David Henry Hwang talks hate, sex, yellow face and faith
On a recent visit to Hong Kong, and nine months after he survived being stabbed in the head near his New York home, the award-winning American dramatist reflected on his life and work
ON A LATE NOVEMBER night in 2015, David Henry Hwang, the playwright probably best known for his 1988 Tony Award-winning M. Butterfly, nipped out to get some groceries. He and his family had just come back from a Thanksgiving trip and the fridge needed restocking. They live in Fort Greene, in the New York borough of Brooklyn. The neighbourhood has a website, fortgreenefocus.com, and if you search it you can find a closed-circuit television photo taken that evening a few seconds before what happened at about 9pm.
The setting: a street corner by a leafy park. Enter two men. One, slightly hunched, is carrying a white shopping bag in his right hand: that’s Hwang. The other is younger, taller, wearing shorts and a backpack: that’s the man who stabbed him in the head.
In the ensuing scene, immediate dialogue is confined to a yelled expletive from Hwang. The young man exits at speed, not pursued by Hwang, who decides to keep heading for home. Considerable loss of blood makes him wobbly: he sidles into a wall and a parked car. Still, he’s remarkably clear-headed. He leaves the shopping inside his front door, calls out to his family that he’s been attacked and continues tottering on, to the hospital. (In the piece he wrote about it for The New York Times in January he concedes, “I realise that dropping off the groceries was a bit over the top.”)
His daughter, Eva, 15, and his wife, Kathryn Layng, run after him. Layng, the actress who played Nurse Mary Margaret “Curly” Spaulding in Doogie Howser, MD, calls out to medical staff at the hospital entrance. They take him into the building. A real-life medical drama ensues.
Hwang, 58, was lucky to survive. His vertebral artery had been severed, and the injury was so close to the skull he had to be taken by ambulance to another hospital for surgery. The police came to interview him several times but his assailant has never been caught. In the Times article, he speculates about hate crime. He mentions a 16-year-old Chinese exchange student, slashed in the face on her way to school in Queens two weeks after his attack. He has learned, he writes, that “Asians are seen as easy targets because of perceived language barriers and a reluctance to report crimes”.
Eight months on, does he still think it might have been a hate crime?