The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 23 (2012)

Finding, Reclaiming, and Reinventing Identity
through DNA: The DNA Trail

Yuko KURAHASHI*

The DNA Trail: A Genealogy of Short Plays about Ancestry, Identity,
and Utter Confusion (2011) is a collection of seven ﬁfteen-to-twenty
minute plays by veteran Asian American playwrights whose plays havebeen staged nationally and internationally since the 1980s. The plays
include Philip Kan Gotanda’s “Child Is Father to Man,” Velina Hasu
Houston’s “Mother Road,” David Henry Hwang’s “A Very DNA
Reunion,” Elizabeth Wong’s “Finding Your Inner Zulu,” Shishir
Kurup’s “Bolt from the Blue,” Lina Patel’s “That Could Be You,” andJamil Khoury’s “WASP: White Arab Slovak Pole.” Conceived by Jamil
Khoury and commissioned and developed by Silk Road Theatre Projectin Chicago in association with the Goodman Theatre, a full productionof the seven plays was mounted at Silk Road Theatre Project in Marchand April 2010.1 On January 22, 2011, Visions and Voices: The USC
Arts and Humanities Initiative presented a staged reading at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, using revised scripts. The
staged reading was directed by Goodman Theatre associate producer
Steve Scott, who had also directed the original production.2
San Francisco–based playwright Gotanda has written plays that reﬂect
his yearning to learn the stories of his Japanese American parents, andtheir friends and relatives. His plays include A Song for a Nisei Fisherman(1980), The Wash (1985), Ballad of Yachiyo (1996), and Sisters*Associate Professor, Kent State University

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Matsumoto (1997). Born to a Japanese mother and African American
father, Houston has explored biracial identity and the interplay of thecultures of Japan and the United States through her plays, which include
Tea (1987), Kokoro (1996), Calling Aphrodite (2007), and Calligraphy(2010). Hwang is best known for his Broadway hit M. Butterfly (1988),
a play that explores the romanticized Western perception of Asian
women as exotic rather than human.3 In Yellow Face (2007) Hwang
looks at the politics that surround ethnicity in theatre by highlighting thecontradictions in color-speciﬁc and color-blind casting practices. Wong
has portrayed intercultural and inter-racial relationships in Letters to aStudent Revolutionary (1989) and Kimchee & Chitlins (1991). Her play
China Doll (1996) is based on the life of the legendary Chinese American
ﬁlm star Anna May Wong. More recently, she wrote Dating and Mating
in Modern Times (2003), a series of monologues about dating, sex, andrelationships from an Asian American perspective. Kurup, an Indian
American, is an ensemble member of the Los Angeles–based Cornerstone Theater Company and has worked as an actor, director, and playwright. His Merchant on Venice, which premiered at Silk Road Theatre
Project in 2007, explores religious and cultural tensions in the UnitedStates. In 2010, Kurup staged one-person pieces, Assimilation (2009)
and Sharif Don’t Like It (2009), at the 2nd National Asian American
Theater Conference and Festival. Both pieces focus on the immigrantexperience of South Asians in the United States, including increasing
racial prejudice after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Patel, a second-generation Indian American trained as an actor, has been demonstrating her talents as a playwright in the past several years. Her ﬁrst play, Sankalpan(Desire), a semiﬁnalist at the Sundance Theatre Institute in 2010, is anadaptation of Chekhov’s Three Sisters set in “the volatile period of prePartition Bengal,”4 and The Ragged Claws (2008) examines a “fractured
relationship between a British mother and her adopted Indian son.”5
Khoury, a Syrian-Slovak-Polish American playwright, is the founding
artistic director of Silk Road Theatre Project (now called Silk Road
Rising). His Precious Stones (2003), a play about the Israel-Palestinian
conﬂict, won Gay Chicago Magazine’s 2003 After Dark Award.
The initial objective of The DNA Trail project was to use information
provided by genetic testing as a launching pad for the playwrights to
explore genetics and racial identity. However, due to limitations in thegenetic data provided by the testing and the subsequent change in theinterests of the playwrights, the plays they created did not directly res-

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onate with this aspect, although in indirect ways many of the plays did.
Yet, the project gave a unique opportunity for the playwrights to cometogether and exchange ideas about how they saw themselves, their families, and their racial and cultural identities. As Khoury reminisces, theproject “demonstrates that a small, relatively young company like Silk
Road Theatre Project can attract a stellar group of highly accomplishedartists to create an original piece of theatre.”6 The participants recall how
the process of reading other participants’ scripts that contain questions
about their personal history, culture, and ethnic position helped them torethink “who they are” in the United States. For example, Gotanda statesthat the act of sharing time with other participants allowed him to “getglimpses into each other’s ways and whys,” and it was during this “waiting time” that he could ﬁnalize his choice of subject, the relationshipwith his Nisei father.7
The results of this creative process, the short plays of The DNA Trail,
overtly or covertly address the questions of cultural and biological identity among “hyphenated” populations in the United States. In this article
I examine the initial impetus for the project, why the project is relevant
to changing identity politics, how the participants’ original expectations
changed due to the limited information provided by the DNA tests, what
subjects actually became the focus of their short plays, and how thesesubjects relate to cultural and racial identity formation in the UnitedStates.
ORIGINAL IMPETUS
The idea for The DNA Trail project began as a conversation about collaboration between Khoury and some of his friends and colleagues in2007. During the course of their conversation, they began to explore various subjects including “art, science, genetics, and pop culture.”8 Khoury
had cofounded, with Malik Gillani, Silk Road Theatre Project in Chicago
in 2002 as a “creative and proactive response to the terrorist attacks of
September 11, 2011,”9 and he had promoted dialogue between people ofdiverse backgrounds and histories with the purpose of “healing the rifts”
caused by ignorance and lack of communication.10 Khoury’s prior theatre experience in collaborating with diverse groups of people helped
him to materialize the idea of inviting multicultural playwrights to document their different histories, heritages, and cultures. Soon after his initial conversation about “how to collaborate,” Khoury invited a number

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of Asian American playwrights to be part of the project that included
collectively shared DNA tests. Khoury noted that the invitees’ responses
were very quick, which he saw as “testimony both to the power of ancestry and our innate desire to discover something new and unexpected
about ourselves.”11
As the very ﬁrst step of the project, the participants took DNA tests.
Kits were delivered to their respective homes, and they “scraped [the]insides of [their] cheeks with something resembling a Q-tip and submitted a swab of [their] saliva to Family Tree DNA.”12 Next, in July 2008,
they ﬂew to Chicago for the initial gathering, where they met with geneticists, genealogists, DNA counselors, and a DNA ethicist. After they went
home, they began writing plays and exchanged drafts of their plays bye-mail. During this writing and later, during the rehearsal process, they
continued to exchange revised drafts for feedback.13 Giving and receiving feedback, which the participants call “collaboration,” resulted, insome cases, in the creation of new characters, the elimination of old characters, and the development of relationships among the characters. For
example, the birth of the character Cleopatra in Hwang’s piece is owed
to Kurup, who gave a suggestion to Hwang.14 Wong’s suggestion helped
Patel make the character of the narrator into the scientist (and also theresult of the adoption project).15 Khoury recalls that the other participants’ questions and suggestions helped him augment the play’s structure and increase the clarity of its content.16
The DNA Trail project resonates with the result of an increased interestin using the availability of genetic testing as a means, particularly forpeople who have limited information regarding their ancestry, to ﬁnd theanswer to the question, who am I? As noted by Catherine Nash, a professor of geography at the University of London, the “all-pervasive” language of genetics and genealogy has become an “increasingly popular
practice,” along with other “recent developments in molecular biology,
biomedicine, and new biotechnological commercial innovations.”17 SarahFranklin, an anthropologist/sociologist who has written a number ofbooks on reproductive and genetic technologies, points out that “therapid emergence of new genetic technologies has placed a premium onfamiliar anthropological questions, such as the meaning of genealogy,
parenthood, or a ‘blood tie.’ ”18 She also states that genealogy “promisesa neat and satisfying pre-given and predetermined collective identity—
such as ‘Irishness’—guaranteed by descent,” thus offering people “thepotential pleasures of choosing an ‘authentic identity.’ ”19

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The release of the documentary ﬁlm Journey of Man (PBS, 2003,
based on the book of the same title by Spencer Wells) fueled public interest in the use of DNA testing in ancestry searches. The ﬁlm documents
how a group of geneticists arrived at the conclusion that the “global family tree” can be traced back to “one African man who lived 60,000 years
ago.”20 Wells used the evidence provided by DNA markers to trace two
separate migration patterns from Africa: one that followed the coastline
along the Indian Ocean and another that traveled into Central Asia.21
Beyond identifying these two great patterns of migration, there are markers that identify “branches” that migrated to other areas and later became
identiﬁed with different ethnic groups. This discovery made it possible
to use DNA testing to identify a person’s relationship, genetically, to thegreat migration patterns and to more speciﬁc branches of the human family tree. The potential to identify one’s ancestors, even if in only a verybroad sense, is part of its appeal to a mixed ethnic nation such as theUnited States where many people have a very limited knowledge of theirown racial and ethnic identities. Recent developments in DNA testing
provide, if nothing else, a way to shortcut the process of identifying aperson’s ancestors’ migration patterns. Contrary to people’s presumptions however, current DNA technology does not function as a perfecttool “for deﬁning race and verifying race,” because the “notions of race”
do not necessarily “correspond to genetic differences among populations,” and also because “the current deﬁnition of race regards it as a‘social construct.’ ”22
A relatively accessible technology based on scientiﬁc research andentrepreneurial development has made it possible to disseminate DNA
testing to the general public, who may take genealogical DNA tests withthe hope of ﬁnding out more about the race and ethnicity of their ancestors. In many ways, the popularity of DNA testing seems to lead to amore biologically ﬁxed, essentialist notion of race as opposed to ourcontemporary understanding of race as social construct. As William Q.
Lowe asserts, “from the nineteenth century until the latter part of thetwentieth century distinct racial categories developed under the biological race theory,”23 and DNA testing seems to validate this theory. In fact,many scientists and biologists see that “advances in sciences, particularly in DNA testing,” would “allow for a uniform method of determining one’s race” and provide a “settled deﬁnition of race,” thus serving
as a sophisticated tool to obtain detailed information about ancestors’
race and ethnicity.24 Thus, although Khoury’s original intention and

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some of the playwrights’ expectations of discovering scientiﬁc facts
about their racial and ethnic backgrounds may seem naive, it is a natural
reaction. For example, Gotanda hoped to ﬁnd that his ancestors were“Portuguese or Panamanian or something exotic other than just Japanese.”25
Hwang hoped that the tests might conﬁrm the existence of “British or
Filipino ancestors” that his family had talked about for several generations.26 Patel wished to discover that she “had African, Chinese,
European—anything other than only South Asian—roots” in her ancestry.27
The ethnicity that these playwrights romantically wished for resonateswith what Gerald Vizenor, a Native American writer and American studies scholar, calls “the wannabee sentiment,”28 a symptom of romanticization and simulation to gain authenticity and authority in discoursewith others. Hwang, Patel, and Gotanda’s expectations also reﬂected
their desire to challenge the labeling of their ethnic identity as Asian
Americans, the simple category imposed on them.
The test results did not satisfy the playwrights’ expectations, however.
Gotanda found that the DNA results were so rudimentary that the participants lost interest in the tests’ results themselves.29 Hwang was disappointed by the results, which “only yielded the rudest outlines” of theirancestral histories.30 Patel stated that because of the results that “contained nothing speciﬁc enough to be exciting,” she shifted her focus to“the various debates within the ﬁeld of genealogical testing” and people’s notions of these tests.31 Houston, who thought that “it was like reading a history book, interesting but not relevant to who I am today beyond
the basics,”32 nevertheless found in the DNA test results that her genetic
heritage included ancestors from France, Armenia, Greece, India, China,
the Philippines, Japan, Cuba, and some parts of South America as well
as Africa and were provocative with regard to issues of deep ancestry
and historical migratory patterns.
Both the unexpected data and lack of speciﬁc information for thesewriters reﬂect what scientists have discovered about DNA testing. Writing about the limitations and challenges of DNA tests, genetics scholar
Linda McCabe states that although many individuals expect DNA tests
to reveal details about their ancestry, the accuracy of the tests is limited
by a number of factors, including the range of databases of the DNA
samples available to the laboratory doing the testing and “the speciﬁcgroup or admixture of groups represented by the test-taker’s ancestry.”33
The playwrights’ expectations of the DNA tests also resonate with what
MaCabe calls the “genetic determinism” that people hold despite theirFINDING, RECLAIMING, AND REINVENTING IDENTITY THROUGH DNA

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understanding of ethnicity as “a conception of shared cultural heritage.”34 It is this sense of genetic determinism that some of the participants’ initially held.
A more positive reaction to the DNA test results came from Wong,
who was captivated by the haplogroups that were identiﬁed by the tests.
A haplogroup is a “cluster of similar haplotypes that share a common
ancestor.”35 A haplotype is the set of alleles (variants of chromosomes,
long strands of DNA). The entire chromosome can be partitioned into
the high linkage disequilibrium (LD) regions called “haplotype blocks”36
interspersed with low-LD regions. While a speciﬁc group of haplotypes,
as deﬁned by genetic testing, corresponds to a speciﬁc ethnic population,
haplogroups are deﬁned by many different markers (genetic mutations)found in Y-chromosome and mtDNA (genetic material found in the
mitochondria) testing. These markers link the members of a haplogroupback to the marker’s ﬁrst appearance in the group’s most recent common
ancestors.37
After ﬁnding that the haplogroups could go beyond immediate raceand ethnic factors, Wong wrote:
I’m in the N9a haplogroup. On the human genome migration map, it’s abrown line trekking eastward, one of the oldest lines out of Africa. With myparents and grandparents all born in mainland China, I just assumed I was apureblood product. I thought the test results would verify me as a faded
mimeograph of the ﬁrst Peking woman, living proof for the argument thatthe early Chinese had developed independently of Africa, and that Peking
Man was indeed my distant cousin. But to my surprise, my test results suggested otherwise. It’s mind blowing to ﬁnd myself connected to a female
ancestor who made that long, arduous trek out of Africa several millennia
ago, ﬂeeing ﬂoods, following the herds, battling wits with wild lands, andeven wilder men.38

The DNA testing allowed Wong to discover that, while the testing was
not a magic tool to identify her ancestors, her own racial heritage mergedwith the broader history of humanity, linking herself to others beyond
appearances.
In spite of their reactions to the results of the DNA tests, which could
not scientiﬁcally clarify the intricate relationship of race, ethnicity, andculture, the participants found the project fruitful because even the unsatisfactory—to their eyes—results allowed them to see the importance292

YUKO KURAHASHI

of exploring their identity formation in multiple ways and from multiple
perspectives. The creative process provided an opportunity for these
artists to reﬂect on identity politics in the United States, which they had
dealt with for a number of years. As Houston states, “most people haveﬁxed ideas about who they are racially, even though race is a man-madeconstruct left over from the days of the plantation.”39 Houston calls thisview “ethnicity-lite.”40 The project allowed the participants to see howmuch they were clinging to “ethnicity-lite” and the way this view has
affected how they see themselves and their families.
FROM THE MELTING POT TO POST–MELTING POT
Before examining each playwright’s piece in response to the DNA
tests, it is important to consider the current view of race and ethnicity in
the United States, because the playwrights’ initial expectations of the
DNA tests and the subsequent change in their focus in playwriting parallel changing views of diversity in race, ethnicity, culture, and religion
in the United States.
Since the founding of the country people have debated which differences should be examined and valued in order to strengthen the UnitedStates and its people. One of the nationalist ideologies is the “meltingpot” theory,41 in which the goal is to eliminate immigrants’ identiﬁcation
with their country of origin and merge them into an ideal of Americanism.
The United States has long used the metaphor of “melting” differencesin culture and tradition among different immigrants as the means ofachieving a distinctive American character and value. In his Letters froman American Farmer, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, an eighteenthcentury Franco-American farmer and essayist, proudly proclaimed thata mixture of people including “English, Scottish, Irish, French, Dutch,
Germans, and Swedes” have settled in “the unknown bounds of North
America,” where “individuals of all nations are melted into a new raceof men.”42 A strong belief in this construct of a Eurocentric race called“Americans” was prevalent in the early political discourse as well. For
example, in an 1814 speech, DeWitt Clinton, mayor of New York City,
stated that “the triumph and adoption of the English language” hadbecome the “principal means of melting us down into one people.”43
These instances demonstrate how people have seen the melting of racialand ethnic differences as a positive goal for America’s future.
In opposition to the many who championed the idea of a melting pot,

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some scholars began to express concern that the term ignored and soughtto eradicate valuable “differences” in race and ethnicity. Writers andscholars such as Horace M. Kallen and Randolph S. Bourne disdained
the term “melting pot” because it described a narrow view of what constituted the United States. While recognizing the importance of the commonwealth, Kallen saw the United States as a “mosaic of peoples, ofdifferent bloods and of different origins, engaged in rather different economic ﬁelds, and varied in background and outlook as well as in blood.”44Championing the importance of the different ethnic backgrounds ofimmigrants to the United States, Kallen used an orchestra as a metaphor:“As in an orchestra every type of instrument has its speciﬁc timbre andtonality,” so, in society, “each ethnic group may be the natural instrument” that plays its own “temper and culture,” and each is part of the“symphony of civilization.”45 Bourne espoused a plurality of self-identiﬁcations as well as nationality. He challenged assimilationists wholabeled those immigrants who refused “to be melted” as a “failure ofAmericanization.”46 Bourne criticized the American public who marveled at the contributions of immigrants while “in the same breadth”
insisting that “the alien shall be forcibly assimilated to that Anglo-Saxon
tradition.”47 He also pointed out that this public sentiment for assimilation had a paradoxical affect on a diverse immigrant population, because,in the process, instead of “washing out the memories of Europe,”
non–Anglo-Saxon immigrants had a tendency to become even moreinterested in “memorializing and documenting their countries, languages
and cultures in Europe.”48
In the twentieth century, public policies began to slowly accept difference and diversity in race, gender, ethnicity, culture, and other attributes of individuals beyond the narrowly deﬁned colonial deﬁnition of“plurality.” Examining the correlates of endorsement of multiculturalism
and assimilation in the United States, Christopher Wolsko, BernadettePark, and Charles M. Judd argue that although “models of thinking about
ethnic diversity that endorse a system of blatant prejudice and discrimination are still present in U.S. society,” they are gradually losing theirstrength because of “signiﬁcant action to counter and correct past discrimination.”49 Offering and adding ethnic studies courses, establishingethnic studies departments, and making diversity efforts imperative inpublic institutions are all part of the nation’s stride toward validation andappreciation of multiple races, ethnicities, cultures, languages, and religions.

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Yet the decades-long debate over assimilation versus multiculturalism continues. Advocates of multiculturalism see multiculturalism as a“strategic component in a broader movement toward social transformation that emphasizes social equity.”50 On the other side, opponents ofmulticulturalism, who hold a strong belief in a universal culture, value“a unifying cultural framework.”51 Michael Omi and Howard Winantcall these two opposing ideals “the twin pressures of assimilation (dissolution of group identity) and cultural pluralism (preservation of group
identity).”52 The conﬂict between assimilationists and multiculturalists
is often compounded by a political discourse on patriotism and national
security. As Margaret Mead asserted in the 1970s, although people in
the United States are encouraged to know about their immigrant roots
and to identify with their ancestors, when they try to maintain an idealof an “ethic of cultural pluralism, of ethnic separatism,” they are constantly confronted by “the ethic of ethnic assimilation, the doctrine of
the melting pot.”53 In addition to the tension between these two ideological practices, the notion of race has continued to inﬂuence people’sviews of themselves and others. As Omi and Winant argue, “speciﬁcityof race,” which is “an autonomous ﬁeld of social conﬂict, political organization, and cultural/ideological meaning,”54 continues to deﬁne who aperson is. In A Matter of Principle, philosopher and legal scholar Ronald
Dworkin argues that American society, which is “currently a raciallyconscious society,” is still dealing with the “inevitable and evident consequence of a history of slavery, repression and prejudice,” and thus even
now the ﬁxed notion of racial categories continues to dictate the roles
and membership of “black men and women, boys and girls” in society.55
Sociologist Mary C. Waters discusses how race-based self-identiﬁcation overpowers ethnic, cultural, and experience-based self-identiﬁcation, as seen in many in the second generation of immigrants in the
United States. Writing about identities of the ﬁrst and second generations of immigrants from the West Indies, Waters describes how someof the second generation tend to “shift toward developing a strong racial
identity,” rejecting “their parents’ ethnicity, and primarily identify themselves as black Americans.”56 The tug-of-war between the dominantlabeling of “race” and the fabric of cultures, education, gender, and sexual orientation seems to constitute a dominant part of identity formationof many of the racially and ethnically mixed populations in the UnitedStates.

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FAMILY, SELF, AND IDENTITY IN THE DNA TRAIL PROJECT
Racially based categories have been an important component ofparticipants’ identity formation in the United States, as those who are
considered partially American and partially Asian. As Lee Weng Choyargues, the term “Asian” in “Asian American” emphasizes “ethnic origin,” while the invisible hyphenation signiﬁes a person’s “marginality”
both within the United States and abroad.57
The participants in the project have differently dealt with their labeledposition as partially American and partially Asian. Some have tried toescape altogether from their ethnically labeled group. For example,
growing up in Chinatown, Wong recalls how she wanted to keep a distance between herself and other Chinese and Chinese Americans: “I
didn’t want to have anything to do with all these people who talked withaccents.”58 Some of the participants had different approaches. By combining the terms Asian and American, Houston has found a way toempower her multiracial and multicultural position in the United States.
In The Politics of Life Houston claims that she is “Amerasian,” whichmeans that she is “neither Asian nor American (and yet both)” and that
she is “neither native Japanese, Blackfoot Pikuni, nor African American(and yet all three)—truly multiracial and multicultural.”59
Kurup, who was born in Bombay and raised in Kenya prior to his family’s emigration to the United States, also expresses how his ethnicallyand culturally complex background has affected his identity formation.
In my interview with him, he explained that although he knows he isAmerican because he possesses a U.S. passport, part of his cultural identiﬁcation is still with the places where he grew up—Kenya and India. He
also points to the complexity within the compound term. For example,
when he immigrated to the United States, he understood “Asia” as a geographical area that included India and Pakistan. However, he soon foundthat the “Asian” used in the term “Asian American” meant a person ofChinese or Japanese descent. Thus, as an “Asian” from South Asia, hehas been “walled off ” from his own identity within the Asian community
in the United States.60
Khoury’s play “WASP: White Arab Slovak Pole” deals with how
people see race, ethnicity, and culture in the United States. “WASP”
portrays Khoury’s daily ritual of answering questions about his “trueidentity.” As an Arab American gay Christian with Polish and Slovak
heritage, Khoury has encountered many prejudiced remarks such as

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YUKO KURAHASHI“You don’t look like Jamil,” meaning he should look like a Middle
Easterner. People’s antipluralist responses, based on their presumptions,demonstrate biases that prompt them to categorize people into a single
group that ignores the ethnic, racial, and cultural complexity and dynamics of the individual. Opposing these supersimpliﬁed presumptions,
Khoury champions the complexity and multiplicity of his ethnic background. He is aligned with the poststructuralist view of ethnicity, which
is championed by Fredrik Barth and Clifford Geertz, who consider that“ethnicity is no more ﬁxed or unchanging than the culture of which it is
a component.”61 He points out that he reacts differently when he encounters people who speak Arabic or Slavic languages, noting that the languages, which he acquired in his childhood, are part of the formation of
his identity.
While Khoury deals with the mainstream view of others in the UnitedStates, Wong and Hwang underscore the current trend of using DNA
testing for ancestry search. In “Finding Your Inner Zulu,” which depictsa Chinese teenager’s search for her ancestry, Wong uses a component of
the DNA test, the haplogroup, the element that identiﬁes the immigration patterns of a person’s ancestors that brought him or her to the place
perceived as his or her country of origin. Cricket, a basketball superstar
at her high school, is devastated because she is turned down by recruitersfrom the University of Connecticut. Cricket attributes this to her shortheight and decides to take a DNA test with the hope of getting inside her
DNA and “turning on the tall gene.”62 The simple act of scraping inside
her cheek is suddenly transformed into a fantastic voyage through the
DNA galaxy where she encounters two of her cousins—a Zulu warrior
and a rabbi. Though her height remains the same, the voyage empowers
Cricket so much that she decides to ask the coach at the University ofConnecticut to reconsider her application. To write this “fantastical”
play, to use her word, Wong used her e-mail exchanges with people who
responded to her social-network postings on a N9A haplogroup site. As
she began to receive e-mail from those who also belonged to the N9A
haplogroup, Wong began to feel an increased sense of kinship with other
N9A group members. The DNA test and e-mail conversations allowed
Wong to acknowledge the complexity of identity formation and to abandon her initial simple assumption about the relationship between “raceand genome.”63 Wong’s experience moves beyond what Waters calls“authentic” ethnic identiﬁcation that is normally utilized in censuses andsurveys.64 Unlike the category used in censuses and surveys, Wong’s

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concept of ethnic identity is not ﬁxed or determined but is more ﬂuid,
providing the possibility of discovering how one could be related to individuals in other racial and ethnic groups.
Hwang’s “A Very DNA Reunion” portrays an equally fantasticalworld created by Bob, a thirty-one-year-old Caucasian man, after hereceives DNA test results. Bob is excited about his recent discovery of
who he is and cries, “Now I know who I am!” He serves as a theatricalvehicle for Hwang to mock people’s naive assumption that they can discover their identity from DNA testing. Through the character of Bob andhis fantasy, Hwang illuminates his own discovery during the creative
process. He states that he began “to feel that it was actually very lazy toimagine that swiping a Q-tip inside one’s cheek could lead to self-knowledge.”65 In his fantasy, Bob’s ancestors—Genghis Khan, Cleopatra, andNinja Dude—visit him. These historical and imaginary ﬁgures resonate
with the “wannabe syndrome” that Hwang might have entertained prior
to taking the DNA test. In this play, Hwang points out the nature of thewannabe syndrome through the character of Bob, who enjoys his reunionwith those who are bound to him by “history and blood.”66 By creating
the character of Bob, who is thirty-one and still living with his parents,
Hwang underscores his belief that indulging in DNA testing is the immature act of a “loser” who cannot see learned cultures and knowledge aspart of identity formation.67
Patel expresses her interest in the potential of DNA tests being used
for adoption programs in her short play “That Could Be You.” Unlike
Wong and Hwang, who use DNA tests to create an illusionary world,
Patel’s play dramatizes the relationship between procreation and the science of DNA. The play’s central characters—birth parents and adoptive
parents—represent nature and nurture. The adoptive parents look forward to adopting the baby from its biological parents. The birth parents
regularly meet with the adoptive parents to inform them of the status of
the fetus as well as to discuss various arrangements for the future. The
character of the scientist—who is actually the result of this surrogate project—functions as a narrator and explains to the audience complex scientiﬁc and medical facts. For example, during the development of a fetus,
non-genetic factors, such as “nutrients, toxins, and oxygen levels during
gestation,” wrap “tightly around the pre-existing DNA and are passed
down through generations,” inﬂuencing “much of the child’s behavioral
patterns.”68 The scientist character tries to convey that while the gene
determines many of the traits of the individual, variable factors such as

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YUKO KURAHASHI“nutrition, reinforcement (positive, negative),” and other forms of nurturing also affect the child’s development.69 Although the adoptive couple is aware of various things that affect the child after birth, they tend
to focus on the birth parents’ and their own genes, allergies, what they
read, and their favorite subjects at school. At one point, this determinist
view of the child’s personal development is challenged by Teddy, theadoptive father, who still believes, or at least hopes, that “a person’s character is not something they are born with” but “something that develops
with love.”70 His remark, which exempliﬁes the signiﬁcance of culturalinﬂuences in identity formation, afﬁrms the poststructuralist notion ofidentity while challenging biological determinism.
Houston, Gotanda, and Kurup used the DNA test results as their inspiration to write plays about relationships within the family. Houston’s“Mother Road” explores what is now perceived as a hereditary disease—breast cancer—and a sibling relationship around this topic. The subjectof breast cancer was inspired by a talk delivered by one of the DNA
experts who visited the participants at the Silk Road Project Theatre.
Houston learned that DNA testing can reveal genetic markers for diseases and that some women voluntarily have bilateral mastectomies after
learning their results. According to the expert, women sometimes decideto have their breasts removed, not because they have developed breast
cancer but because their DNA tests reveal that they are at high risk fordeveloping it.71 That lecture prompted Houston to create two siblings,
Perpetua and her half-sister Eve. Perpetua visits Eve, who is older andwho lives in a remote area on the southern edge of the Mojave Desert,
to inform her of their mother’s recent death from breast cancer. The true
objectives of Perpetua’s visit are, however, to ﬁnd a new place of belonging now that their mother is dead and to warn Eve about the possible riskof their developing breast cancer. Eve, who has never forgiven her
mother for putting her up for adoption, resents Perpetua’s visit. However,
over the course of the evening of their meeting, Eve, who has recently
lost both her husband and son in a car accident, begins to develop a senseof kinship with Perpetua, who has recently undergone a preventative
bilateral mastectomy. Using her new knowledge about DNA testing andits function in discovering medical markers for certain diseases, including breast cancer, Houston focuses on reconciliation and mutual understanding between the siblings, one of the themes that she has dealt withfor many years.

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In “Child Is Father to Man,” Gotanda portrays the grieving and regretof the character “Man” after his father’s death. Man traces the life
journey of his father from the island of Kauai to Arkansas and then to
California, his marriage to a daughter of a wealthy businessman, theirincarceration in an internment camp during World War II, and theirstruggle to rebuild the family’s life after the war. The play’s focus is on
the conﬂicts between Man and his father, who criticizes his son’s decision to be a playwright instead of a lawyer. It also expresses the son’s
regrets about the lack of communication between himself and his father.
Gotanda’s theme—the conﬂict between father and son—is universal, yet
his piece is also ﬁlled with Japanese American references. The play is
an elegy to his own father, because he could express his regret about not
spending enough time to understand his father during his father’s lifetime. Like Houston’s “Mother Road,” Gotanda’s play illuminates how
one can reconcile with a family member. In his play he does this byaccepting who he is and acknowledging that he himself is also part of
the father.
In “Bolt from the Blue” Kurup pays tribute to his immediate andextended families. Instead of using the results of his DNA test as his subject matter, Kurup probes into the hidden family heritage of depression
with which, according to his parents, several family members have been
afﬂicted.72 Although this is not the raw data from the DNA test he took,
the test, along with the conversations with other participants during thecreative process, prompted him to use what he had heard from othermembers of his family as a hypothesis. The play centers on the conversations between a man in his late thirties or early forties named Rishi(who represents Kurup), who lives in the United States, and his cousin
Hari, twenty, who lives in Glasgow and suffers from severe depression.
The script consists of e-mail and phone exchanges between Rishi and his
mother, his friend Paul who is a therapist, and Hari. Rishi tries to reachout to Hari through e-mail and via Skype. However, Hari makes a suicide attempt and his condition deteriorates so that eventually he is conﬁned to a mental institution. The play ends with a sudden silence from
Hari. Writing this story allowed Kurup to face his family’s problems,
exploring a taboo area that his family had avoided openly discussing.73
To summarize, the testing done for The DNA Trail project did not provide the information the participants had expected. As a result, with the
exceptions of Patel and Wong, the participants were not able to write

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plays as they originally planned that used detailed scientiﬁc information
about their ancestors’ race and ethnicity. Those who did not have speciﬁc expectations from the testing used the information and the DNA test
results as sources of inspiration for stories indirectly related to DNA,
incorporating such topics as genetics and medicine. However, The DNA
Trail reminded the participants of the power of “learned cultures” or“enculturation,” as is evident in many of the short plays, including theones that focus on relationships among family members, a major sourceof enculturation. As David Matsumoto, a psychologist with expertise incross-cultural communications, deﬁnes in Culture and Psychology, enculturation is “the process by which individuals learn and adopt the ways
and manners of their culture.”74 The creative process that encompassed
a series of e-mail and face-to-face communications helped the participants to reﬂect on how they have learned and adopted the cultures thatthey now regard as theirs. The project also reminded the participants that,
although they are living in a multicultural era where multiplicity andpluralism are supposed to be welcomed, the general public’s increasing
interest in ﬁnding, through DNA testing, scientiﬁc data about the raceand ethnicity of their ancestors may be contributing to a rigid notion
about categories of race and ethnicity. As anthropologist George A. De
Vos states, today, in the era of ethnic pluralism, “ethnic minorities” thatwould not remain in a ﬁxed position are not “content to remain mute.”75
Although the creative results of this project, the seven plays, address
issues that deviate from the originally intended premise, the experienceof participation in The DNA Trail provided the authors with the opportunity to rethink and challenge the monolithic, ﬁxed category of race that
pigeonholes them as humans and artists.
NOTES
1
Each production consisted of the seven plays. These have not been ofﬁcially published.
2
I attended this staged reading and have used it as research material for this article.
3
Hwang’s interests and topics have been diverse and multifaceted as exempliﬁed by
FOB (1979), Golden Child (1996), the musical Aida (2000), Flower Drum Song (2002),
and such musical dramas and operas as 1000 Airplanes on the Roof, The Voyage,
Ainadamar, The Sliver River, and The Fly. Hwang’s newest play Chinglish, which
premiered at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago in July 2011, opened in fall 2011 on
Broadway to rave reviews.
4“Lina Patel,” SouthernAsianPlaywrights, accessed 23 November 2011.
http://southasianplaywrights.org/?page_id=8n.

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5

301

Ibid.
Jamil Khoury, “The DNA Trail: From Swab to Stage,” World Literature Today(March–April 2010): 26.
7
Philip Kan Gotanda, e-mail interview, 27 January 2011.
8
Khoury, “The DNA Trail: From Swab to Stage,” 23.
9
Ibid.
10
Ibid., 23–24.
11
Ibid., 23.
12
Ibid., 26.
13
Lina Patel, e-mail interview, 11 November 2011.
14
David Henry Hwang, e-mail interview, 29 December 2011.
15
Lina Patel, e-mail interview, 29 December 2011.
16
Jamil Khoury, e-mail interview, 30 December 2011.
17
Catherine Nash, “Genealogical Identities,” Environment and Plan D: Society andSpace 20 (2002):27.
18
Sarah Franklin, “Biologization Revisited: Kinship Theory in the Context of the New
Biologies,” in Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies, ed. Sarah Franklin and
S. McKinnon (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 424.
19
Ibid.
20
Hillary Mayell, “Documentary Redraws Humans’ Family Tree,” National Geographic News, 21 January 2003, accessed 24 November 2011.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/12/1212_021213_journeyofman.html.
21
S. Fisher, “Journey of Man,” Video Librarian 18, no. 4 (July–August 2003): 22.
22
William Q. Lowe “Understanding Race: The Evolution of the Meaning of Race inAmerican Law and the Impact of DNA Technology on Its Meaning in the Future,”
Albany Law Review 72, no. 4 (2009): 1141.
23
Ibid., 1116.
24
Ibid., 1114.
25
Velina Hasu Houston, “Hiking the DNA Trail,” American Theatre (March 2010):
41.
26
Ibid.
27
Ibid.
28
Gerald Vizenor “Native American Indian Identities: Autoinscriptions and the
Cultures of Names,” Genre 25, no. 4 (1994): 438.
29
Philip Kan Gotanda, e-mail interview, 27 January 2011.
30
David Henry Hwang, e-mail interview, 31 January 2011.
31
Lina Patel, e-mail interview, 25 January 2011.
32
Velina Hasu Houston, e-mail interview, 26 January 2011.
33
Linda L. McCabe and Edward R. B. McCabe, DNA: Promise and Peril (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2008), 80–81.
34
I use the deﬁnition provided by Raymond Scupin in “Ethnicity,” in Race and Ethnicity: An Anthropological Focus on the United States and the World, ed. Raymond
Scupin (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003), 67.
35
Jeffrey Basset, “Genetic Genealogy and the Bassett Y-Chromosome Project,” in The
DNA Trail program notes (Chicago: Silk Road Theatre Project, 2010), 22.
36
Kun–Mao Chao, “Pattern Identiﬁcation in a Haplotype Block,” in Bioinformatics
for Biologists, ed. Pavel Pevzner and Ron Shamir (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2011), 24.
37
Spencer Wells, Deep Ancestry: Inside the Geographic Project (Washington, DC:
National Geographic, 2006), 230–31.
6

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YUKO KURAHASHI

38
Elizabeth Wong, “Playwright Reﬂections,” Silk Road Theatre Project, accessed 20
March 2011, http://www.srtp.org/mediaplayer/thesevenplays.html.
39
Houston, “Hiking the DNA Trail,” 41.
40
Velina Hasu Houston, e-mail interview, 18 January 2012.
41
The use of the term “melting pot” to suggest the ethnically diverse populations in
the United States dates back to 1908 when Israel Zangwill’s play, The Melting Pot, wasstaged in Washington, D.C., to rave reviews. In the play, the central character, David, a
Russian Jew, emigrates to the United States after losing all of his family members in a
pogrom. Over the course of the play, David falls in love with a gentile woman, who turns
out to be the daughter of the Russian ofﬁcer responsible for the deaths of his family
members. The central theme of the play, David’s yearning for a metaphorical “meltingpot” where everyone can live peacefully without racial discrimination, attracted an
audience that included a number of immigrants. Philip Gleason, Speaking of Diversity:
Language and Ethnicity in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1992), 7.
42
J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, “What Is an American?,” in Letters from an
American Farmer (1783), ed. Susan Manning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997),
42–44.
43
The “people” in Clinton’s speech meant Anglo-Saxons. See Merle Curti, The Rootsof American Loyalty (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946), 74.
44
Horace M. Kallen, Culture and Democracy in the United States: Studies in theGroup Psychology of the American Peoples (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924),
58–59.
45
Kallen’s pluralism refers to pluralism within European countries. Kallen, Culture
and Democracy in the United States, 124–25.
46
Randolph S. Bourne and Van Wyck Brooks, eds., History of a Literary Radical andOther Essays (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1920), 266–68.
47
Ibid., 266.
48
Ibid., 267.
49
Christopher Wolsko, Bernadette Park, and Charles M. Judd, “Considering the Towerof Babel: Correlates of Assimilation and Multiculturalism among Ethnic Minority and
Majority Groups in the United States,” Social Justice Research 19, no. 3 (September2006): 278.
50
Dennis J. Downey, “From Americanization to Multiculturalism: Political Symbols
and Struggles for Cultural Diversity in Twentieth-Century American Race Relations,”
Sociological Perspectives 42, no. 2 (1999): 249.
51
Ibid., 251.
52
Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States from the
1960s to the 1990s, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994), 52.
53
Margaret Mead, “Ethnicity and Anthropology in America,” in Ethnic Identity: Creation, Conflict and Accommodation, ed. Lola Romanucci-Ross and George A. De Vos,
3rd ed. (London: Altamira Press, 1995), 309.
54
Omi and Winant, Racial Formation, 52.
55
Ronald Dworkin, A Matter of Principle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1985), 294.
56
Mary C. Waters, Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American
Realities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 286.
57
Lee Weng Choy, “Accents and Hyphens: Reading Ping Chong’s Deshima,” Art and
AsiaPacific 20 (1998): 79.

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303

58
Roberta Uno, “Introduction to Letters to a Student Revolutionary,” in Unbroken
Thread: An Anthology of Plays by Asian American Women, ed. Roberta Uno (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 262.
59
As the daughter of a Japanese mother and an African American father, Houston hasemphasized the complexity of her racial and ethnic attributes. She has also used the term“transnationality” to describe how being of both Japanese and American nationalities
has shaped her identity and work. Velina Hasu Houston, ed., The Politics of Life: FourPlays by Asian American Women (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 3.
60
Shishir Kurup, phone interview, 7 February 2011.
61
Richard Jenkins, “Ethnicity Etcetera: Social Anthropological Points of View,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 19, no. 4 (1996): 810.
62
Wong, “Finding Your Inner Zulu,” (unpublished manuscript, 3 March 2011),
Microsoft Word ﬁle, 1.
63Wong discovered that she and David Henry Hwang, who are both Chinese
American, do not belong to the same haplogroup. Elizabeth Wong, e-mail interview, 28
January 2011.
64
Mary C. Waters, Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 53.
65David Henry Hwang, e-mail interview, 31 January 2011.
66
David Henry Hwang, “A Very DNA Reunion” (unpublished manuscript, 3 February2011), PDF ﬁle, 2.
67David Henry Hwang, e-mail interview, 30 December 2011.
68
Lina Patel, “That Could Be You” (unpublished manuscript, 28 January 2011), PDF
ﬁle, 2.
69
Lina Patel, e-mail interview, 25 January 2011.
70
Patel, “That Could Be You,” 14.
71
Velina Hasu Houston, e-mail interview, 26 January 2011.
72
Shishir Kurup, phone interview, 7 February 2011.
73
Depression has often been considered weakness and failure in general, and Kurup’s
family is not an exception in viewing it this way. Shishir Kurup, phone interview, 7
February 2011.
74
David Matsumoto, Culture and Psychology (Paciﬁc Grove, CA: Brooks and Cole,2004), 156.
75
George A. De Vos, “Ethnic Pluralism: Conﬂict and Accommodation,” in Ethnic
Identity, ed. Romanucci-Ross and De Vos, 12.