David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly

David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly, was first written in 1988 and his work was inspired and he was influenced by Giacomo Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly and it is based on a true story. David Henry Hwang as a first generation Chinese American being born in California on August 11, 1975, the writer of the three-act play M. Butterfly was a son of Chinese immigrants, his father was from Shanghai and his mother was an ethnic Chinese from the Philippines. His father immigrated to Oregon during the 1940’s and he majored in business in Linfield College and then he transferred to the University of Southern California. It was not very surprising for Henry to leave China, because of the type of beliefs that he had. According to David Henry Hwang his father “never much liked China or Chinese ways of thinking. He’s always been much more attracted to American ways of thinking. He feels Americans are more open – they tell you what they think – and he is very much that way himself.” His mother, Dorothy Huang, also was coming from a Chinese background. Her grandparents move to Philippines where they became very …show more content…
Butterfly” by focusing on the two aspects of feminism and post – colonialism, touches on the way that gender and cultural identities are negotiable in our interactions, however, they are always therapeutic. Even though Gallimard believes that Song is a woman, the audience in the theater can clearly see and observe the way he is dressed and his act with his feminine behavior, as well as the hints of transgenderism. On the other hand, the prison cell that Gallimard is staying at is the brief representation of how he is trapped in his own mind and beliefs, exactly like being in a prison cell or in a box and also how he is unable to see everything from outside of the box. Gallimard could never leave his prison cell, meaning he could never snap out all these delusions and his own imagination and he chooses to be alone with his own