The Year of the Dragon (play)

The Year of the Dragon
Frank Chin playing the character of Fred Eng in a 1978 production of The Year of the Dragon.
Written by	Frank Chin
Characters	The Eng family
Date premiered	May 22, 1974
Original language	English
Subject	Asian American identity
Genre	Realism
Setting	Chinatown

The Year of the Dragon is a play written by Chinese American playwright Frank Chin. It is one of the first plays by an Asian American playwright to be produced on a mainstream New York stage. It premiered in 1974 at the American Place Theatre, and starred Randall Duk Kim, who had played the lead in Chin's earlier play, The Chickencoop Chinaman. The rest of the cast included Pat Suzuki, Tina Chen, Conrad Yama, Lilah Kan, Doug Higgins, and Keenan Shimizu.

The play portrays a Chinese American family in Chinatown, San Francisco during Chinese New Year. Chin wrote the play as a critique of the racism in American society, and the play satirizes "American tourists who eroticize, objectify, and commodify Chinatown and its residents."

A television production of the play was filmed by PBS in 1975 with George Takei replacing Kim as Fred, after Kim declined the television adaptation for artistic reasons, feeling that there would not be an adequate amount of rehearsal time for the adaptation to work. The rest of the original cast appeared in the PBS production.

In addition to subsequent productions, the play was revived in 2001 by East West Players in 2001, under the direction of Japanese American actor Mako Iwamatsu, who had directed the first EWP production in 1974.

The play tells the story of Fred Eng, 40-something tour guide who lives at home in San Francisco's Chinatown with his parents and younger brother, Johnny. Fred is frustrated because ten years earlier he had given up his dreams of being a writer to help his cancer-stricken father run the tour guide business. Yet, not only is his father still alive, he also has no respect for Fred's desire to be a writer and mocks Fred for dropping out of college, even though Fred did so to help him. Fred also hates working as a tour guide, as he must act out the white tourists' fantasy of what Chinese people are like, unable to make them understand that Chinatown is not China and that its residents are Americans too. Fred is also frustrated that his brother Johnny, in addition to running with a bad crowd, is not interested in leaving Chinatown for a better life, but wants to become part of the family business.