The first time I confronted my racial identity, it was a literal test.

In the mid-2000s, my triplet siblings and I were taking our first standardized exams at our public elementary school. Our teachers instructed us to fill in only one test-sheet bubble corresponding with our race. My brother filled in “white/Caucasian.” I filled in “Asian/Pacific Islander.” My sister filled in “Other.” After school, we discussed this dilemma with our Filipina mother and white father. They laughed but understood our anxiety. My mom recalled this time to me recently, wondering, “How could I tell you that you were all right?” It felt like each of us, in our own way, was also wrong.

It was unfair for the education system to make biracial people “pick a side” at such a young age. But within the injustice was a subversive agency: for my siblings and I, our racial identity was a choice that we had an active role in shaping. We could choose how to present ourselves to the world.

This is an experience many people of color confront in some way. We may have no choice in the color of our skin, the families we’re born into, or how our bodies are perceived by others. But we do have some choice in how to express ourselves. We can choose if we’ll code switch to fit into an office culture; if we’ll eat our family’s cuisine in public; if we’ll dress in traditional clothes at community events. Some of these choices can lead to violence or erasure. But they can also lead to laughter, or a deeper understanding of how ridiculous race is in the first place.

As a teenager, the first piece of art I discovered that staged these choices (and the confusion and glee they elicit) was Yellow Face by David Henry Hwang. The Pulitzer finalist play, first produced in Los Angeles and then mounted off-Broadway by the Public Theater in 2007, is now making its Broadway debut at the Todd Haimes Theatre. The show follows a fictionalized version of its playwright, played by Daniel Dae Kim (the surrogate character simply goes by DHH). Yellow Face initially presents Hwang’s real-life struggles in the 1990s—including his participation in the ultimately unsuccessful protest to stop Jonathan Pryce from playing an Asian character in the 1991 Broadway production of Miss Saigon. Then, Hwang’s play takes on a surreal turn. Yellow Face imagines a scenario where DHH accidentally casts the completely-white actor Marcus for an Asian role in his farce Face Value. DHH must then cover up this mistake, even as Marcus embraces his false Asian identity and takes a leadership role in the Asian American community.

Hwang is satirizing not just the fluidity of identity, but also the reactionary desire to curb that fluidity with hard and fast rules. Yellow Face offers a critique of people like Marcus (played by Ryan Eggold) who reap the rewards of ethnic representation without its baggage—what today we might call cultural appropriators. But Hwang also offers a lacerating self-critique of activists (like himself) who argue for what is allowed within the Asian community and in the theater—what today we might call gatekeepers.

Hwang is calling attention to anti-Asian racism, while also being non-judgemental about where to draw the line of acceptability. Perhaps, Hwang suggests, that line is more tenuous than we think, and transgressions across it can be sneakily thrilling. If Marcus can easily step into the role of the “upstanding Asian American,” it could be a role that actual Asian Americans perform as well. Like any great role, each Asian American makes bold choices in their interpretation of the part. The audience for these interpretations must also make bold choices: will we applaud or jeer the actors?

Between the Public Theater and this Broadway production of Yellow Face, a lot has changed in America’s understanding of race. We have new terms for white folks falsely claiming to be a people of color: “white Negroes,”“Rachel Dolezals,”“pretendians.” Many Americans take anti-Asian racism more seriously—in the 2020s, Stop AAPI Hate was formed to address escalating hate crimes across the country.

I spoke to David Henry Hwang over Zoom about changes between 2007 to now. He noted that American cultural shifts have also shifted the way audiences view Yellow Face.

“We had hoped and believed that the play would resonate more with an audience in 2024 than it did in 2007,” Hwang said. “Exactly because a lot of these issues, like cultural appropriation and identity, are more in the center of popular discourse. So in 2007, it was a funny play. But I got the sense that audiences didn’t know whether it was okay to laugh? Or it felt like the issues at the heart of the play were more kind of niche issues which didn’t apply to them unless they were Asian.”

In the decades since the Miss Saigon protests, campaigns, initiatives, and critics have called for the complete end of yellowface casting. Hwang’s Yellow Face often aligns itself with these activists by calling out double-standards and inequities, but the show takes a more playful approach to the issue. Like any good play, Yellow Face doesn’t work in absolutes, presenting arguments without endorsing or disavowing them. The show doesn’t burn yellowface into the ground, but instead lets yellowface’s horrors fester onstage. When I laugh at the ridiculous scenarios that involve yellowface, I might also be enjoying yellowface’s absurd pleasures. Perhaps both these horrors and pleasure are also part of an Asian American consciousness. It’s not exactly a reclamation of yellowface, but more like a painful transformation of it.

I asked Hwang if there was something productive to be found in yellowface casting, something exciting about there being no finality for it in the show.

“In an optimistic read of the future, our society continues to progress, and therefore questions come up which have not really been confronted before,” Hwang said. “…Racially mindful casting is, I think, always going to be a thing. But there may be some occasions when it’s fine, given where the society is, and what the role is in the show.”

Hwang and director Leigh Silverman present such an occasion in this Roundabout production by including Black actress Marinda Anderson and the half-British Peruvian American actor Kevin Del Aguila in the cast. The inclusion of Anderson and Del Aguila now encourages Hwang to expand his critique of theatrical casting across more identities. He’s written a new short scene for this production, imagining a conversation between actors Gina Torres (portrayed by Anderson) and Roman Lopez (portrayed by Del Aguila) while they wait to audition for Face Value. The scene includes this humorous exchange:

‍GINA: My character is supposed to be the stage manager. But she’s really just a glorified maid.

ROMAN: Well, stage managers sorta are.

GINA: I think they just wanted to find a way to put a Black person into the show.

In one way, Hwang is lampshading the fact that Anderson is the token Black performer in this production. He might also be anticipating critics like me, who have previously called attention to the white-Asian binary in his shows. Hwang preempts that discourse by making it the text of Yellow Face.

In another way, I find Anderson’s inclusion in the production to be exciting. The actress brings a hilarious, frenetic energy to her scenes, and she plays characters that I’ve never seen Black performers play—including real-life figures Lily Tomlin, Joe Papp, Jane Krakowski, and even David Henry Hwang’s mother. The original protestors of Miss Saigon objected to a white man playing an Asian. Yet within this Yellow Face, there’s a Black woman playing a Chinese American. There’s a delight in watching this cross-racial casting, aided by the fact that Anderson and Del Aguila never drastically change their makeup, hairstyling, or outfits to play their Asian roles. They’re fully themselves, and their strong presence in the show questions what roles I assume are even “for” Black and Latino actors.

Another way Yellow Face feels relevant in 2024 is its intense questioning of what even counts as “Asian American.” In the show, DHH uses Marcus’ claims of Siberian ancestry as proof that he’s Asian. But when I ask you to imagine an Asian American face in your head, you probably imagine someone who’s Chinese, Japanese, or Korean—not Siberian, Pakistani, or Filipino. The Asian American “face” might be a capacious but empty vessel.

Or maybe it’s the term “Asian American” that’s empty. Over the past few years, there’s been an intellectual debate about the usefulness of the term—“Asian American” was created by coalitional student activists in the 1960s, but is now used in wildly different contexts. When I ask Hwang where he falls on this debate, he acknowledged he’s seen the term “Asian American” created as an accepted identity within his lifetime.

“I’m of the generation which worked to implement the term ‘Asian American,’” Hwang said. “If we say that it was invented around 1968 and the San Francisco State University student strike, by the time I got to college in the late ‘70s, it was still a term that was not widely used in American society. There was still more ‘Oriental’ than ‘Asian.’ So I think I have a certain personal investment in the term Asian, which is just historical for me.”

Hwang also acknowledged the fact that “Asian American” is an identity that is contested in ways that other racial groups are not.

“I do think that it brings together, it lumps together, people whose root cultures are profoundly different, but so do any of these racial terms,” Hwang said. “The idea that ‘Asian’ somehow should be defined more by their specific root culture nationality, than as a unified or collective ethnic group, feels unique to Asians. It kinda perpetuates the perpetual foreigner stereotype.”

Hwang also stressed his frustration that the term “Asian American” has been taken out of its original political context and thus its meaning has changed.

“It’s a little disappointing to me that the term Asian American, which was invented as part of a radical project, then over the intervening decades became associated with this other term, the ‘model minority,’ which was also invented around the mid-sixties,” Hwang said. “These two things somewhat became inflated. ‘Asian American,’ which was originally part of an attempt to create solidarity among Asian people and other people of color—what we used to call ‘Third World’ solidarity—it has become so detached from Black people, brown people, Indigenous people. It has been used by the right wing, but also sometimes by Asian American themselves, to drive a wedge between ourselves and other people of color. And I find that sad.”

This production of Yellow Face arrives as an intervention into contemporary discussions around the term “Asian American,” reminding audiences of its contested status across multiple historical moments. This is especially true for people of my generation (Gen Z), who don’t have memories of the play’s late-1990s setting, and the show’s staging of the congressional investigations into Asian Americans’ campaign donations for the 1996 presidential election.

When I asked Hwang about what he hopes my generation gets out of the show, he said he hopes we see a pattern of anti-Asian hate throughout American history.

“I hope that younger people and younger AAPIs can appreciate that there is this recurrent impulse in America,” Hwang says. “Basically it’s what Marcus says: ‘every time the US makes any Asian country its enemy, the first people they go after are Asian Americans!’ The 90s was a good example of that. Certainly post-9/11 and targeting of South Asians and Muslims was another example. The pandemic was another example. But specifically the late 90s, it was a period when, I believe, America was gearing up to make China its next enemy—that period feels like it's really speaking to the current moment when America is again gearing up to make China its big enemy.”

Yellow Face itself is preoccupied with a generational shift happening in Asian America. When the fictional DHH tries to convince an Asian actor of Marcus’ race, he says “It’s a new world out there. The demographics of this country are changing so fast…” I’m wary of making generalizations about biracial people being the future of America. But it is true that multiracial Asians now comprise 14% of the Asian population in the U.S. Within my Filipino family, the entire next generation is half-white and half-Filipino. Yellow Face sharply suggests that Asian American identity might not be able to be strictly defined by “looking Asian” anymore, a fact I personally struggle to reconcile. Even though I am actually Asian, I strangely found myself identifying more with Marcus than DHH.

When I told Hwang about my identification with Marcus, he referenced another scene where DHH tells college students that “Nowadays, we don’t all ‘look alike.’ Looks don’t matter any longer.”

“He’s saying it in the scene in order to cover his butt—but is there some truth to that?” Hwang asked. “That’s what younger generations, which are going to include more multiracial Asians and Americans in general, that’s the sort of thing that is going to be decided in a different social context.”

In some ways, how my siblings and I answered that standardized test proved prophetic in how we now express ourselves. My brother, who answered “white/Caucasian,” has spent the majority of his adult life in the American South, and can play up a Southern charm even when he’s the only person of color in the room. Maybe he’s not code switching; that’s just who he is now. I answered “Asian/Pacific Islander,” went to a Northeast liberal arts college, and studied how racial identities are staged. I tend to make everything about race, and join Asian groups even when I don’t look like anyone there. My sister, who answered “Other,” is proud to be both Asian and white, but has also expressed ambivalence about feeling in community with either group. She’s also trying out to be on the Filipino national team for lacrosse.

Sometimes, I’ll get a cheap thrill from not answering “Asian/Pacific Islander.” The #1 question I get on dating apps is “Where are you from?” I understand that I’m racially ambiguous, and to most people I look Latino. I also understand that for me, the question is asked with curiosity, not the threat of violence used against immigrants. Still, the predictability at which I’ll be asked that question is frustrating in accumulation. It’s as if before a guy can flirt with me, or even see me as attractive, he must make me racially legible.

Like Marcus in Yellow Face, I’ve started lying. If everyone just assumes that I’m Latino, what’s the damage in saying I am? These are clueless white gay men, ones who I’ll never meet in person, guys whose only reference point for the Philippines is Cameron Diaz talking about lumpia. It’s fun to say I’m Latino and mess with them, because they’ll believe me. In the Roundabout production of Yellow Face, Kevin Del Aguila portrays the Asian American actor B.D. Wong, with a knowing wink to the audience. I’m basically doing the opposite: I’m an Asian American person pretending to be Latino, with a knowing wink to myself. By typing a few words, I can put brownface over my own watered-down, biracial yellow face.

I’ve justified the charade as harmless fun. Spain colonized the Philippines, so I’m just cosplaying as my ancestors’ oppressors! Passing isn’t paranoid for me—it’s easy, and there’s convenience in not explaining myself. In these moments I feel what Marcus feels in Yellow Face. It’s the satisfaction of a lie; the casual way that my face shape-shifts depending on the eye of the beholder; the adrenaline of getting to be anyone, at any time.

But this charade isn’t harmless fun. When I say I’m Latino, I adopt an entire culture and life that I have no connection to—and I instantly erase my family and history. A wink to myself can’t salvage this false act. I’m causing harm to myself, and I can’t stop because there’s a rush in doing it.

Yellow Face critiques people like myself and Marcus, people who cause harm by transgressing racial boundaries. But the play also seeks to understand us. It’s part of a rich literary canon on passing and mixed Asian identity, but feels unique by provoking its audience to laugh, to withhold some of its judgment, and to just enjoy the worlds that open up when racial boundaries blur. Yes, there is a line somewhere. But it gives the audience agency in creating that line together.

Yellow Face forces its audience, for a short time, to live in the quagmire of identity I call home. I don’t have a stereotypical Asian American face. I am also white and Other. The term Asian American threatens to smooth out differences in class, nationality, and experience. Asian American is an empty vessel into which I pour my pain and joy. All identity is performed. Calling myself Asian American might be a new, transformed version of yellowface.

Despite all of this, I still embrace being Asian American. Even though no one’s forcing me to, I fill in that bubble. It’s a choice I make every day.

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Yellow Face is running now on Broadway at the Todd Haimes Theatre.