A Soldier Died After Racist Hazing. Now His Story Is an Opera.

When she visits St. Louis this weekend to see the life and death of her only child transformed into an opera, Su Zhen Chen will be seated near an aisle, and an exit.

“If I can endure, I will watch the whole opera,” Chen said in a phone interview this week before leaving her home in New York. “If I don’t feel like I can bear it, I’ll leave midway.”

It will be understandably difficult to watch. The opera, “An American Soldier,” by composer Huang Ruo and playwright David Henry Hwang, which is having its premiere in a newly expanded version at the Opera Theater of St. Louis on Sunday, tells the story of her son, Danny Chen, a native New Yorker who enlisted in the Army and was deployed to Afghanistan.

Soon after he got there, in 2011, he was subjected to brutal hazing and racist taunts by fellow soldiers in his battalion, and killed himself. He was 19.

His death led to several courts-martial and helped spark a national conversation about hazing and racism in the armed forces. Su Zhen Chen said she hopes that the opera will spread his story, in the hopes that others will be spared his fate. But she is not sure that she can stand to watch the whole thing.

Danny Chen’s cousin, Banny Chen, said that it had been painful but powerful to see an earlier one-act version performed at Washington National Opera in 2014.

“I remember in 2011, 2012, when this was happening, we only heard about it through words — through other people’s mouths, through the media,” Banny Chen, 24, said in an interview. “When we were in D.C., it was all manifested visually, and it was so much more realistic. For me, it was very difficult to sit through, but it was real. It did actually happen. It was an ugly truth.”

The most affecting moment for him came near the end, when the opera has Danny sing to his mother from beyond the grave. “That was the part where I finally teared up,” he said.

The story’s path to the opera house began with Elizabeth R. OuYang, a civil rights lawyer who had worked to focus national attention on the case while serving as president of the New York chapter of OCA Asian Pacific American Advocates. She turned to Hwang — whose works include “M. Butterfly” and “Yellow Face,” which was just named one of the best American plays of the last 25 years by The New York Times — to see if he would be interested in writing a drama about Danny Chen.

He said he was not sure a play would be the best fit for the story. But he thought it could make a moving opera.

“Opera deals with big themes, with epic themes,” Hwang explained this year at a discussion about the project at the Guggenheim Museum. “It’s very comfortable dealing with tragedy, with death and, of course, with love, also.”

He happened to know a composer in search of a subject: Huang, who had written the well-received opera “Dr. Sun Yat-sen,” as well as music for Hwang’s play “The Dance and the Railroad” in 2013. Huang had been asked by Francesca Zambello, the artistic director of Washington National Opera, to write a one-act for the company’s American Opera Initiative.

Huang remembered the Chen case and was drawn to it. “This was an American story,” he said this winter at a discussion at the Museum of Chinese in America in New York, a few blocks from Elizabeth Street in Manhattan’s Chinatown — where Chen grew up, and part of which has been renamed Private Danny Chen Way.

Hwang’s libretto draws on testimony from the court-martial, interspersed with flashbacks, and includes some of the racial epithets that were hurled at Chen: “gook,” “dragon lady” and “egg roll.” It also recounts some of the brutality he endured, including being dragged over rocks, and includes a scene of one of the soldiers charged in connection with his hazing and death (who is given a different name in the opera) being acquitted of the most serious charges — something that pains the Chen family to this day.

Writing operas about contemporary history can be fraught. John Adams’ “The Death of Klinghoffer,” which explores the 1985 hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro by members of the Palestine Liberation Front and their murder of Leon Klinghoffer, a Jewish passenger, has long been controversial for its attempts to explore the motivations of the hijackers as well as the victims. Members of the Klinghoffer family have been among the work’s most vocal critics.

The creators of “An American Soldier” took the sensitivities of the Chen family seriously. Su Zhen Chen has never accepted that her son killed himself, despite evidence presented at the courts-martial. The opera includes details from the case, including the fact that Danny Chen wrote “Tell my parents I’m sorry” on his arm before his death. But the shooting occurs offstage, so the suicide is not explicit.

As she prepared to travel to St. Louis this week, OuYang — who was wearing a T-shirt that said “Pvt. Danny Chen. All American. Soldier for Life” — said that she would attend a rehearsal to find the best moment to escort Su Zhen Chen out of the theater if needed. She described how they left together shortly before the end in Washington, missing the climactic aria for the character called Mother Chen.

“One of the most beautiful parts of the opera — when I went to the dress rehearsal I was sobbing, I still remember — is the mother’s lullaby to Danny, which is at the end,” OuYang recalled. “I would really love the mother to listen to it, it is just so beautiful.”

But, she added, “I couldn’t risk it, because the gunshot is so close to the lullaby.”