{"id":200944,"date":"2019-02-05T03:20:24","date_gmt":"2019-02-05T08:20:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/?p=200944"},"modified":"2019-02-05T03:20:24","modified_gmt":"2019-02-05T08:20:24","slug":"flower-drum-song-author-c-y-lee-dead-at-102","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/2019\/02\/05\/flower-drum-song-author-c-y-lee-dead-at-102\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Flower Drum Song’ author C.Y. Lee dead at 102"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Lee’s son, Jay Lee, told The Associated Press that his father died Nov. 8 in Los Angeles. The family decided at the time not to make his death public. (Pixabay Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

NEW YORK \u2014 C.Y. Lee, whose novel \u201cThe Flower Drum Song\u201d became a bestseller and the basis for a popular stage musical and Oscar-nominated film despite mixed critical reactions and concerns about stereotypes, has died at age 102.<\/p>\n

Lee’s son, Jay Lee, told The Associated Press that his father died Nov. 8 in Los Angeles. The family decided at the time not to make his death public.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Flower Drum Song,\u201d a story of generational conflict set in San Francisco’s Chinatown, came out in 1957, and quickly became a popular read. The New York Times’ Idwal Jones praised Lee’s \u201cobjective eye,\u201d but also faulted the book for its absence of \u201cdeeper notes\u201d and its affinity for \u201cslang and sex\u201d and \u201cpopular taste.\u201d (The author would later acknowledge he wanted to reach a large audience).<\/p>\n

Lee’s debut novel attracted the attention of screenwriter Joseph Fields and composers Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. Their musical adaptation, originally directed by Gene Kelly, ran on Broadway from 1958-60 and was revived in 2002, with a book by \u201cM. Butterfly\u201d playwright David Henry Hwang. A 1961 film version, among the first major Hollywood productions to feature an Asian cast, received five Academy Award nominations despite being called by The New Yorker an \u201celaborate fraud\u201d and a showcase for crude stereotypes.<\/p>\n

Lee has since been praised as among the first Asian novelists to break through commercially in the U.S. and Hwang is among those who thought the book underrated. \u201cFlower Drum Song\u201d was out of print at the time Hwang worked on the Broadway revival and he had to track it down from a Seattle book seller.<\/p>\n

\u201cI thought, ‘Oh, it’s such a shame this author and this book have been lost, particularly the bittersweet tone of the novel,\u201d’ Hwang told the AP in 2001.<\/p>\n

\u201cC.Y.’s book is complicated in terms of texture about what it means to be an American \u2014 the things you gain and the things you lose \u2014 but it ultimately affirms the value of this social experience.\u201d<\/p>\n

A native of China who emigrated to the U.S. during World War II, Chin Yang Lee wrote several other novels, including \u201cChina Saga\u201d and \u201cGate of Rage,\u201d based on pro-democracy protests in 1989 centred on Tiananmen Square.<\/p>\n

He spent more than a year writing \u201cFlower Drum Song,\u201d and at the time was renting a small apartment above a Filipino nightclub in San Francisco. He was employed at the time by a Chinese-language newspaper, for which he wrote stories for elderly readers. For his novel, he drew upon his observations about the difference between older immigrants and their more assimilated children.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn Chinatown, I knew everything that was going on,\u201d he told the AP in 2002. \u201cOut of that I created characters, using everybody including my own family and my friends, plus a lot of invention from the air.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lee struggled to find a publisher. After more than a dozen rejections, he was warned by his agent that he might have to \u201cthink of another profession.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBut then the novel landed at the sick bed of an 80-year-old gentleman, who was a reader for a highbrow publishing house (Farrar, Straus),\u201d Lee told the AP. \u201cHe was quite ill, but he read it. He didn’t have the energy to write a two- or three-page critique. He wrote only two words \u2014 ‘Read this’ \u2014 and died.<\/p>\n

\u201cWithout those two words, the novel would have never been published.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NEW YORK \u2014 C.Y. Lee, whose novel \u201cThe Flower Drum Song\u201d became a bestseller and the basis for a popular …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":147012,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,106],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-200944","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","category-hollywood","mauthors-the-associated-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200944","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200944"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200944\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/147012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200944"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200944"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200944"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}