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==Novel==
The novel was written while Lee was a journalist working for two San Francisco Chinatown newspapers Chinese World and Young China. It was a story of generational and cross-cultural conflict in the early 1950s. He lived in [[Chinatown, San Francisco, California|San Francisco's Chinatown]] to turn his short story into a novel. It was he who suggested going to Forbidden City nightclub, on which the musical is based, to find Asians would could sing and dance. The story is quite different from subsequent productions, as the spurned girl commits suicide, and the flower drum song is sung by a servant who
C. Y. Lee's work has been overlooked because some observers felt that ''Flower Drum Song'' perpetuated Orientalist stereotypes of Asians. The novel was a [[New York Times]] bestseller, but quickly went out of print. The first ethnic studies programs in the late 1960s did not accept Lee's playful vision of mixing Chinese and American traditions. For many years the book was rejected by young Asian Americans as being "too white face" or "Uncle Tom". C.Y. Lee was a Chinese immigrant and wrote of the society as he saw it at that time, perhaps an example of the very generation gap portrayed in the musical. While mainstream America had fueled Lee's initial success, the new Asian American movement's consciousness-raising had all but buried Lee's evocation of the Chinese experience in America. <ref>Andrew Shin, [http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2278/is_2_29/ai_n8640589 "Forty percent is luck": an interview with C. Y. Lee], MELUS, Summer 2004 </ref> Largely in conjuction with the 2002 revival, the novel was made available again as a reprint, though copies signed by the author in 1958 are greatly prized.
== 1958 musical ==
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