CHINESE DRAMATIST STARS IN UCSD ROLE

LA JOLLA —  He watched his first stage play in the arms of his mother. He developed a passion for opera, a yen for drama. He learned to worship Eugene O’Neill, to follow in his footsteps “in every way possible.”

He had no idea that such mimicry would include incurring tuberculosis, as O’Neill had; leaving college early, as O’Neill had; weathering a series of ill-fated love affairs, as O’Neill had, and joining the navy, as O’Neill had.

Now the long day’s journey of Huang Zong-jiang has taken him from the People’s Republic of China, his home, to the campus of UC San Diego as a teacher. Huang is further proof that the Chinese cometh to UCSD in a very big way.

Paul Pickowicz, Huang’s sponsor in UCSD’s Chinese studies program, said that 15% of the freshman class is Asian-American and that more than 100 students come from China; the second-largest group comes from Taiwan.

Many are clamoring to take Huang’s courses in Chinese drama and opera largely “to study their own culture,” Pickowicz said. “It’s amazing. You can peek in on one of his classes and see the looks on their faces. They’re learning about their culture--their own roots.”

Huang seems eminently qualified to deliver such knowledge. Except for being exiled during part of the Cultural Revolution--he was forced to work as a field hand in a remote village--he has been at the forefront of opera, drama and film in his native land.

At UCSD, he is officially a Fulbright scholar-in-residence, one of about 20 from Asia teaching in the United States. Pickowicz said Huang was “at the top of the list” among those qualifying for the honor. A glowing recommendation came from Alan Alda, who got to know Huang during the latter’s visits to the Eugene O’Neill Memorial Theatre Center in New London, Conn.

For one who has known Alda and Helen Hayes, and rubbed shoulders with the giants of his own country, Huang is remarkably unassuming and unpretentious--the kind of teacher students love, Pickowicz said.

His appearance is almost one of boyish innocence. He is a small, jovial man with a bright, sunny face and tufts of gray spreading around the temples. He has a perky sense of humor, much of it delightedly self-deprecating.

“I want it etched on my tombstone,” said the 65-year-old gentleman, “that I was a great amateur actor and a fan of the performing arts.”

Huang struggles to answer every question posed as candidly as possible--whether it concerns Helen Hayes; Communism, which he has espoused, or the current movie “Tai-Pan,” which he and apparently most of his contemporaries loathe.

“It has sparked a great controversy in China,” Pickowicz said. “It tends to glorify the life of an opium trader, but what has been really controversial is the role of the lead actress--and the fact that she’s from China. The role (played by Joan Chen) is that of a kind of sex slave for the opium trader. In many scenes, she’s bare-breasted, which is also causing a lot of the howling in China.”

“I am not opposed to nudity per se,” Huang said with a wry smile. “But in this case, it was gratuitous.”

Huang has never done a nude scene, but he has worked as an “actress.” In traditional Peking opera, men played all the parts, even those of women. Because he went to the same high school as former Premier Chou En-lai and gifted Chinese dramatist Cao Yu, Huang was once told that he was one of the three greatest “actresses” ever to appear at the school.

Before he wanted to be Eugene O’Neill, he wanted to be an opera singer. But he didn’t have the voice--for the stage, or the shower. He now sees O’Neill as a tragic figure, but that hasn’t deterred his desire for emulating the great man, whom he sees as the American Shakespeare.

Huang first began to study O’Neill in the 1930s. A few years later, O’Neill’s “The Great Horizon” prompted him to become a seaman. He sailed in the navy, as O’Neill had--in Huang’s case, with the Chinese navy, to such ports as San Diego, which he last saw in 1946 and had longed to return to ever since.

Not coincidentally, one of Huang’s first plays was titled “The Great Reunion,” which later became a movie. Huang has acted in and directed films, written books, plays and operatic librettos.

He sees Peking opera as another monumental influence.

“I am always interested in comparing the two,” he said of O’Neill and opera. His tenure as a Fulbright scholar “gives me a chance not only to share our Chinese artistic treasure with American friends, but also to further study the Western film and theater. These are the two purposes of my stay in the United States.”

Inevitably, Huang is asked about Communism. He joined the party in 1949, which even for a Chinese artist and intellectual was early. He says simply that Communism provided his country an escape--a mechanism for survival--from crushing pre- and post-war poverty.

As the son of intellectual parents--his father was educated in Japan at the turn of the century, near the end of the Ching dynasty--Huang’s period of exile during the Cultural Revolution is a subject of irony and curiosity. It is also the kind of tragedy O’Neill the playwright might relish.

Huang doesn’t sound bitter toward the late Mao, but he is toward Mao’s wife, a member of the Gang of Four who was exiled--but not before she had done great damage to the arts. At least, that is Huang’s opinion.

But those days are gone; happier days are at hand. Huang sees China’s renaissance in the arts as sure but slow--demanding patience as much as perseverance--but well worth the effort in the end.

He would like to see more bicultural co-productions in cinema--the recently released “The Great Wall” is a modest beginning, he said, and proof (because of its light comedic style) that both countries should be wary of tackling too much too soon.

Maybe one day, both countries will be ready for a serious film examining their relationship, or exactly what happened to China in the last four decades.

Now, however, is not the time.

“We have made the start,” Huang said. “I hope to do whatever I can to help the process succeed.”