Flower Drum Song

One scene in The Flower Drum Song by C. Y. Lee, the 1957 novel on which the Broadway play and movie were loosely based, is set in a basement teahouse in San Francisco's Chinatown. Last Saturday while Lingling and Ouwen were having an upscale lunch at Postrio near Union Square (end-of-year luncheon with Lingling's Chinese American International School), I was happily eating Singapore chow fun in a basement teahouse on Sacramento Street in Chinatown that I like to think was the one in the book. I asked the waitress how long it had been there, and she said, "1920."

My revived Flower Drum Song odyssey began with a notice in the San Jose Mercury News last October that the American Musical Theatre of San Jose was going to put on a revival of Flower Drum Song with a new book by David Henry Hwang. Lingling and Ouwen weren't too enthused but I persuaded them to go with me anyway. I enjoyed the heck out of it, though I must say that Hwang's "improvements" didn't really change much except introduce a stronger emphasis on fleeing Mao's Communist China, insert a Beijing Opera theme, and make an unfortunate reference to bound feet, which made Lingling and Ouwen howl - they said bound feet hadn't been common in China for decades before the 1950s when Flower Drum Song was supposed to take place. For my taste, it was still very colorful, all the Rogers and Hammerstein music was intact (including the politically incorrect but still fun "I Enjoy Being a Girl"), and the cast was good - I, understandably, really enjoyed Emily Hsu as the sexy Linda Low (she also played Linda Low in the Broadway revival).

My interest stimulated, I ordered the 1961 movie version on Netflix and then ordered the C. Y. Lee novel in a beautiful new edition with a very interesting introduction by David Henry Hwang and a fresh author's note by the author. Hwang explained his own renewed interest in the musical and his efforts to locate Lee, whom he found in the nouveau Chinatown in Los Angeles's Monterey Park suburb.

I watched the first half of the movie, was a bit disappointed, read a bit of the book, including Hwang's introduction and C. Y. Lee's tantalizing note, then had to put it aside while I struggled through a three-month Mandarin II class at UC-Berkeley Extension. Then one evening a few days ago I watched the rest of the movie and loved it, and watched the fascinating bonus shorts featuring Hwang, Lee, Nancy Kwan, and others. Lee, very spry in his mid-80s, recounted how he came to write the book and how it became a Broadway musical and then a movie. In the movie, the showstopper for me and my other favorite song is the "Grant Avenue" sequence. Nancy Kwan is sensational in this and in the "I Enjoy Being a Girl" mirror segment. Lingling, Ouwen, and I spend a lot of time in San Francisco Chinatown, and walking down Grant Avenue that song always pops into my head. It stands for San Francisco for me the way "On your left, Washington Square, right in the heart of Greenwich Village" from the Wonderful Town song, "Christopher Street," means everything Manhattan for me.

I immediately resumed reading the book, starting over from page 1. The cover is particularly interesting, as it is a painting by Hector Garrido "based upon his painting done for the original Dell paperback edition." I found the book quite different from the play and movie, simultaneously charming, gritty, realistic, and very moving. Most of the characters from the movie and musical are present but in a somewhat different context and embedded in quite a different story line.

I could see why Rogers and Hammerstein concocted a more colorful and romantic story line than the book to wrap their music around, and for their purposes I have no complaints. In the book, May Li doesn't appear until the middle and is feistier and cheekier than Myoshi Umeki's portrayal. Linda Low, called Linda Tung in the book, has a more confused and sinister persona than in the film, and Helen (Chao) is a truly tragic figure in the book. The movie's conflict between traditional and modern culture embodied in Old Master Wang and his eldest son, Wang Ta, is even more vividly explored in the book, and the final scenes had me tearing up.

I love immersing myself in these cultural artifacts dating back to my high school days. The movie came out the last year I was in high school, about the same time as we all sat around listening to the Broadway cast recording of Camelot and watching such movies as It Started in Naples. In this golden age of Netflix, iTunes, iPods, and the wonders of the Internet, it is possible to recreate all those sights and sounds like never before.