Han Ong
Photo: Annette Hornischer

Novelist and Playwright, New York

Holtzbrinck Fellow - Class of Fall 2010

Han Ong is a novelist and playwright. His novels are Fixer Chao (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2001), which was named a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year and cited as a new immigrant classic by the New York Times; and The Disinherited (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2004), nominated for a Lambda Book Award. Among Ongʼ s more than three dozen plays are The L.A. Plays (1990), The Chang Fragments (1996), Middle Finger (1997), and The Suitcase Trilogy (1992–97). They have been widely produced in the US in such venues as the Joseph Papp Public Theater (New York), Berkeley Repertory Theater (Berkeley, California), the Mark Taper Forum (Los Angeles, California) and the American Repertory Theater (Cambridge, Massachusetts), as well as abroad, at Londonʼ s Almeida Theater. Ong is one of the youngest recipients of the MacArthur Fellowship, awarded to him in 1997, when he was 29. He has also received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Guggenheim Foundation, and Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Born in the Philippines to Chinese parents, he immigrated to the US with his family as a teenager. Ong has been a guest lecturer at Columbia University and Long Island University and has taught playwriting for several years at New Yorkʼ s 92nd Street Y.

Project Description

Untitled Novel

During his fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin, Ong will work on his third novel, which will explore, among other things, the nature and mystery of philanthropy. The book will consist of a set of interlocking short stories – “alighting from one character to another” – set off by an American businessman who decides to retire to the Philippines and sponsor the college educations of local students. “Burden of Dreams,” a long story published in the Fall 2009 issue of the magazine Zoetrope, is the novelʼs opening story. “A subset of the overarching idea of philanthropy,” Ong writes, “would be the idea of ‘promise.’ What is it and what does it take to harbor it successfully until it finally flowers? What does it take to be a noticer of promise, to be its prognosticator, as any philanthropist must to some degree become?”

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