in an interview with the Washington Post's Lonnae O'Neal Parker, "I hope this MacArthur Fellowship demonstrates the importance of self-determination and the hunger for improvement for people of [my generation]. I didn't take being a [high-school] dropout as a measure of my intelligence or as a harbinger of my future." Ong's works have been performed at venues such as the Highways Performance Space and Gallery and the Berkeley Repertory Theater in California; Joseph Papp Public Theater in New York; Portland Stage Company in Maine; Boston's American Repertory Theater; and at the Almeida Theater in London. Ong collaborated with fellow Filipino American writer Jessica Hagedorn in 1993 to write a performance piece entitled "Airport Music" for the Los Angeles Festival. Ong is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fiction and the TCG/NEA Playwriting Award. "Fixer Chao" was named a Los Angeles Times "Best Book of the Year" and was nominated for a Stephen Crane First Fiction Award. "The Disinherited" was nominated for a LAMBDA Book Award. Although the MacArthur Foundation's Genius Grant finished in 2002, Ong continues to write despite his lamentation that he is "a little poorer now." He has recently focused his efforts solely on novels and hopes to revisit the Philippines after more than twenty years of separation from his homeland. Ong is a recipient of the 2010/2011 Berlin Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin. Major themes Ong's works are often set in urban, multicultural settings. His plays can be divided into two groups: those exploring the issues related to immigration (a search for roots, clashes of culture, identity crisis, American Dream) and those that examine the lives of non-stereotypical Asian Americans. His work portrays the darker side of Asian American life. The characters are typically depressed and hopeless. They are alienated from society and lack mutual communication, respect, and warmth in their family lives. This sense of alienation and outsiderness draws upon the memories of his adolescence. Ong characterizes his work as having "a point of view of somebody with their noses pressed against the glass looking in. It's like a jewel: you turn a different facet to the light." Ong writes from an American perspective, but his Filipino descent is "the more concrete thing I can actually fall back on in terms of nostalgia, of identification." Criticisms David Henry Hwang considers Ong as a "younger, or 'Third Wave' Asian/Pacific playwright" who refuses to