I have been taking advantage of my stay in Hong Kong to
catch up with the local media scene. The Hong Kong media scene, especially the
TV industry has been dominated by one single channel – TVB. With a dominating
rating since its launch 40 years ago, any competitions seemed to be irrelevant.
TVB is also the reason why I wanted to become an actor – I was fed with their
brilliant productions throughout my childhood.
The company has recently changed hands, not because of
financial reason but because of the original owner wanted to go into a real
retirement. In the last few years, productions have been criticised at times being
lack of originality by copying storylines from western production and other
eastern country productions such as Japan and Korea. Nonetheless, with a huge
profile of well-known actors, this doesn’t seem to be an issue for this
television channel.
I have been coordinating the Diversity Casting Australia group
for some time now. During this period, when I discussed the issue with
different people, I sometimes got people questioning me about the scene in the
Hong Kong media. At that time I informed them that as long as an actor can act
and can speak Cantonese, they have similar opportunities to perform on stage
and on screen. I remembered when I grew up there were various Indian and
western actors who were in TV and film productions. Hong Kong has a huge Indian
population and also a quite notable western population, so it was natural to
see them on TV and I never questioned their presence. What more is that although
they sometimes do play token characters but a lot of times they were just
playing your day to day characters like next door neighbours and colleagues at
workplace.
This time when turn on the television and watched a recently
extremely popular TV series, I noticed that a Kiwi-Australian girl who could
speak fluent Cantonese is capturing the hearts of a lot of people. As a
daughter of a missionary mother, Corinna Chamberlain is a graduate from the
local drama school Academy of Performing Arts in music theatre. Having grown up
in Hong Kong, she speaks fluent Cantonese and English. Her rise to attention
was not because of her playing some token funny foreign character, but just a
normal childhood friend of one of the leading characters. Her supporting role
had quickly caught the attention of the audience and the media and her star has
been rising quickly.
Hong Kong’s cultural change has been moving forward quickly.
Two years ago another Hongkong-Indian actor Gill Mohindepaul Singh also rose to attention because of his regular role as
a next- door neighbour in a TVB sitcom. Similar to Corinna, he speaks fluent Cantonese. He is now
working actively in the film industry.
In fact accepting non-Chinese actors in local production is
not something entirely new in Hong Kong. One of my childhood friends’ fathers
was a TV and film actor before he retired. He was of mixed descent but he looks
like a westerner. But he was never short of any opportunities in the industry.
When I grew up there are other western actors such as the Australian actor GregoryCharles Rivers, who came to Hong Kong to pursue acting because he was
fascinated by the Hong Kong pop music scene. He had a successful run at TVB and
now he is a voice coach in Hollywood after being invited by Chow Yun Fat. Another case is
Brian Thomas Burrell from America, who is now also working on TV regularly.
One might argue that these are just exceptional cases. But
what I wanted to point out is the concept of embracing cultural diversity to
reflect our society. As “mono-cultural”
as Hong Kong, as some Australian peers noted, the Hong Kong screen embraces
cultural diversity on screen as a norm. Nobody questioned why certain westerner
or Indian actor is on screen doing certain role. It was just accepted as it is.
Unlike my experience in the past when I discussed the issue with some people, I
was informed that I needed to “justify” my presence as a character in an Australian production. Non-Chinese actors can be just anyone apart from their token roles
and that was reflected in local productions. People talked about how good
Corinna Chamberlain was in her current role but nobody talked about why does
the main character have a westerner childhood friend. I think that is the main difference.
Australia is slowing changing for sure, but is the pace
itself too slow compared to other countries? That is my question.
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