Ching Chong Chinaman by Lauren Yee portrays a Chinese-American family who are completely whitewashed and are racist to another Chinese man, who they call Ching Chong. Each character in the play eventually tries to discover their cultural identity and realize how they were trying to blend in so hard to American culture. The desire to try to be part of the majority manifested chaos in their family and led to shocking discoveries about who they really are. This can be shown through the eldest daughter of the family, Desdemona, who is trying to find her cultural identity through her application process to Princeton.
In the beginning of the play whilst taking a family portrait, Desdemona is illustrated as educated and conscious of social inequalities when her dad, Ed, tried to support the Manifest Destiny. In Scene 2 once the Chinese man enters, she also tries to tell her mom, Grace, that she cannot call the Chinese man, or J, “Ching Chong” since it’s a racial slur and that they cannot keep him here to be her brothers, Uptons, pet. Throughout all this, Desdemona is stressing out about her grade in BC Calculus and how Princeton cares about it.
However, Desdemona’s character starts to shift in perspective the longer J stays when she told Ed to not speak, look, or acknowledge J because he can’t speak English. In Scene 5, this is further deepened when Desdemona is going over her essay for Princeton about a Korean schoolgirl orphan named Kim Lee Park. At first the essay starts off as Desdemona being a savior for Kim Lee Park and helping her purchase a yak that kept her warm in the winter and providing her food and transportation. Then, when Desdemona needs more words and Kim Lee Park doesn’t want to help anymore, she slaps her and forces her to give more ideas. After this, Desdemona goes to Upton and tells him he can’t use J as an indentured servant unless J also does her math homework.
In Scene 11 when Desdemona is at her Princeton interview, she realizes she is not Chinese enough and tries to discover her identity and catch up on it. When Ed didn’t provide enough information on her Chinese heritage, she decided to do a DNA test and found out that her family is also Mexican. She then goes to Mexico for her quinceanera and tells her father she wants to be a person of “color” color. However, Desdemona finds out she’s adopted and is actually Korean and goes on a rampage but then calms down and ends the play with her and Upton saying Merry Christmas.
Desdemona’s character shocked me throughout this play because I expected her to act differently from her parents and to try to educate them on racial issues but in reality she was also participating in it. In each scene, we are revealed another aspect about her that makes her seem absurd. Her actions are aggressive because when she was stressed, she slapped her Korean “friend” and her overall attitude throughout the dialogue is seemingly ignorant. She tries to pretend to be educated and that she’s benefitting the world with her charity and insight when she’s actually just being insensitive by doing so. She tries so hard to be oppressed or to have something about her standout when she should have been trying to celebrate her own culture rather than others. This play really portrays how hard it is for families to try to conform to American culture and society and in the process they end up losing their own background because they just want to be accepted.
I appreciate your discussion of the ways in which Desdemona’s character was very insensitive in her battle to be oppressed. I think the loss of culture impacts people in many ways and I am sure many people share Desdemona’s mentality, so I think that is one of the reasons people should attempt to preserve their culture.
I was definitely perplexed by Desdemona’s character as well, especially throughout the beginn=ning of the play. It was comedic that she would try to be as “sensitive” as possible to Jinquiang’s situation when, in reality, she was the most dehumanizing towards him. She would tell everyone not to call him anything and not to even look in his direction. She also “thrusted” her calculus textbook at him because she couldn’t be within a couple of inches of him. Her character doesn’t even really have a resolution at the end, so I wonder if she is ever able to truly accept her identity and Jinquiang’s identity as well.
I agree with the way you described Desdemona’s character by discussing the lack of awareness and respect present in the way she carried herself. She treated Kim Lee Park with complete disrespect with only her own best interests in mind throughout the play.