It took me a while to decide on Kronos’ name, however—I chose Kronos ultimately because of that connection to time, perhaps ironically, since the character Kronos is timeless in a sense. He is one victim, he is all victims.

LR: Prometheus Nguyen, for all of its Classical allusions, seems to envision a sort of new mythology for contemporary urban America (or perhaps, more accurately, an anti-mythology)—one in which the heroes are people like Kronos Nguyen, Matthew Shepherd, Emmett Till, and in which the problem of hubris lies not with those human beings who attempt to rise above their “place,” but with “Olympus,” the system which metes violence out on those whom the accepted nationalist rhetoric excludes from the American dream. Do you think there is such a thing as a mythology of contemporary Asian America? If so, what might such a tradition look like to you (e.g., what would be its touchstone conventions and archetypes, who would be its heroes), and how would you see your own work fitting into such a space? If not, why not?

TR: That’s a huge question, and it’s something that occupies my mind regularly. If I understand correctly, you mean mythology as a kind of nation-building project, a way of narrativizing a community, yes? If so, I think there is an Asian American mythology, a very important mythology, that is an object of contention and flux. I was trying to explore this conundrum in R&L, a play which I no longer completely agree with myself nowadays. Asian America is a subject that I’m both deeply passionate yet extraordinarily anxious about. The question of the actual existence of an “Asian American community” has been a persistent one, and it’s still relevant particularly after so many years of the radicalism of the ’68 student strikes and the Vincent Chin solidarity mobilizations, and in light of the obvious ethno-cultural-economic gulfs between different diasporic populations. And we can combat the model minority myth all we want, but much of the community does indeed strive for (and in some cases, always has striven for) the social position of whiteness. During my time at Stanford, one of my passions was to attempt to radicalize and politicize the “Asian American community,” especially in building solidarity with Black, Chicano, and First Nations communities but these days I’ve become a bit more pessimistic. I went to a community screening of Vincent Who? in San Francisco recently, and one of the community members, a middle-aged Chinese American man, fiercely decried that “Asian Americans have too high an average median income for their own good!” A profound point on so many levels.