Julia Cho’s Ongoing Journey of Exploring Racial Identity from BFE to Aubergine

Abstract

As a second generation Korean-American playwright, Julia Cho has written plays that show Korean Americans’ lives and their identities living in America. Her early plays including BFE were featured with Korean American characters who were struggling to conform to the mainstream, but failed. Even though her latest play, Aubergine, also has Korean American characters, the way she represent them is different from the previous ones. Because of these different representations, her previous plays had been analyzed from the characters’ emotional or psychological features while the latest one has not been sufficiently analyzed and has only been explored within the Korean diasporic landscape. In this regard, this paper aims to look into how Asian Americans are differently represented in Cho’s two plays, BFE and Aubergine, both of which were written about a decade apart. Cho is dealing with the characters’ diasporan identities as a main theme in her plays with the similar dramatic strategies, but they have different impacts on each play. The main character in BFE distances herself from her ethnic identity while the one in Aubergine reaches the generational understanding. This paper analyzes the dramatic strategies in both plays and focuses on how those shared strategies serve each play’s different purposes.