ABSTRACT
The 1970s saw not only the emergence of Asian American playwrights, but the beginning of the rift between male and female writers in terms of their style and choice of content. The two major EWP productions in the 1970s, Frank Chin’s The Year of the Dragon and Wakako Yamauchi’s And the Soul Shall Dance, exemplified the two opposite poles created in the gender differences in Asian American literature. The conflicts between “male writings” and “female writings” continued to be the current debate. In Asian American literature (including drama), the gulf between male and female authors’ ideology and their vision of race and gender has often evoked antagonism and misunderstanding. The hostility became extremely visible when Asian American male writers, such as Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Hasu Wong, emphasized the importance of reclaiming Asian American manhood in the early 1970s. Maintaining the position of cultural nationalists, they published the first Asian American anthology entitled Aiiieeeee! 1 This anthology includes works by Asian American male authors who condemned effeminate stereotypes perpetuated in American society and culture. In the introduction to the anthology, Chin and his co-editors state:
The white stereotype of the acceptable and unacceptable Asian is utterly without manhood. Good or bad, the stereotypical Asian is nothing as a man. At worst, the Asian American is contemptible because he is womanly, effeminate, devoid of all the traditionally masculine qualities of originality, daring physical courage, and creativity. (15)
