The Case of the Racist Reporter

In his new play, “Yellow Face,” David Henry Hwang puts words in the mouths of many real people, from the actress Jane Krakowski to the former House majority leader Tom DeLay.One major character, however, is singled out by having his name omitted: a New York Times reporter who, in the play, interviews the protagonist (a playwright named David Henry Hwang) and whose covert racism supposedly becomes the inspiration for Mr. Hwang’s next play. Whenever his name comes up, there is a loud beep, and a voiceover that says: “Name omitted on advice of counsel.”The second act of “Yellow Face” describes a government investigation in which Mr. Hwang’s father, Henry Hwang, was involved in the late 1990s. A front-page story in the Times on May 12, 1999, reported that federal officials were investigating the source of tens of millions of dollars that had been transferred from the Central Bank of China into a California bank founded by Henry Hwang. David Henry Hwang was mentioned in the story, because he for a time sat on the bank’s board. No charges were ever brought in the case.In the play, and more directly in a column in May in the Los Angeles Times, Mr. Hwang suggests that the Times’s coverage of his father was influenced by prejudice. He links it to the investigation of the nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee, which was going on at the same time. “To what extent,” Mr. Hwang asked in the L.A. Times piece, “were the reporters who broke these stories influenced, however unconsciously, by the template of Asians as perpetual foreigners?” He argued that, since journalists are often biased, the privileging of “true stories” over fiction is misplaced. “Sometimes,” he wrote, “it is fiction that actually reveals the truth.”So how much truth and how much fiction are in Mr. Hwang’s characterization of the reporter whose name is so conspicuously omitted in the play? The playwright, reached by phone, declined to comment on the reporter’s role, or why he chose not to name him. But here are the facts:The May 12, 1999, story was written by two investigative reporters, Tim Golden and Jeff Gerth. Mr. Hwang, for his purposes, conflated them. In the interview within the play, the character of Mr. Hwang refers to other stories the unnamed reporter has covered:the unauthorized sale of satellite technology to China, the investigation into political contributions by Asian-Americans, Wen Ho Lee, Whitewater — all of which Mr. Gerth either broke or participated in covering. But Mr. Gerth, reached by phone and informed about the scenario in the play, said he’d never spoken to Mr. Hwang. Mr. Golden, who was the lead reporter on the California bank story, said he had a vague memory of calling Mr. Hwang and having a brief conversation, in which Mr. Hwang declined to talk about the issues involving the bank. But nothing like what happens in the play’s interview scene — in which the reporter as much as confesses to thinking that Asian-Americans have divided loyalties — occurred.Mr. Golden, who was provided a copy of the interview scene in the play by The New York Sun, said that he didn’t challenge Mr. Hwang’s right to invent things in the service of art, but called the suggestion that the bank story was biased ridiculous.“The story never accused anyone of committing a crime,” Mr. Golden said. “What it did was to show, in great detail, how this money moved through Henry Hwang’s bank and how the Clinton administration was generally asleep at the switch as it did.” No one, including Henry Hwang, ever challenged the facts of the story, he added.Asked if he thought the reporter character was based on him, Mr. Golden laughed and said: “I don’t think it’s really based on me. Presumably it’s based on David Henry Hwang’s mythological understanding of the New York Times and its role in American society. The fact that I may or may not have had a three- or five-minute telephone conversation with him in the course of this reporting seems to me to be fairly irrelevant to the creation of that myth.” To have used his name, or Jeff Gerth’s, “would have exposed his ulterior motive more obviously.”Asked if he would have considered suing for libel if Mr. Hwang had used his name, Mr. Golden said: “I generally think that criticism of our work comes with the territory and that we need to be accountable for what we write.” He acknowledged that the Times’s coverage of the Wen Ho Lee case, which he was not involved in, was flawed. (Mr. Lee pleaded guilty in 2000 to one count of mishandling classified data, and the other charges against him were dismissed.) “That’s fair game, too, I guess,” he said.But Mr. Golden said he saw a certain irony in Mr. Hwang’s accusing journalists of bias, while claiming for himself the right to correct the record through invention.“He’s trying to have it both ways,” Mr. Golden said. “He says that fiction gets at a deeper truth than journalism, but then he wants to decide which truth is deeper, and he twists the facts to get there.”

The Case of the Racist Reporter

The Case of the Racist Reporter

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