Can crime writers get away with murder?
A TV series that stars three Kiwi Asian actors is shaking up the industry, writes Emily Brookes, but writer Roseanne Liang says they only win ‘when there are a hundred shows made by us about us’.
There’s plenty that’s shocking in the rather explicit trailer for TVNZ’s new comedy series Creamerie. Set in a dystopian future eight years after an unexplained malady has wiped out all the world’s men, it features forced impregnation, embedded population tracking devices, blood, violence, and a group of three dairy farmers who discover things aren’t quite as they seem.
But perhaps the most surprising element of the whole clip is that the farmers are all played by Kiwi women of Asian descent.
‘‘It shouldn’t be radical, but it is,’’ said Creamerie writer and producer Roseanne Liang, herself a Chinese-New Zealander. ‘‘I think by its very nature it is.’’
Liang, known for films including My Wedding and Other Secrets and last year’s Shadow in the Cloud, starring Chloe¨ Grace Moretz, is no stranger to the question of how Asian Kiwis, and particularly female Asian Kiwis, are represented in the media.
In 2007 she made a short film, Take 3, about the stereotypes Asian actresses are asked to perpetuate in casting rooms: the sex worker, the kung fu fighter, the overachiever. In one scene, a woman auditioning for the role of a doctor trying to resuscitate her dying husband is told to imagine failure at this task as akin to ‘‘getting a B’’ grade.
Frustration over this very issue was what led Liang to her three lead actresses – JJ Fong, Ally Xue and Perlina Lau – with whom she developed Creamerie.
‘‘They’d met on this theatre show and they’d formed a friendship,’’ Liang recalled. ‘‘They’re three very different Asian women, but often they’re lumped together. They came to me because I was a writer and they said, ‘Can you write a show that we devise so we can kind of control our narrative a little bit more as practitioners, as storytellers?’’’
The results were two webseries, Flat 3 and Friday Night Bites, both starring Fong, Xue and Lau – and now Creamerie.
There is no reason the new show, which Liang described as a ‘‘gender-swapped, light antidote to The Handmaid’s Tale’’, needed to star Asian women. She simply cast the people she wanted for the roles.
But just by virtue of having three Asian women in the lead roles (the support cast includes such household names as Kim Crossman and Rachel House), Liang said it became political.
‘‘This, I guess, is the burden of representation... You suddenly speak for everyone, or speak for more people than you intended to speak for.’’ Actress Xana Tang understands this well. ‘‘It’s not the sole responsibility and I don’t want to be cast just because I’m Asian,’’ said Tang, born in New Zealand to Chinese and Vietnamese parents.
‘‘But I think anyone working in the arts that is a person of colour is representing.’’
Now 28, Tang began acting in her late teens. She had significant supporting roles in shows like Filthy Rich and Hounds, but it wasn’t until she landed a part on Australian crime miniseries Dead Lucky that she realised there was a mid-point between a one-dimensional Asian character with no traits other than stereotypes, and a character played by an Asian person but with no distinct cultural traits.
‘‘It was the first character where I thought, ‘Oh, I’m not just playing a girl who happens to be Chinese. Everything about the way I move, the way I speak, the way I think, is so culturally tied [to being Chinese] – but I’m not trying to sell the Chineseness, it just is.’’
Tang is having the same experience in rehearsals for her new play, Single Asian Female. Written by Asian-Australian Michelle Law, the play centres on restaurant owner and single mum Pearl Wong and her daughters, 20-something Zoe – played by Tang in the Auckland production – and teenage Mei.
Tang was initially attracted to Single Asian Female by the chance to work with Kat Tsz Hung, who plays Pearl. She had seen her in the sketch comedy series A Thousand Apologies, ‘‘and it was the first time that I saw someone that had a full Kiwi accent just like me, that looked
like me, and the way the comedy was portrayed was from her perspective and from her lens. For the first time, it didn’t seem like the Asian character was being made fun of.’’
Creamerie, said Liang, was an example of what’s become known as ‘‘colour-blind casting’’, a practice popularised by shows like Grey’s Anatomy and Bridgerton, in which characters are written without indication of race or ethnicity and can therefore be played by anyone.
It sounds like the perfect solution to lack of representation, but Tang wasn’t sure how she felt about it.
‘‘By saying we’re being colour-blind, we’re just looking at the talent… You’re not seeing the person for who they are and everything that they bring.’’
White characters are written with assumed traits, but they’re more difficult to identify because they’re part of our dominant culture. Tang wants to see characters from ethnic backgrounds written in the same way.
That’s why a production like Single Asian Female – written and directed by and starring Asian women – is so exciting for her.
‘‘It feels incredibly authentic,’’ she said, noting that the characters did things like squat instead of sit on the ground, wore jandals inside and had particularly strong links to family. We don’t have
‘‘The burden of representation rests on the people who are underrepresented, and it shouldn’t be that way.’’ Roseanne Liang.
translate... It’s just, oh, I get that.’’
Tang called for more people of colour in all creative roles. ‘‘Otherwise they’re not threedimensional characters or multi-dimensional characters. They’re just a concept or a stereotype.’’
Liang agreed that the way forward was holistic, saying productions needed to be more representative from top to bottom.
‘‘Right from the runner all the way up to producer, there needs to be more of a push towards representative diversity at the very least.’’
But it couldn’t only be the responsibility of the minority to ensure this happened.
‘‘The burden of representation rests on the people who are underrepresented, and it shouldn’t be that way,’’ said Liang. ‘‘It should rest on everyone’s shoulders. Everyone should want that to happen, because when we tell stories that reflect our society wholly and holistically and in all its complexity, then we all win.’’
Performative ‘‘wokeness’’ or tokenism wouldn’t take representation very far, she said; audiences could sense the lack of authenticity. Liang’s hope was that one day soon, the characters in Creamerie would just be seen as a trio of dairy farmers.
‘‘We win when what we do becomes unradical, when there are a hundred shows made by us about us. The irrelevance of representation is the goal.’’
Auckland Theatre Company’s season of Single Asian Female runs April 27 – May 15 at ASB Waterfront Theatre: atc.co.nz
Creamerie premieres on TVNZ 2 and TVNZ OnDemand on April 19.