From Fu Manchu to "misfortune cookies", a new theatre work harnesses both anger and humour to subvert Asian stereotypes. Joanna Wane talks to collaborators Nathan Joe and Jane Yonge.
It seems ludicrous now but not that long ago in New Zealand's history, the two people sitting in front of me were considered an existential threat. In some circles, they still are.
Jane Yonge at least fits the stereotype of Asian women being small and beautiful, if not submissive. As a director, she calls the shots.
She's also half-Pākehā — a "hybrid" is how one of her school teachers put it — and heavily pregnant. Playwright, poet and performer Nathan Joe is the Chinese nerd in glasses. He's also queer. "Look at me!" he says, with a laugh. "I'm your worst nightmare. Five-foot-four inches of pure terror."
Using humour to disarm the audience before landing a sucker punch is a trademark of Joe's work. The title of his latest collaboration with Yonge, Scenes from a Yellow Peril, does exactly that. It's a reclamation of sorts, de-weaponising a phrase that's been used to humiliate, alienate, persecute and demonise, with its fearmongering Fu Manchu caricatures.
Opening in Auckland next week, it's not a play exactly but more a collection of performance pieces, from slam poetry to soliloquies, with live music and "misfortune" cookies. In the publicity material, it's promoted as an "uncomfortable, playful and enlightening provocation on racism and privilege". Joe describes it as firing mini storytelling cannons at the audience.
One of the 17 loosely themed segments is called "You Always Masturbate"; another is "My ancestors crossed oceans to be here and all I have to show for it is bubble tea" — but the opening poem is a war cry of distilled rage. "These are secrets held tightly between twisted lips … Make them listen. Make yourself heard. Your silence will not protect you."
In one of the most powerful scenes, "They Shoot Chinamen, Don't They?", three ghosts from the past appear. The first is Joe Kum Yung, a 70-year-old retired miner who was murdered in Wellington's unofficial Chinatown district in 1905 — shot in the back by Englishman Lionel Terry, whose manifesto "The Shadow", proselytised on racial purity.
The second, a young South Korean tourist Jae Hyeon Kim, was hitchhiking on the West Coast when he was killed by white supremacists almost 100 years later. The third, Mei Fan, had met her Kiwi husband in China. The estranged couple were in a custody dispute over their two young children when he stabbed her to death at her Miramar home in 2013.
On the 100th anniversary of Joe Kum Yung's murder, a memorial was placed on the site where he fell. When Yonge went there a few years ago, as part of a research project, the ramshackle 19th-century shacks and opium dens that once lined Haining Street were long gone. The memorial, she says, looks like a miniature manhole cover. "It's literally a tiny disk embedded into the concrete. You'd miss it if you didn't know it was there."
The invisibility of Asian lives, both historic and contemporary, is what Joe aims to subvert with his full-frontal approach in Scenes from a Yellow Peril, as both playwright and performer (the cast of five features four Chinese Kiwis and one Korean). He grew up in Riccarton, then Christchurch's version of Chinatown. His parents still have the same fish and chip shop they did when he was a kid.
It wasn't until he went to broadcasting school, where he was the only Asian in the class, that he began to identify more deeply as Chinese. "Even within my group of friends in high school, I was always like the token Asian in the sense that I was basically white. That was the lens I viewed myself through. I think I'm part of a generation where that was really common; it's just the way you navigate being a minority," he says.
"Because I was quite middle class and had a nice, sheltered, suburban upbringing in that particular area, I didn't actually encounter much racism except maybe in town. That's when you'd get 'Hey, chink' or 'Hey, gook,' or my sister would. What I went through the most in my teenage years was the fact that I was queer. Christchurch was terribly homophobic."
In his short film "Homecoming Poems", Joe performs a poignant piece about his father driving him up to start a new life in Auckland and finally plucking up the courage to come out to him in the car. "Dad's back behind the wheel and he asks you, 'Why are you so quiet?' And I say, 'Dad, I'm gay.'"
That's where the poem ends, but the response was silence. Months later, his father told him he cried all the way home. Joe is still wrestling with that to some degree (one of the segments in Scenes from a Yellow Peril is titled "I cannot invite my parents to this play"), but coming to terms with his queerness in his early 20s gave him space to look more closely at his Asian identity.
"You can't separate those two things, right? I'm queer and I'm Chinese. They aren't the sole things that define me but they are very strong and constituent parts, and I feel the most ease when those two things can sit side by side," he says. "It's when they're wrestling with each other that I can feel myself being pulled in two different directions. The queerness, it feels like that's Western, and the Chineseness feels rigid and conservative, which I think are really old ways of seeing it."
Yonge's upbringing was equally urban but in the Auckland suburb of Glen Innes, which had a large Tongan and Samoan community. Her parents were both born in Fiji. After the 1987 military coup, they initially moved to Toronto but her mother — whose own family had fled China's communist revolution — missed the feeling of being in the islands. In Glen Innes, the community was close-knit and life revolved around the church. When the gradual process of gentrification began, Yonge was at high school and got involved in street protests against the physical removal of state houses from the neighbourhood.
After a brief flirtation with acting, Yonge found her feet as a director, then did a master's degree in arts politics at New York University on a Fulbright scholarship. She wasn't long back in New Zealand when Joe, who'd seen some of her earlier theatre work, got in contact to see if she'd be interested in directing Scenes from a Yellow Peril, then still in development.
The pair met for a chat over coffee, then stayed in touch during the 2020 Covid lockdown. Yonge was living in Wellington, working for the city council in emergency services, and collaborating with Joe as dramaturg on the script for his first play, Losing Face. "It was like, aww, a kindred spirit," she says. "We chat like old aunties, but it's really nerdy. We don't gossip about anything, we just talk about work.
"We started having these phone calls that turned into conversations that would last four or five hours. Some evenings I'd come home from work and be like, 'I'm going to talk to Nathan Joe about art and scripts and theatre!' — after I'd just spent the day ordering 200 pizzas for the soup kitchen. When we did eventually meet up again, it was like we'd known each other for years."
Yonge, whose first baby is due in September, lives in Auckland now and has taken a break from her day job as an advocate at the arts trust Te Taumata Toi-ā-Iwi to direct the show. She won't divulge details but look out for her cameo "Ali Wong moment" on stage. The first trimester of her pregnancy was exhausting, she says, and involved a lot of lying on the couch bingeing Bridgerton.
Auckland's theatre scene is an intimately connected one. Yonge's partner is a fellow director and Joe flats with one of Scenes from a Yellow Peril's producers, whose partner shot three teaser trailers for the show. The costumes were made by Korean designer Steven Junil Park, of the label 6x4, who also created the pieces worn by Joe and Yonge for the photo shoot featured on these pages.
Yonge was director and co-creator of The Basement Tapes, which won a coveted Fringe First Award at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2018. An award-winning playwright himself, Joe wrote, narrated and directed I Am Rachel Chu, an "act of literary terrorism" inspired by the bestselling book and hit film Crazy Rich Asians, and was the 2020 National Poetry Slam Champion.
So they both have form. Even so, the inclusion of Scenes from a Yellow Peril in Auckland Theatre Company's 2022 season, the first under new artistic director Jonathan Bielski, is a bold move away from the mainstream. A rehearsed reading of the project, while still a work in progress, was held at the Civic Theatre last year as part of the Auckland Arts Festival.
Yonge talks of the show as a kind of theatrical degustation, with echoes of everything from Phoebe Waller-Bridge's Fleabag to Shakespeare's King Lear. "The visual imagination of this work is so important because Nathan paints worlds through words," she says. "We also give the audience permission to laugh. To really sit with this isn't to feel guilty or outraged. It's actually to feel a bit sad about the state of things, but with a lot of laughter along the way."
What's expressed on stage are often secret thoughts that aren't usually said out loud, says Joe, and that can be discomfiting. "How do we do that without losing the audience? How can we be kind of wry and cheeky and sexy and camp about it? How can anger be something that we're using as a tool of joy as well?
"It's kind of fun, because we're never allowed to be angry. And in the right context, seeing people who aren't often given licence to be angry is really refreshing. That's why we all love the rise of the problematic female character who's kind of messed up. I want people to see some of themselves in this and go, 'Yeah, f*** yeah.! Be angry, you little tiny Asians. Rise! Rise!"
Scenes from a Yellow Peril is on at Auckland's ASB Waterfront Theatre from June 21 to July 3 (atc.co.nz).
Going up the slide is okay, actually. (Sometimes.)