Renegade lovers on the lam

Matthew C. Yee’s country-and-western musical reimagines Chinese American identities.

By JACK HELBIG

Actor, writer, composer, musician, lyricist, visual artist, short film director, and stop-motion animator Matthew C. Yee is no still water. But he does run deep. Yee is currently playing the lead male in Lookingglass Theatre’s Lucy and Charlie’s Honeymoon, a country-and-western musical about an Asian American couple on the lam from the law. He also wrote the book and the songs.

Lucy and Charlie’s Honeymoon has been gestating for a long time. “I first came up with the idea in 2011,” Yee explains. “I was in school [in a screenwriting class], and I was trying to write a short scene about a couple who are arguing about how they should rob a gas station. And the whole scene is just them fighting.”

The scene was filmed for class, but Yee kept thinking about how to expand it. As a Chinese American artist, he wanted to put more of himself into the story.

“I decided to make these two characters Asian American. And I wanted to tell this story of this couple who have all of this pressure put on them by their immigrant parents to live the American dream. And rather than embracing the positive American dream, they have embraced the dark side of the American dream, the greed and anger and all of this other stu that’s represented in American cowboy culture.”

Lucy and Charlie also embrace country-western music, something Yee embraces as well, especially classic country tunes of the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. He lists his favorites:

“Johnny Cash, The Carter Family, Conway Twitty, Loretta Lynn, Patsy Cline. Glen Campbell’s ‘Wichita Lineman’ is a really big one for me. There’s a song that I’m obsessed with called ‘Big Bad John’ by Jimmy Dean. Country music is a great storytelling device because that kind of music is already so specific and story-driven.”

The fact that the genre back then was mostly lily-white made it more enticing for Yee.

“Most of our cast is Asian American, and I’m like, I love playing this music, and I want a cast of Asian Americans playing country-western music because it’s just not something—well, that’s not what you usually get. A lot of Americans think [country-western music] belongs to a certain community. I wanted to flip it on its head and make it for everybody.”

And in his show, Yee goes whole-hog CW. In the show’s title song (available on YouTube), Yee and his costar, Aurora Adachi-Winter, twang their way through a tune that has a very Tammy Wynette/George Jones vibe: “We gotta do something to get out of town for a while / To celebrate our marriage with a little bit of style / Doin’ bad things with you really gets my heart rate up / I’m horned up, too / I’m ready to screw / I guess this must be love.”

Yee grew up in Lombard, the son of a first-generation Chinese American father who was born and raised in Chinatown. His father is the subject of Yee’s Ward 25: I Remember Chinatown, his short-subject contribution to Lookingglass’s “50 Wards: A Civic Mosaic” digital project. His mother is a first-generation Scottish American. “I guess I could identify as mixed or whatever, but as I’ve gotten older, I have come to identify really strongly with my Asian heritage,” Yee says.

The irony is not lost on Yee that he has grown increasingly interested in an Asian heritage that his father spent his life distancing himself from. As Yee points out in his short film about his dad, “The first generation desperately tries to forget their heritage and become more American. And the second generation desperately tries to remember and become more Chinese.”

“So [my father] went full on into sort of his American identity and has sort of, I think, lost a little bit of his Asian culture. Like, he doesn’t speak the language [of his parents, Cantonese], and he doesn’t know the stories. When he was a kid, he played football in high school, and he rode a Harley-Davidson. And he did all this stu that made him cool, but also very American.”

Yee was the opposite. “I played football my freshman year, and I hated it.”

To learn about his Chinese heritage, Yee turned to his grandparents. “I talked a lot to my grandmother. I talked a lot to my greataunt. She’s like the gatekeeper. She has all the stories. I think a lot of the time, the second generation, like me, feels like we’ve lost part of our heritage because there’s somebody that was ahead of us in the line who didn’t keep the stories going or keep that tradition going. So we try and get that stu back.”

But for Yee, the issue of identity was complicated: “Because I was mixed, I had both of these identities within me, and it made things really confusing. I just wanted to know where I belonged. It’s just a very human thing. You want to know what tribe you belong to, right? So you feel safe. And when I was a kid, that just was something that was on my mind all the time. I didn’t know how to fit in very well.”

It didn’t help that kids at school kept asking Yee, “What are you?”

“God, constantly. ‘What are you?’ That’s the worst question. God, I hate that question. Yeah, that one was always frustrating. China is so di erent from America. To accept both cultures—Chinese American and Scottish American—can be really confusing. Dealing with that as a kid, it shaped my personality a lot and put a chip on my shoulder.”

Yee’s song “Renegades” from his current show captures these feelings of alienation that send his just-married protagonists, a pair of star-crossed “first-generation Asian American renegades” (to quote Yee’s lyrics), on a wild American road trip set to a very American tune.

Yee’s song goes, “Lucy was born of Chinese immigrants who came looking for a better world. . . . [But] she found herself quite alienated by the culture of the USA. . . . She was a first-generation Asian American renegade . . . . Charlie’s folks came from China, too. . . . He did drugs and played in bands . . . He was a first-generation Asian American renegade.” Yee was, in a way, a second-generation Asian American renegade. But ultimately, Yee found his footing in life by embracing what made him unique. “I love both sides of my family and their culture. I don’t need to reconcile anything anymore. I don’t need to justify anything. I’m who I am, and I get to have both sides of my family. And I just love getting to embody that every day. That’s what America is supposed to be; it’s this beautiful mix. And whereas when I was younger, I felt like it didn’t make sense to me; now it makes total sense to me, and I don’t have any questions about my identity.

“I just don’t care what anybody thinks. I’m gonna do what I’m gonna do, and as long as I’m happy, that’s all I really care about.” v

@JackHelbig