Asian Australian Actors? Myth or Reality?

Recently read an article by a prominent British theatre critic Lyn Gardner on the lack of British East Asian actors in UK, which consequently could be a factor that led to a recent Royal Shakespeare Company of “The Orphan of Zhao” with only 3 East Asian actors in the cast.  The article investigates the reason behind the lack of East Asian actors in the British acting scene, and encourages agencies to put forward more East Asian actors for casting so they could be seen and known. Reading the article got me thinking about the situation in Australia. Are we sharing the same issue?

I don’t know about other cultures, but for Chinese families, Chinese parents do not usually encourage their kids to take up performing arts, or basically any arty profession as a career. I experienced this the first hand and is still at times being discouraged by my parents to think about taking up acting as a career. This could be part of the reason why we do not have a lot of Asian actors in Australia initially.

However, looking at the past 10 years or so, I do think that there are lots of changes in the Asian acting scene. My first gig was in an all Asian cast musical “Flower Drum Song” and that was the first time I thought, “hey there are lots of us around, so why I didn’t see them on stage or on screen before?” So I started looking into this whole “lack of Asian actors” claim in the industry.

Even now, at different occasions, when I questioned why there aren’t more Asian actors on the Australian screen and stage, I was informed that there aren’t enough Asian actors around to do the jobs, which at times I found it absurd. Just judging from the casting sessions I went to when they were looking for stereotypical Asian characters, I always run into a bunch of Asian actors.  Then there is a question of whether there are enough trained Asian actors in the industry. For this I thought about the NIDA graduates I knew and could easily find a bunch of Asian background graduates. Lily Ji (2012), Jenny Wu (2010), Harry Tseng (2010), Pearl Tan (2005), Gareth Yuen (2005), Jason Chan (2001), and Monica Sayers (2004). And these are just some of them. There are also other acting graduates from other acting schools such as Jonathan Chan, Stephanie Son and Ivy Mak. I myself am a graduate from the Theatre School of UNSW. So the claim of no professionally trained Asian actors seems to be a bit thin in my opinion.

So what went wrong? Sometimes I do think because there are not many writers who can write materials for Asian actors. Debra Mailman in one of her interviews last year did acknowledge that even for Indigenous actors, roles tend to be more segregated when it comes to general productions. She cited her role in Offspring as an example in the interview. So maybe Asian actors and writers should work harder to put out materials to tell our stories on stage and on screen. But then I also thought, we might have different traditions and cultural background, should this really play such an important part in productions when we are just talking about generic characters? I have Asian Australian friends who were born in Australia and they are more Australian than Asian. Their parents maybe Asian but my friends speak and act like Australian nonetheless. They are as Aussie as you could expect. So is it that important that Asians have to tell Asian stories, as compared to the Australian stories? Would this approach be actually further segregating the industry into smaller and less rewarding sectors? These are some of the questions I do have.

For me, I do think we should continue to write and put our work out there. However, this should be the bridging process of putting our talents and abilities out there, instead of letting it becoming the only venue for us to showcase ourselves. Writing our own materials should be a gateway to open up the market to us and not to be limited by it. I do look forward to one day I would be called for a “character” in a major production as compared to an “Asian / Chinese character” in a stereotypical context. But until then I would continue to write my materials and hopefully get them produced and put myself out there.

Performance4a - where you find Asian Australian actors