Assignment

Response Paragraph: Birdmen

Guo Shixing, one of the most popular playwright in China today, has been active in the Beijing theater scene since the 1990s. Birdmen (written in 1991; staged in Beijing under the direction of Lin Zhaohua in 1993) is the second part of Guo's trilogy of idlers. The other two of the triology are Fish Men and Chess Men.

Birdmen is a comedy about Asian Americans in Beijing and about the Chinese attitude toward non-Chinese cultures in the 1990s. In the play, the West is represented through three characters: Paul Ding, the protagonist who is a psychoanalyst, Dr. Chen (an orinthologist with a Westernized education) and Charlie (a Caucasian American delegate from the International Bird Preservation Organization). Such an intercultural drama as Birdmen raises questions germane to the creation and fuction of cultural identities.

For whom is the given identity invented? Whom is it intended to serve? How are the local and the foreign identities defined and defended? How do the local birdmen treat the Westernized characters? On the other hand, how does Paul Ding "stage" (both in the sense of his dramatic encounter and his "performance" of his roles in China--a land that is foreign to him) the encounters between the birdmen (allegedly his patients) and himself?

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