C.Y. Lee (author)

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C.Y. Lee is the author of the best selling 1957 novel Flower Drum Song. The novel became a Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical which opened in 1958, is itself adapted from C. Y. Lee's novel The Flower Drum Song published in 1957. The original production was the first Broadway show to feature Asian American players. The 1961 film jump-started the careers of the first generation of Asian American actors, including Nancy Kwan, James Shigeta, and Jack Soo. On October 2, 2001, the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles premiered David Henry Hwang's adaptation of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Flower Drum Song to glowing reviews, in the first production that literally was an all-Asian cast of actors and voices. Its initial run was extended, and after several months, the production moved to Broadway.

Lee was born in 1917 in China. C. Y. Lee arrived in the United States in 1943 and graduated from Yale in 1947 with an MFA in playwriting. He was a contributor to Radio Free Asia. Lee was a journalist working for two San Francisco Chinatown newspapers Chinese World and Young China when he penned his landmark tale of generational and cross-cultural conflict in the early 1950s. He lived in San Francisco's Chinatown to turn his short story into a novel. It was he who suggested going to Forbidden City to watch Asians sing and dance, with Jack Soo quitting his job as emcee to perform in the Broadway production.

C. Y. Lee's work has been overlooked because some observers felt that Flower Drum Song perpetuated Orientalist stereotypes of Asians. The novel was a New York Times bestseller, but quickly went out of print. The first ethnic studies programs in the late 1960s did not accept Lee's playful vision of mixing Chinese and American traditions. For many years the book was rejected by young Asian Americans as being "too white face" or "Uncle Tom". C.Y. Lee was a Chinese immigrant and wrote of the society as he saw it at that time, perhaps an example of the very generation gap portrayed in the musical. While mainstream America had fueled Lee's initial success, the new Asian American movement's consciousness-raising had all but buried Lee's evocation of the Chinese experience in America.^[1] Hwang updated the Lee's book to reflect the social changes that have impacted Asian Americans, while retaining the original's spirit. Reviews of Hwang's version were mixed. Hwang would defend his version saying that he wrote it as if it were written by an Asian American, but C.Y. Lee was an Asian American, though not one educated after the Civil Rights Era. Largely in conjunction with the revival, the novel was made available again as a reprint, though copies signed by the author in 1958 are greatly prized.

Lee, still living, was interviewed on the 2006 DVD release of the movie, and worked with Hwang in the rewriting of the musical.

Contents 1 Works by C. Y. Lee 2 Sources 3 External links 4 References

[edit] Works by C. Y. Lee

• 1957 The Flower Drum Song. Lee's novel about generational conflict within an Asian American family over an arranged marriage in San Francisco's Chinatown
• 1958 musical by Rodgers and Hammerstein in 1958.
• Lover's Point (1958)
• Madame Goldenflower (1960)
• The Second Son of Heaven (1990)
• Gate of Rage (1991)

[edit] Sources

• The Chronology of American Literature, edited by Daniel S. Burt. Copyright © 2004 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company.

[edit] External links

• Flower Drum Song, Dec. 4, 2002, The Maynard Institute
• Flower Drum Song reviews on Amazon

[edit] References

1. ^ Andrew Shin, "Forty percent is luck": an interview with C. Y. Lee, MELUS, Summer 2004