LOS ANGELES — “Miss Saigon” is revived and on tour again, playing in a theater near me. This is exciting news for some fans of Broadway musicals, and for Asian and Asian-American actors with the chance for important roles. For others, to whom “Miss Saigon” perpetuates deeply held notions of Asian inferiority, this is bad news.

“Miss Saigon” is about a Vietnamese prostitute in Saigon during the war years who falls in love with a white male American G.I. He leaves for America without knowing that she is pregnant. She bears his son and when he returns, gives up the child to him so that he can save the boy and take him to the United States, far from Vietnam. Left behind, our prostitute kills herself.

I saw the musical in New York City in 1996, paying for tickets in the fourth row, an extravagant expenditure for a graduate student on a minimal fellowship. In my earnest idealism, I believed that I should see a work before I criticized it. But sometimes things are as they appear on their yellowface.

All around me, audience members sobbed at the tragic love story. I was disgusted. I could not help but think of how “Miss Saigon” was based on Puccini’s opera “Madama Butterfly,” set in Japan. In Puccini’s by-now universal story, two star-crossed lovers, a Japanese woman and a white man, together embody Rudyard Kipling’s dictum: “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet.” Because East and West are fundamentally opposed, the lovers are doomed, or, to put it more accurately, one lover is doomed — the Japanese woman. Happy to see that her child will live a better life in the West, she takes her own worthless life.