US Hostipitality through the Lens of Chinese American Drama

The concept of hospitality at the global level has long been inseparable from the phenomenon of migration as a permanent feature of human history. Academics within different fields of study have used hospitality as a metaphor “to describe the often inhospitable, and even hostile, treatment by the state of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers” (Lynch and al. 15). Jacques Derrida’s portmanteau term ‘hostipitality’ emphasizes that hospitality always entails its opposite (hostility), since acts of hospitality toward some often exclude others. In the dramatic narrative of Chinese experience in the US, both the initial relative hospitality of the 1850s and the swift shift to violent racial politics culminating in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act were rooted in the vicissitudes of global capitalism and America’s expansionist aspirations. This paper explores how these moments of the official (un)welcome are represented in Chinese American drama, aiming to re-memory (and, hence, negotiate) the traumatic past through its stage re-enactment. The discussion focuses on three plays: Genny Lim’s Paper Angels (1980), David Henry Hwang’s FOB (1980), and Lloyd Suh’s The Far Country (2022). Lim’s play relies for its effect upon the unique socio-cultural fact—the poems inscribed by Chinese detainees on the walls of the West Coast immigration center on Angel Island; Hwang scrutinizes the uneasy relational dynamics between second-generation and more recent immigrants; Suh complements the dramatization of the ordeal of passing through strict immigration control with a transcontinental perspective. Each in its own way, the plays seem to bear out Lisa Lowe’s dictum that the emergence of Asian American culture as an alternative cultural site results from the state’s distancing Asian Americans from the terrain of national culture.