David Henry Hwang was born on August 11, 1957, in Los Angeles, California, to his immigrant parents, Henry Yuan, a native of Shanghai, China, and Dorothy (Huang) Hwang, who was born in China but raised in the Philippines. Hwang's mother and father met after immigrating to the United States and while attending the University of Southern California, where his mother studied music and his father majored in business. Although the theme of Chinese ancestry has played an important role in many of Hwang's works, he has said that his ethnicity was not a significant concern as he was growing up.

While attending Stanford University, where he earned a bachelor of arts degree in English in 1979, Hwang became involved in a search of his cultural roots and took an interest in what it meant to be an immigrant. Also, while at Stanford, Hwang wrote his first play, F.O...