The play Ching Chong Chinaman, written by Lauren Yee, highlights several personal conflicts and developments through the use of dramatic irony and comedy. Desdemona, the daughter of Ed and Grace, was tightly focused on achieving her goal of being accepted into Princeton. Throughout the play, Yee uses irony in order to bring to the audiences’ attention the lengths that a student might go to in order to attempt to stand out against other applicants. Her burning desire to get into this school and to pursue the American Dream also caused her to be incredibly disrespectful to Kim Lee Park, who was a seventeen year old Korean orphan who she was sponsoring.

Over the course of the play, Desdemona turned much of her attention to what she could use for her college applications in order to create a sob-story or to stand out. To include topics such as teen marriage, drug abuse, adultery and a unique background were all appealing to her. This relates to the issue in the American college application process today, where students deliberately try to use a quirky or devastating topic in order to increase their chances of being accepted into a top college. The play also hinted at the theme of having selfish intentions behind seemingly good actions through the absurd interaction between Desdemona and Kim Lee Park in scene 5. Desdemona exploited Kim’s personal story of being abandoned by her mother for her own personal gain in order to create a certain image in the eyes of admissions officers. When Kim was too tired to help Desdemona write an essay that was written with no sense of respect toward Kim’s circumstances, Desdemona called her a “stupid girl” and guilted her into continuing.

Yee’s goals to highlight this personal struggle for Desdemona became especially evident when she ended up being admitted to Princeton and finding out that she herself is adopted from Korea immediately afterwards. This not only proved to her that she did not need to search deeply for a ‘unique enough’ background, but also that she should have been more respectful toward Kim’s background. Desdemona developed a superiority complex, believing that her personal goal of attending an elite institution was far above what someone in Kim’s position could achieve. The American Dream rests on the reputation that immigrants who came from nearly nothing work their way up to success. Desdemona was an example of how people in today’s society fight to stand out using their backgrounds as support, while completely disregarding the true hardships that actually accompany being part of a certain community. Her superficial standpoint on how she viewed her culture was a character flaw that Yee worked to bright to light.