In this metaphorical sense, Street contends, Hwang is as obsessed with wildness, settlement, justice, civility, and honor as any other writer of the American West.
Still, Hwang's reputation as a Western American author is primarily dependent on his second commercially successful play, The Dance and the Railroad, initially produced in 1981. A postmodernist glimpse at nineteenth-century Chinese male laborers, the play features only two characters, employed on the Pacific stretch of the transcontinental railroad. For the younger of the two, idealistic and romantic, the American West is in every sense the Gold Mountain, a dreamland where men become rich overnight. For the older, the American West is all too real, a beautiful but terrible country with potentially devastating spiritual liabilities. While the younger never questions that he will return to China, the older has accepted a grim reality that he may grow old and die on land that will forever be foreign to him. Hwang's purpose in the play is threefold: first, to emphasize the role played by Chinese American males in the exploration and development of the American West; second, to suggest the attributes of early Chinese American laborers who endured the oppression of white bosses, withstood all that nature threw at them in the Sierra Nevada, and--psychologically and physically intact--survived the whole of the railroad experience; and finally, to fashion a mythos, an historical center, to which contemporary Chinese American males can look for identity and purpose.
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