David Henry Hwang was born on August 11, 1957 in Los Angeles, California. His father, Henry Hwang, was a banker who had immigrated to the United States from Shanghai, China, in the 1940s, and his mother Dorothy, also born in China, was a pianist and music teacher. Hwang grew up in an affluent suburb of Los Angeles. He enrolled at Stanford University in 1975, where he developed an interest in playwriting. It was while he was at Stanford that he wrote his first play, F.O.B. The letters stand for "fresh off the boat," and the play explores the contrast in cultural attitudes between a recently arrived Chinese immigrant to California and two Chinese-American students who have long since assimilated American ways. The exploration of the interaction of Eastern and Western culture was to become a prominent.....
