SOURCE: Moy, James S. “Flawed Self-Representations: Authenticating Chinese American Marginality.” In Marginal Sights: Staging the Chinese in America, pp. 115-29. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993.

In the following essay, Moy examines the playwrights' intent to denounce common Asian stereotypes in Hwang's M. Butterfly and FOB and Philip Kan Gotanda's Yankee Dawg You Die. Moy contends that by targeting Anglo-American audiences, the plays simply reinforce these fallacies and at times create new stereotypes that further marginalize Asian Americans from mainstream culture.

One thinks one is tracing the outline of the thing's nature over and over again, and one is merely tracing around the frame through which we look at it. … A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein

The extent to which socially conscious drama can emerge...