Volcano of cultural tension

Lynda Chanwai Earle is seeking a new audience with her play about a Chinese student in Auckland. SUSAN BUDD reports.

Linda Chanwai Earle started her career as a sculptor, but words, not clay, are her raw material now, with a growing body of plays to her credit.

Her previous work Box/Role/Dream won the Best Play award at this year's Wellington Fringe Festival. In 1998 Alchemy, a co-production with Merenia Gray, took the Best New Work prize at the same festival.

An attractive woman in her 30s, she looks as exotic as the brilliant flowers arranged with a huge peacock feather that she will take to a friend's grave after our interview. That exoticism comes from her mixed heritage, Pakeha and Chinese, a background that has constantly informed her work as a writer.

This week her latest play Foh-Sarn (Fire Mountain) opens, marking a new plateau. It's a bigger and more traditional work than she has attempted before, featuring a cast of six actors drawn from the New Zealand Chinese community and with a traditional two-act structure and narrative.

It is determinedly contemporary, down to canto-pop, karaoke bars and street gangs. And with it, she wants to attract a new audience rarely seen in the theatre.

The play chronicles the tragic experience of a young Hong Kong Chinese woman in her first year at Auckland University. Mei-ling, new to Auckland, embarks on a relationship with the charming Chia-Han from Taiwan.

But it seems Chia-Han is a member of a street gang. Mix in a television reporter investigating the Triads and the police, and what started as an innocent dalliance becomes fraught with issues of loyalty, love and identity.

The title is a bit of a pun on the name for New Zealand used by Chinese immigrants last century, "Gum Sarn" (Gold Mountain), though Chanwai Earle explains that she wanted a title to encapsulate the volcanic simmering of cultural tension she sees in Auckland. The play was in part inspired by a television documentary directed by Philip Tse on Triads in New Zealand.

"I went 'ohhhh' when I saw a young girlfriend interviewed," she says. And that became the genesis. Some of that television footage is used in director Nathaniel Lee's production.

It is an Auckland story, tragic but humorous, says Chanwai Earle. She is excited that Fire Mountain is the first play on this scale to use local Chinese actors speaking Cantonese on stage. The actors, who include film critic Helene Wong, along with students she and Lees auditioned, have a raw but honest quality, she says.

Chanwai Earle equates the Asian community's interest in theatre at about the level of Maori and Pacific Islanders just before it began to flower.

"There is me, half-Asian even though I don't look it, can't speak fluent Cantonese, trying to appeal to an Asian audience. It is quite hard work," she admits. She is aware that suicide and unwanted pregnancy are topics that will provoke a strong reaction among the Asian community.

"I am expecting it and that is okay so long as I can get the young Asians to come along," she says. "It is not often you get new Asian immigrants on the stage to tell how it is for them."

Chanwai Earle describes Fire Mountain as a traditionally structured play.

It begins with a suicide and, not so conventionally, a ghost participates in the story told in flashback. She feels that, like Maori playwright Briar Grace-Smith, a close friend, she weaves the spiritual with gritty social realism. In Asian and Polynesian cultures, the afterlife runs parallel.

"The dead are with us all the time. You need to feed them, burn money for them. They need help, otherwise they will come back."

The playwright's own experiences colour her narrative. Born in London to a third-generation New Zealand Chinese mother and Pakeha psychologist father, she spent her childhood in Papua New Guinea and her adolescence in Havelock North. At the age of 13, she moved from Lei International Primary School in PNG, a melting pot of 23 nationalities, to Havelock High in Hawkes Bay where the students were 95 per cent Pakeha. The culture shock was immense. Until then Chanwai Earle says she was unaware of racial difference.

"On my first day, I saw all the Pakeha kids at the front of the class and all the Polynesians at the back. I sat in the middle," she says. "And when I sprouted boobs, suddenly all the boys were very interested because I was so exotic and it all went to my head in the wrong way.

"I went into a downward spiral, almost dropping out of school. I was looking for friendship, so got myself into a gang and hung out with Polynesians. When they said they were my mates I knew they meant it."

Chanwai Earle entered into an abusive relationship with a Rarotongan man that lasted three years.

"In the weekends I would be at my boyfriend's place with his big, extended whanau, Aunty Linda to all the kids. In a way it was wonderful, but then I saw a lot of domestic violence that you can't idealise in any community."

In the first year of her fine arts degree at the University of Auckland's Elam School of Arts, the experiences manifested themselves in slashed canvases and violent imagery. And it was there that the convoluted path to theatre began, her interest in sculpture turning to writing poetry and attending theatre. She completed a postgraduate diploma in drama and a creative writing course at Auckland University.

A reading from Honeypants, her collection of poetry, resulted in an invitation to teach at Arohata Women's Prison, where she worked for two years with Jim Moriarty as script co-ordinator, drama facilitator and performer in dramas created within the prison.

"The work was very rewarding, but so demanding that there was no time for anything else."

But perhaps, it helped her to decide what path to take and right now it feels like the only direction she could have taken.

* Foh Sarn, directed by Nathaniel Lees, runs at the Herald Theatre from October 25 to November 11.