Name C. Lee Role Author | Education Yale University | |
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Books The Flower Drum Song, The virgin market | ||
Chin Yang Lee (simplified Chinese: 黎锦扬; traditional Chinese: 黎錦揚; pinyin: Lí Jǐnyáng; born December 23, 1917) is a Chinese American author best known for his 1957 novel The Flower Drum Song, which inspired the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Flower Drum Song and writer for his 2006 film 10,000 Apologies with May Wang.
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Biography
Lee was born 1917 in Hunan, China, into a family of artists and scholars. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Xi'nan University, then emigrated to the United States of America in 1943 and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in playwriting from Yale University in 1947. He was a contributor to Radio Free Asia. Lee was a journalist living in and working for two San Francisco Chinatown newspapers, Chinese World and Young China at the time, in the early 1950s, when he was writing Flower Drum Song, expanding it from a short story to a novel. He currently lives in Alhambra, California.
The Flower Drum Song
By the 1950s, Lee was barely making a living writing short stories and working as a Chinese teacher, translator and journalist for San Francisco Chinatown newspapers. He had hoped to break into playwriting, but instead wrote a novel about Chinatown, The Flower Drum Song (originally titled Grant Avenue). Lee initially had no success selling his novel, but his agent submitted it to the publishing house of Farrar, Straus and Cudahy. The firm sent the manuscript to an elderly reader for evaluation. The reader was found dead in bed, the manuscript beside him with the words "Read this" scrawled on it. The publishing house did so, and bought Lee's novel, which became a bestseller in 1957.
The novel, about generational conflict within an Asian American family over an arranged marriage in San Francisco's Chinatown, was adapted into the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Flower Drum Song, opening in 1958. The original production was the first Broadway show to feature Asian American players. The 1961 film jump-started the careers of the first generation of Asian American actors, including Nancy Kwan, James Shigeta, and Jack Soo. Lee was interviewed on the 2006 DVD release of the movie.
On October 2, 2001, the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles premiered David Henry Hwang's adaptation of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Flower Drum Song to glowing reviews, in the first major theatrical production that had an all-Asian cast of actors and voices. Its initial run was extended, and after several months, the production moved to Broadway, where the reviews were less than stellar. Lee had worked with Hwang on the rewriting of the musical.
Works by C. Y. Lee
Novels
Short stories
Many of Lee's short stories were published by the New Yorker magazine after the success of his first novel: