Drum Song (1957), however, was neither reclaimed nor celebrated. A new generation of scholars began to compile what would eventually become an Asian American literary canon, but omitted this prominent Chinese American novel.
The omission was deliberate, I believe, resulting from two realities of that period. Foremost was the novel’s association with the musical and movie. To the extent that we discredited the musical Flower Drum Song as inauthentic, the novel became tainted by association; the unsophisticated politics of that period could not accommodate such a distinction. Second was a reverse-snobbery whereby the very success of the novel in the general marketplace rendered it suspect as an example of true Asian American literature. This sort of prejudice is not limited to ethnic studies scholars. It often happens in mainstream circles that a critically acclaimed artist is abandoned by his allies after achieving popular success: if the masses like it, how artistic could it be? Similarly, Asian American critics might have argued that if white readers had liked The Flower Drum Song, how “authentic” could it be?
By the mid-1990s, when I began to consider writing a remake of the musical Flower Drum Song, the novel had more or less vanished from both mainstream and Asian American consciousness. A few scholars, such as the late Amy Ling of the University of Wisconsin, were brave enough to buck the tide of fashion by writing about author Chin Yang Lee, but by and large his first novel and his subsequent ten works were ignored by both English Literature and Asian American Studies departments. (An exception was Boston University, where a C.Y. Lee Archive was established at Mugar Memorial Library.) Lee’s body of work as well as his literary reputation have long been secure in Taiwan, but when I looked for the novel that had inspired Rodgers & Hammerstein here in America, I found it virtually impossible to obtain a copy. Luckily, through a mutual friend, I obtained a used copy from the invaluable Seattle bookseller David Ishii. I pulled the well-preserved hardcover from its mailing paper and sat down to investigate this forgotten novel with the world-famous title.
With the turn of each page, I grew increasingly moved and excited. I had not experienced a feeling like this since I first picked up Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976) as a college student. Here were characters, cultures, and situations that I knew well but had never expected to encounter so intimately on a published page. Yet there were differences between my Lee and Kingston experiences. In the 1970s, I was a young aspiring writer at a time when any Asian American work was still a rarity. By the late 1990s, I had become a middle-aged playwright, and in the intervening years had witnessed a blossoming of Asian American writing, much of it to critical and popular acclaim. My experience with The Flower Drum Song,
therefore, was like discovering a long-lost ancestor, a forgotten branch of my family tree, a missing piece of literary history for which I felt particular affinity.
I sought out the author, who was by then in his seventies and living in southern California. Spry, affable, and sporting a mischievous smile, C.Y. Lee met me for lunch in the Los Angeles suburb of Monterey Park, home to a large and growing Chinese community. Over dishes of the type featured in the novel, he described the humorous and providential manner by which this novel came to be, stories he’d no doubt recounted most of his life, but which still seemed fresh. Lee had come from China as a foreign student and graduated from Yale Drama School. Upon the advice of an agent, who told him plays about China would never sell, Lee switched to prose, and lived in a small room above a Filipino restaurant in San Francisco’s Chinatown, eking out a living editing a Cantonese newspaper and waiting for immigration to deport him when his student visa expired. It was the Writer’s Digest short story prize that allowed him to stay, and the sale of his novel to a New York publisher that was a turning point in his life.
Lee’s stories of the mainstream success following publication felt familiar and touching to me. Playwright and screenwriter Joseph Fields, author of works such as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Wonderful Town, optioned the book, and then persuaded the A-team of the American musical theater, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, to adapt the work with him for the stage. Lee was shepherded around Hollywood, where Edward G. Robinson met him with the pitch, “I want to play the Chinaman.” Lee was in his early forties when his novel was published, about the same age as I was on the occasion of our first lunch. I felt I was meeting a father figure in more ways than one.
A strong case can be made for The Flower Drum Song as the first Chinese American novel to be released by an established publishing house. Works by Chinese American authors in English had been published prior to The Flower Drum Song’s appearance in 1957, and some, like Pardee Lowe’s Father and Glorious Descendant (1943) and Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter (1950), had attracted substantial readerships. But these were memoirs that, as noted by scholars such as Jeffrey Paul Chan, essentially followed the form established by a single antecedent, Yung Wing’s My Life in China and America (1909). While it is fair to assume that elements of Lee’s work are autobiographical (an assumption reasonably applied to many works of fiction), his is clearly a novel, and it predates the publication of Eat a Bowl of Tea. As such, whether by design or happenstance, The Flower Drum Song represents the birth of a new literary genre, one which has since blossomed into a vital and prospering form. Add to this the fact that it became a bestseller and was translated into a popular dramatic form, and the impact of this work upon American culture, as well as on a nascent Asian American consciousness, can hardly be overstated.