"If I knew there was going to be a show with Asian characters, I went out of my way not to watch it," Hwang said. "Even as a child, I'd feel that the depictions of Asians, of people who looked like me, were categorized as inhuman. They didn't seem like human beings."
On Monday, Hwang, a Tony Award winner for "M. Butterfly," spoke about the issues of culture, race, ethnicity and identity that resonated with him in a lecture in Filene Auditorium. Much of his career took off after he began understanding the way these themes had impacted his life.
"Writing is a means of discovering," Hwang said. "These discoveries can be personal, like self-discoveries. But they can also take into account the world around us in the form of social or political discoveries."
As a child of the 60's and 70's who grew up in southern California, Hwang felt a disconnect from these Asian people as depicted in the media.
"These people had faces similar to mine, and I knew as a result, they would be associated with me," Hwang said. "But I felt this disjunction because they had no relationship to me and how I felt inside."
Determined to change the impressions surrounding Asian-Americans, Hwang set out to redefine the Asian stereotype that was often depicted in popular media. He hoped to show the public that the Asian male could be portrayed as confident and suave, even if Hwang's characters were written to struggle with broken English.
Hwang began writing in his freshman year at Stanford University and regularly went to San Francisco to watch theater productions. With the help of his professors, Hwang received training in the art and eventually made it onto Broadway. He is best known for his plays "Yellow Face" and "Chinglish."
Theater professor Soyica Colbert said she was excited to feature a playwright who is so often featured in the College's curriculum.
"Every time I've taught American drama, M. Butterfly' has been on the reading list," she said. "It's been so well-received as a post-modern drama. He's been a fixture of the American drama canon since the 80's when that play first premiered in New York. He's such a natural fit in regards to what we teach in our English and Drama department."
Colbert added that Hwang's emphasis on global communication proved especially relevant to the Dartmouth community.
"'Chinglish' is about how we communicate with each other," Colbert said. "The larger question is what gets lost in translation and what can't be translated in that we don't always understand each other perfectly. But the point is, we can try to collaborate."
Marco Herndon '16 found the discussion of the writing process particularly enlightening.
"I really enjoyed hearing his description of the trajectory that led him to his first play," Herndon said. "He really spoke to the fact that it comes from an inner instinct, like an instinctual act."
Hwang closed his discussion with some advice for students.
"As we become artists and as we write, we have to give ourselves permission to fail, because if you don't fail, you're not working hard enough," Hwang said. "If you're not trying new things, you're not going to have these new things."
Hwang emphasize the importance of exploring the undiscovered and reflecting on the past.
"It is easy to talk about successes," Hwang said. "But in some ways, it is more important to talk about failures, because that's where we learn."
The lecture, called "How I Learned to Write What I Don't Know," was hosted by the Asian American Conference Series and the Leslie Center for the Humanities.
