From The Page To The Stage

Award-winning composer and writer, Min Kahng talks about how he created musical ‘four immigrants’

- Harvard Gazette

Min Kahng, the composer and writer of the award-winning “The Four Immigrants: An American Musical Manga talks about his creative process and artistic journey

“The Four Immigrants” was originally a Japanese manga. How did you come to bring it to the stage?

I stumbled upon it in a used bookstore in downtown Berkeley (California). Henry Kiyama was a 20th-century Japanese artist who came to the U.S. to study art. He was college-age in San Francisco when immigration laws were stiffened. It primarily interested me because the narrative we are told about Asian immigrant history is they came here to become laborers. To learn there was a Japanese immigrant who came to study art at the San Francisco Art Institute really spoke to me because I feel like I’m trying to carve a similar path. I got in touch with the English translator Frederik Schodt, who I discovered lives 20 minutes away. Fred is a very generous and giving person. He gave me his vote of confidence, and through him I got the blessing of Kiyama’s daughter and granddaughter, who are in Japan.

So was your path to the arts non-linear?