Jose Antonio Vargas on Urgency of Tony Nominee ‘Yellow Face’

In a recent viral video, a middle school bully is heard asking: “Where did that little ching chong go?”

The bully’s target is a five-year-old son of Chinese immigrants, seen and heard in the video trying to hide and asking to be saved.

Yes, kids can say nasty or mean things all the time, words and phrases they learn and pick up from somewhere, but this felt different. As I watched the video, I kept thinking, this kid is a mere “Yellowface” to the bully.

In Hollywood terms, Yellowface is to Asian people, particularly of East Asian descent, what Blackface is to Black people: an offensive practice of performance and mimicry. Examples abound, in varying degrees, from Jonathan Pryce, a white Welsh actor, wearing prosthetics to play a Eurasian character in the musical Miss Saigon, to the white British actor Tilda Swinton, who in the Marvel movie Doctor Strange was cast as The Ancient One, a character in the comic books as an elderly Asian man.

I offer another definition, apropos of the bullying incident, in a country where the population of people of Asian descent has more than doubled since 2000, now numbering at a record 25 million, according to the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. As a Filipino American who often gets mistaken for someone of another ethnicity (I remember a newspaper editor once telling me as I worked as a reporting intern, “Korean? Chinese? Japanese? I mean, you’re some kind of Asian!”), “Yellowface” is a flattening slur. It’s what happens when someone of Asian descent is treated as interchangeable from any other Asian ethnic group.

And David Henry Hwang, the playwright, offers the most damning of all definitions in his semi-autobiographical masterpiece Yellow Face, up for three Tony Awards next week, including best revival of a play. (Filmed by PBS as part of its Great Performances series, the play, starring Daniel Dae Kim and Francis Jue, both Tony-nominated, is available on PBS.org and other streaming services until June 30.)

In one crucial scene, Kim, playing DHH (David Henry Hwang), is being interviewed about his Chinese immigrant father, a prominent banker, by a New York Times reporter covering the 1990s Chinese banking investigations. “Does your father see himself as more American or more Chinese?” the reporter, played by Greg Keller, asks. He’s white. DHH fires back, turning the question inside out. “How about you? Do you see yourself as more American or more white?” A couple of lines later, the reporter says: “There’s no conflict between being white and being American.”

I gasped out loud, as did a few theatergoers around me at the Todd Haimes Theatre, where the play had its Broadway run. (A middle-aged white woman who told me later that she has followed Kim’s career since he starred in the TV hit Lost turned to me and asked: “Did he really just say that?”) This was in late October, just days before the election. Anticipation hung in the air, not only about the impending election and its consequences but at what was unfolding on stage. Like life itself, the play defies easy categorization, twisting and turning and surprising itself along the way as jowls of laughter fill the theater. Comedy does make the medicine go down.

The play starts off as a docudrama, then turns into a crazy backstage farce about the making of play, before it gets really political and personal, all at once. Deftly directed by Leigh Silverman (who helmed the original off-Broadway production in 2007), the play runs a blistering 100 minutes, with supporting actors playing characters of various racial backgrounds (Shannon Tyo, Marinda Anderson, Kevin Del Aguila, among them) who don’t look like them. When a white character named Marcus (played by Ryan Eggold) passes himself off as Asian — as DHH encourages him to do — you’d think you’re watching some version of Rachel Dolezal.

Yes, the David Henry Hwang who protested Miss Saigon for casting Pryce in an Asian role, created a character named DHH who then hires a white actor to play an Asian role. Hwang the playwright and DHH the actor spare no one, including himself. It takes an expert actor to juggle all the tonal changes in the piece, and Kim met the challenge, in the process becoming the first Asian American actor to be nominated for best performance by a leading actor in a play in the 78-year history of the Tonys.

Stripped bare, Hwang’s definition of Yellowface resides in who belongs in America, and who gets to define who is American, or American enough, for whom. And the space between the “Yellow” and “Face” in the title is deliberate — that space is where you, the viewer, and where Hwang, as the playwright, wrestle with ourselves. What kind of faces are we wearing to get to belong? And at what cost? 

You can see the cost both in Kim and Jue’s faces, as they portray father and son grappling with the promises and perils of America.

George C. Wolfe, the protean film, television and theater director, once said that movies are for stories (here’s the beginning, the middle, the end), television is for characters (you follow episode after episode) and theater is for ideas. Not many playwrights throw as many big ideas on stage about race, identity and belonging as Hwang. At a time that demands greater introspection of ourselves, we are all the better for it. 

I wish I could tell the kids bullying that 5-year-old in that video: We are more than yellow faces.

Jose Antonio Vargas is a journalist, documentary filmmaker and theater producer and the founder of the immigration organization Define American.