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Character Analysis Trying To Find Chinatown

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Chinatown by David Hwang
This one- act play, Trying to Find Chinatown, describes the encounter between two characters that are dissimilar in their traits; Benjamin, an ethnic Caucasian who considers himself Asian, and Ronnie, who is an ethnic Asian but actually knows very little about his Asian heritage. Benjamin was adopted by a Chinese- American family and is desperately trying to find out his father’s birth house in New York’s Chinatown. In the process he meets Ronnie, a street musician expert in playing violin,and ask for directions to the house. He assumes that Ronnie is an Asian man and would perhaps know his way around the lanes of Chinatown. Their viewpoint are contrarian but interesting to observe …show more content…

His ranting about ethnic pride leaves one with pride and reflects the liberal education he had at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where he majored in Asian American studies. I empathize with him when I notice that Benjamin’s last name and his ethnic identity are the products of his adoption as an infant into an Asian American family. There is a similarity of character between his and mine ,this happened when few of my cousins took a trip to Calabar a state in Nigeria to go find the grave of my maternal great grandfather who was sent on exile for mix communication,he died and was buried there,a thing that never happened in the Benin kingdom a to a king.We experience the same attitude Benjamin character got from Ronnie.The first person we met as we enter the city misdirected us,after all said and done we find where he was buried we were filled with joy and we paid homage.furthermore the reason for Benjamin’s visit to New York City is a kind of pilgrimage during which he wants to pay homage to his recently deceased father. This being his first time to the New York City, he is obviously lost as he does not know the whereabouts of the location. His objective is to visit his father’s birth house in Chinatown. However, since he is new to the place, he needs directions to reach there. This is where the clash comes when he hopes to wrestle the information from Ronnie. He assumes that since Ronnie is Asian in appearance, and looks might be the right person to provide him the relevant

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