Britain's "liberal" media and UK Chinese: from London Chinatown to the general election

The Guardian has always been sloppy about China matters, but its publishing stable now appears to have given up any pretence of writing about UK Chinese issues informatively.

"It was a genuine community built by the emigrants from Hong Kong who, having been bombed out of Limehouse in the East End in the 1940s, made this patch of London, with its cheap commercial rents, their own," writes Daniel Boffey in the Observer about Soho's Chinatown

Er ... I don't think so. I know we all look the same to the "liberal" media but it was Cantonese and Shanghainese sailors and their families living mainly in the two streets of Pennyfields and Limehouse Causeway, not Hong Kong migrants, who were bombed out during the war: a large number were rehoused in Poplar.

My father was an early Chinese occupant in Soho's Chinatown from 1947 when it was mostly Indian and Jewish. It wasn't until the 1950s — but really the '60s — that waves of Hong Kong migrants got the takeaway industry going after the domestic washing machine rendered laundries largely obsolete. They bought up the fish 'n' chip shops that were going under and started serving their own food.

You wouldn't find many HKers in that early Soho mix. A few Kuomintang diplomats finding new ways to make a living and former Cantonese and Shanghai sailors, but hardly anyone from HK.

In the ten-part series Chinese in Britain, which I presented on BBC Radio 4 in 2007 (repeated last year), we looked at the history of UK Chinatowns including Limehouse and Soho, but the pattern of not allowing ethnic minorities to tell their own story persists in some organs which continue to get it wrong.

At best, invisibility is thrust on us; at worst, the Chinese are still defined as villains. From the yellow-peril Fu Manchu books by Sax Rohmer to the BBC's Sherlock reboot, where even innocent Chinese passers by in Soho Chinatown were portrayed as sinister and "other", the Chinese are dehumanised and excluded. Yet none of the liberal media paused for breath between BAFTAs and plaudits to question why, well into the 21st century, the publicly-funded British Broadcasting Corporation was breathing life back into what should be moribund racist tropes.

In Channel 4's recent  debate concerning the role of the ethnic vote in the imminent general election, chaired by Krishnan Guru-Murthy, only one single solitary east Asian face could be seen in the audience — placed on the corner in the seat nearest to Krishnan where he stood more chance of being picked up by the cameras, presumably after someone panicked on the night at the oversight. None on the platform. Yet Chinese are Britain's third largest Black and Asian minority ethnic minorities (BAME) after South Asians and African Caribbeans.

In a piece for the South China Morning Post magazine last October, I outlined how the ethnic vote could swing results in the marginal seats, with the Chinese key to the outcome in 36 seats including Barnet in May. Still, here are the Chinese being excluded yet again.

So when the Chinese are next accused of being the authors of their own exclusion ... think on.

My article on the Ming Ai Chinese in Britain project for the South China Morning Post magazine.

Pic from Red Scarf

BBC Newsbeat crocodile tears over anti-Chinese racism

Michael Wilkes of the British Chinese Project

While it is always uplifting to see the wicked repent and mend their ways, the BBC Newsbeat item — acknowledging how racism against Chinese Brits is largely ignored — is in danger of providing the corporation with bleeding-heart cover in the absence of measures to rectify the injustice.

The Newsbeat article quotes Michael Wilkes of the British Chinese Project as saying:
"Essentially Chinese people don't like to worry other people. There's a mindset within the Chinese community that we need to keep our business within ourselves, within our own family unit. I'm saying to young British Chinese people now that we can speak out. It's our responsibility - when you're being prejudiced against, you've got to speak up."

Well, that's a powerful get-out-of-jail-free card, allowing the protectors of Jeremy Clarkson's Top Gear petri dish to wriggle off the hook. Blame the victims and take a bow.

It's hard to ignore the utter hypocrisy of the publicly-funded BBC (barring a few enlightened individuals fighting the good fight for genuine balance and justice). The corporation notoriously runs its employment of women along the lines of Logan's Run, where we're mostly bumped off at 50, but also renders east Asians invisible. It declines to cast us in normal roles, which would show us as part of the fabric of British society — which is exactly what we are.

I mean, no regular Chinese characters in Eastenders? Really? Still?

There are plenty of examples of the establishment's fear and loathing of East Asians in general and the Chinese in particular. In Beebland, we are either invisible and excluded or else we turn up once in a blue moon to embody the ugly stereotypes lurking in the fantasy world of the white-bread powers ruling that particular roost.

Their nadir for many was the  Sherlock: The Blind Banker episode: a vivid illustration of the routinely-ignored racism against us. Instead of acknowledging and tackling the glaring and hateful dehumanisation contained therein, they gave the creeps a BAFTA.

The BBC is a BIG part of the problem, rather than even a part of the solution. If the corporation was sincere, there would be east Asians on their channels every night, depicted as normal folks alongside everyone else. The media are lagging way behind the advertisers, who've included increasing numbers of us in the past years because the ad men and women understand that we are not only human beings deserving of equal treatment and representation, but also (in purely monetary terms) a worthwhile slice of the market.

Our absence reflects the prejudice of media gatekeepers, management strata and the theatre establishment (hello, Royal Shakespeare Company). When you create a vacuum, this in turn creates space for nightmares: a blank canvas for the most ghastly of projections. The sleep of reason produces monsters and the BBC has played its part.

It's encouraging to see journalists, editors and producers finally taking this on in the Newsbeat article. However, in context, that piece is a sop thrown to the youth market (which has a more enlightened attitude towards issues of race, gender and sexuality, as well as growing numbers of east Asians) by one hand, while the other ensures the continuation of the conditions that allow such racism to maintain its foothold. Enough of the crocodile tears. Let's see some action.

Being Human Festival: Anna Chen talks about Chinese comedy in culture debate

Being Human Festival: Ha ha ha? Laughter and Humour Across Languages and Time.

Had a lovely time last night talking at another event in the Being Human Festival.

Laughter is generally regarded as something quintessentially human: being human means being able to laugh (or so Aristotle claimed). However, the things that make people laugh can vary quite considerably, and these differences may be magnified across time, languages and cultures.

In this session of Caf矇 Culture, UCL academics Geraldine Horan and Seb Coxon and comedian Anna Chen aim to take a closer look at this issue. Join them to find out whether humour can ever really be a serious subject, and to debate such questions as: How do jokes work? Can jokes be translated from one language to another? What is the history of joking? To what extent are we able to understand jokes from another historical period or culture?

I talked about the history of Chinese comedy and my attempts to challenge stereotypes in my own writing and stand-up. The Chinese are said to have invented the political joke — 4,000 years of repression and hierarchy will do that to you. Under Confucianism (2,500 years ago), comics were looked down on and mocking the sovereign earned you the death penalty. This soon applied to all authority until what was required for survival was "gravity in speech and manner."

Despite this, texts in mediaeval times are full of Chaucerean mockery of authority and the big-heads who like their power over other human beings a bit too much — and also of the idiots who fell in line (nuthin' changes). Corrupt officials and country bumpkins bore the brunt of contemporary cynical wit.

This venting used the Crosstalk form which has been popular since the middle-ages: the two-hander: a straight man and a funny man.

It lost its momentum during the early communist era, especially in cultural revolution China, after 1966. The authorities demanded that practitioners cut out the satire and use their skills to praise, instead. This repression gave rise to an explosion of cynical humour under communist rule, but in private.

Although there's a strong tradition of clowning, the Chinese don’t do silly. So Monty Python, which requires a ditching of personal dignity, does not go down well. Humour that demonstrates smartness and quickness of wit, such as Monkey, is what's favoured.

Chinese tend not to use set-up and punch structure. In popular comedy, it's more scatalogical — which is understandable in a nation where death has been harshing your mellow for centuries in civil wars, wars against imperialist aggression, extreme poverty and famine. For the masses — and especially for Cantonese like my father — a farting, pooing human being is at least a live human being.

Today, authority is very much in the comics' crosshairs, especially the despised internet censors. The Grass Mud Horse phenomemon is a crude jibe at the Chinese Government's attempts to limit access to the world wide web, and plays with some very offensive double-entendres, mostly concerning yo mama's birth canal.

Comedy is now a massively popular branch of the Chinese entertainment industry. Performers like Zhou Libo are huge stars, entertaining the snotty Shanghainese, making gun of the rural "garlic-munchers". Not much comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable in evidence there.

Here's a modern joke I found that features Chinese and isn't fuelled by hatred:

There are four blokes on a plane; an American, a Brit, a Chinese and a Japanese. The plane cuts out and starts to plummet but there’s only on parachute. The American is brave so he jumps out yelling, “God Bless America”. The Brit jumps out, shouting, “God save the Queen.” The Chinese yells, “May China live ten thousand years,” and kicks out the Japanese.

I interwove my own stand-up throughout my talk, giving examples of how I unercut and subvert stereotyped expectations. Where I attempt a high-wire act, treading the fine line between subversion and reinforcing the stereotypes, do I succeed? If not, why not? Do I need to refer to my ethnicity at all? Or will it always be the elephant in the room until I acknowledge it and then move on? The tension between the expectations of an audience fed a limited and distorting set of representations of east Asians (when they are not being rendered utterly invisible) and my efforts to set them straight do make for a rich seam of comedy to mine.

In the end, a writer has to write about what he or she wants to write about, and go where the energy is.

The ability to create comedy demonstrates an understanding and a facility with the cultural codes. Once a minority (ethnic, gendered, sexuality and disabled) can do comedy, you are firmly embedded at a deeper level in society and it's harder to keep you marginalised. That's why ethnic minorities always produce smart-arses who want to express a view of the world refracted through the prism of their own experience, rather than what's being projected onto them from outside.

Crossing the divide between being "other" and embedded in the culture  means you belong to society as a participant, observer, commentator, consumer and a producer of meaning. We don't want to be dismissed as "Other". It's our world, too, and we can laugh at it — and at ourselves within it if we choose to do so — but strictly on our own terms.

The Life & Crimes of Anna May Wong on Madam Miaow, Resonance FM, 5pm today

Later today on Madam Miaow's Culture Lounge, Resonance 104.4FM, listen to "The Life and Crimes of Anna May Wong", the story of Hollywood's first Chinese screen legend. 5-6pm. Presented by Anna Chen from her one-woman show, Anna May Wong Must Die!

With Charles Shaar Murray.

Listen afterwards here or even better, as it's radio, LIVE via the Resonance FM widget in the right sidebar.

British East Asian Artists open letter to Ed Vaizey and broadcaster on racial exclusion in the culture

An open letter to Ed Vaizey and heads of broadcasting from the British East Asian Artists group.

We read with interest that the UK Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries, The Right Honourable Mr. Ed Vaizey, has expressed concern about the number of black actors who are abandoning Britain for America because of lack of opportunities here. We welcome the concern that Mr. Vaizey and the media at large have expressed on this issue recently. We also welcome his determination to make meaningful changes in this area. In our opinion such an initiative is long overdue.

However we hope that these concerns and efforts will include all minority ethnic groups and not just the catch-all “Black & Asian”. As a group that fights the cause of British East Asian theatre and screen workers, we would like all parties to keep at the forefront of their mind that Asia continues east of India and that East Asia (particularly the East Asian “diaspora”) is not just “Chinese” and “Japanese”.

East Asians are the third largest minority ethnic group in Britain today. We are also the fastest growing and arguably the most diverse.

This is simply not reflected on our stages and screens at present and never has been.

China, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Thailand are among the top ten senders of international students to the UK, which by the government’s own statistics contributed 75% of the UK’s total education export income worth £17.5 billion in 2011. British East Asians contribute much to the economy and general make-up of the modern United Kingdom and to be continually ignored and passed over in this way is surely unacceptable.

As said, we welcome the ministerial and media concern about black actors which is no doubt largely as a result of the recent success of Chiwetel Ejiofor and Idris Elba.

Let us remember though, that, despite the lack of challenging opportunities, both Chiwetel and Idris had successful enough careers here to enable them to start up in the US.

No such opportunities (barring literally one or two “tokens”) are afforded East Asians in Britain. Recent successful “China plays” aside, East Asians are not seen in our popular media.

In 30 years, except for one Chinese DVD seller who lasted barely three months, the popular soap opera Eastenders has never featured any recurring East Asian characters whatsoever.

The hospital dramas, Casualty and Holby City, have featured only three young East Asian regular characters each despite the high number of (diverse) East Asians working in our health service. Coronation Street, set around Manchester with its long-established Chinatown, has featured only one East Asian character (a female Chinese immigrant) in its entire history.

East Asian males are rarely seen on our screens and mixed-race East Asians are particularly rare, not fitting the generic “Chinese/Japanese” stereotype. When East Asians are featured they are nearly always heavily accented, the women passive and submissive, the men brutish, asexual and devoid of any individualistic character. East Asians are, more often than any other minority ethnic group, rarely seen as indigenous.

In discussions around equal opportunities and social inclusion we therefore urge all parties to consider the full extent of Britain’s multicultural make-up. On our part, we feel that East Asians have been seen as the “model minority” for too long. High-achieving, silent and largely invisible. We feel this needs to change now.

Signed:

Anna Chen
Hi Ching
Dr. Broderick Chow
Kathryn Golding
Paul Hyu
Michelle Lee
Chowee Leow
Jennifer Lim
Dr. Amanda Rogers
Lucy Sheen
Dr. Diana Yeh
Daniel York

About British East Asian Artists

British East Asian Artists (BEAA) is a pressure group comprising actors, performers, writers, film-makers and academics who came together during the controversy over the Royal Shakespeare Company’s casting of the Chinese classic The Orphan Of Zhao with just three actors of East Asian descent in a cast of seventeen with all three in roles described by critics as “minor”. The social media protest initiated went global and resulted in the Arts Council and Equity sponsoring the Opening The Door To East Asians In The Theatre event last February 11th 2013. BEAA’s objectives are to raise the profile of East Asians working in theatre, film and TV and to enable people of East Asian descent to make, and have access to, performing arts work.

Chronology of the RSC Orphan of Zhao campaign ("Zhaogate")": http://madammiaow.blogspot.co.uk/p/rsc-orphan-of-zhao.html

Press pick up on the BEAA letter to Ed Vaizey.

britisheastaa.wix.com/beaactors

www.facebook.com/BEAArtists Twitter @BEAsianArtists

Edinburgh Fringe greenlights yellowface and BLACKFACE

Alarming news emerges from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival: not only yellowface but now BLACKFACE is okay in its theatres, marking a throwback to majorly less enlightened times.

Three young east Asian women, Julie Cheung-Inhin, Emily Siu-see Hung and Anh Chu, were put through the grinder this week, when they went to see Beijing Cake, a Chinese-themed play at theSpace Venue 39. They watched a group of white, black and Jewish students from Yale University doing the ching-chong playground thang for 15 minutes, before walking out humiliated and upset. One has to ask: why would a young theatre company do that to their audience?

What is this, the 1950s?

Actually, the fifties is a bit modern for this outfit unless you mean the 1850s, since the 19th century costumes spring directly from the anachronistic film and TV tropes which evidently fed their minuscule mindset. Guys ... READ. Extend your horizons. Meet some actual east Asian people. There were three in your audience the other day from whom you might have learnt something — like Julie who wrote this:

We stayed for 15 minutes of what felt like being slapped in the face while approximately 30 audience members laughed away.

The play starts off with two white actors and two black actors coming out in traditional Chinese costumes to perform a mock Chinese dance waddle that made our fists clench. The dialogue then began with the white American protagonist (Sarah Rosen) talking loudly and slowly to the black actress (Cassie Da Costa) playing Mie Hwa, asking how to say certain words in Chinese. Da Costa replied in a made-up “Chinese” language that was clearly meant to sound Chinese. (Indeed, it felt like “Chinky Chonky shu shu shu” mockery).

Later on when talking to the playwright, Rachel Kauder Nalebuff, about the “Chinese” used in the play, she explained they wanted to make up the Chinese language rather than use real Chinese (and let’s not even start on how old this language is!) so as to not offend the Chinese people.

We hoped that the joke or irony would come out soon, but when the yellow-faced black actor (Gabriel Christian) started to portray an elderly Chinese man chucking money at a white woman to buy her unborn child, we could take no more. Perhaps the most insensitive and hurtful part of the play was the portrayal of the ghost of Mao Zedong as a kindly paternal figure that Rosen’s character repeatedly goes to for comfort and hugs. A parallel of this would be painting Hitler or Mugabe as a friendly confidante.

Nostalgia for times past, when white dominance was rarely challenged, is creeping in everywhere. From theatre and popular entertainment to politics, angry white boys and girls and their dimmer sidekick Tontos are reasserting an obsolete pecking order. We bet our last prawn cracker they wouldn't dare do the black or Jewish version ... thankfully for our multi-racial friends who are viewing this with bemusement. We're all wondering where this bit of cultural kite-flying is leading us.

When the women spoke to the manager of theSpace venue where Beijing Cake was playing, he was less than helpful, replying never mind yellowface, blackface was all the rage in the US. *scary face* Ah! So! That's what's in the pipeline. That ain't no light at the end of the tunnel — that's an oncoming train. "He told us we were wasting our time. He blew the issue off by saying its all subjective and that we are the only ones that are offended."

It's not only about race. The elderly, the poor, immigrants — anyone who can be classified as "other" — we're all being crushed under the tank treads of the new producers of culture, the people who are supposed be dreaming for us ... but whose off-the-peg dream collection only fits some of us, and then only some of the time.

The sleep of reason now produces this sort of shrunken homunculus rather too often, with higher human faculties disconnected. My baby Marxism taught me that the cultural superstructure arises out of the economic base. If only I'd known it can sink right back in if the base goes tits-up, I'd have yelled louder and earlier. Call me the Flying Buttress (my magnificent flying butt yields to no man) but we are witnessing a descent into an ugly primordial sludge where we're being hardwired to react with fear and loathing. We need to look at how Beijing Cake represents yet another marker in the ongoing cultural implosion as the new order crystallises with the biggest social shake-out since the second world war. Cultural output reflects a major restructuring of the western economy in favour of an intellectually-limited and spiritually-moribund elite, with nothing better to do than consume on a grand scale and gestate mini-me versions of themselves.

So: yellowface and blackface, even today. What next? A ground-breaking Jim Crow revival?

Those who own society need court jesters to flatter them, authenticate and endorse their version of reality, reshape truths and render invisible threats and unpalatable facts. There are too many incurious entertainment industry shills willing to fill the brief. Once was a time when the Edinburgh Fringe was a byword for progress in the arts. Now it's just a showcase for those licensed sycophants.

Let's hope that the Arts Council's shrinking resources aren't funding any of these miserable shows or the venues which insult our collective intelligence by giving them house room. [Edit: to make it crystal clear, the Arts Council England didn't fund this particular schlock, thank heavens. I do hope ACE continues to remain alert to the lively wider debate about representations of east Asians that sprung up after the RSC Orphan of Zhao debacle.]

CRAP LYRICS: What do Siouxie Sioux and Rod Stewart share with Bernard Manning?

Charles Shaar Murray just read me a brilliant demolition of "Hong Kong Garden" by Siouxie Sioux and the Banshees and "Every Picture Tells A Story" by Rod Stewart from journalist and former NME writer Johnny "Cigarettes" Sharp who has written a most excellent book, Crap Lyrics (pub Portico).

Punk rock never had any truck with petty social rules or niceties. Yet when Siouxie sang, Slanted eyes meet a new sunrise, a race of bodies small in size, she seemed to be expressing a knowledge and empathy with immigrant peoples that had more in common with pre-punk figures such as, say, Bernard Manning. Chicken chow mein and chop suey, they rhymed questionably with Hong Kong Garden takeaway, displaying all the searing wit of the bloke who goes into a Chinese restaurant and asks for 'flied lice'. But let's not be too hasty in our condemnation. After all, Miss Sioux has since claimed that the song was 'kind of a tribute' to immigrant communities who were harassed by skinheads in the late 80's.

It's certainly an interesting way of showing respect for other cultures, especially coming from a band who once wore swastikas on stage. I'm sure they meant well, though. Anyway, I'm off down the Notting Hill Carnival dressed in an afro wig and boot polish — it's my tribute to the afro-caribbean community. I'm hoping for a warm reception.

I can't stand Rod Stewart so I was lucky enough to miss out on this lyrical masterpiece, "Every Picture Tells A Story".

Once the Beatles had taken the word by storm, the globe became a playground for tight-trousered troubadours eager to export some culture (usually a culture of sexually transmitted bacteria) to their foreign cousins. But like latter-day Marco Polos, they did at least report back on theier experiences, to educate us in the customs and peoples they met there. As Rod Stewart put it in this postcard from the edge:
On the Peking ferry I was feeling merry, sailing on my way back here.
I fell in love with a slit-eyed lady, By the light of an eastern moon,
Shanghai Lil never used the pill, she claimed it just ain't natural
... and so I did the decent thing, and put a condom on my Deng Xiao Ping.

OK, so I kind of made up that last line. But don't dismiss old Rod for any lack of chivalry, or indeed romance. He goes on to inform us how she won his heart, then refers to her once more as the 'slit-eyed lady'. How she must have loved that pet name. Sadly, history history does not record whether she affectionately dubbed him 'parrot face' in return"

Johnny's sharp book is full of equally funny take-downs, throwing like a top martial artist, actually not having to do much except have an eagle eye and present what's already there. The Beastie Boys telling us, Girls! To do the dishes! Girls! To clean up my room. Girls! To do the laundry!; Rod Stewart again, promising to make love to you Like fifteen men when he gets "Lost In You" (hmm); Prince coming over some poor woman's wedding gown in "Head" (double hmm); Prince once more coming where he shouldn't in "Come" (triple hmm). Who's this Liz Phair who wants to fuck you like a dog (presumably after sniffing your bum for the longest time) and threatens to make you like it in "Flower"? And Prince yet again, this time coming in his "Sister" like some sort of dribble-monster run riot.

Thank heavens song-writing giants like Bob Dylan and David Bowie set a better example. Oh, wait ...!

Buy this book!!!

David Henry Hwang interview: race, class and Yellow Face

My Morning Star interview with David Henry Hwang, whose play Yellow Face launched London's new Park Theatre last month.

‘We're pretty good on race sometimes but terrible on class’ 
East Asian playwright DAVID HENRY HWANG talks to Anna Chen about issues of cultural assimilation and equality of opportunity 

ONLY six months before I finally meet David Henry Hwang, the Western world's most famous playwright of east Asian heritage, the British East Asian Artists (BEAA) led an international protest when the Royal Shakespeare Company gave a miserly three — minor — roles out of 17 to east Asian actors in their first Chinese play, The Orphan of Zhao.

Now we're enjoying the British premiere of Hwang's play Yellow Face which launches London's brand-new Park Theatre, a mere quarter of a century after its Tony Award-winning author first had a play performed here, the Broadway and West End mega-hit hit M Butterfly.

And there are several more on the way with Chinglish and Golden Child expected this year.

Everyone's walking around the theatre with huge grins 'cause our Dave's in town. He's the nicest bloke you could wish to meet with the gentle manner of someone totally at ease with himself.

Hwang isn't just the first ethnically Asian playwright to succeed in the West. He’s got 20 plays, 10 musicals, plus film credits and writing galore on his CV and is recognised as one of the leading US playwrights and as a Grand Master of the theatre there.

Los Angeles-born in 1957, Hwang is the son of a penniless immigrant who became a millionaire banker. But the hip, young and educated Hwang is also a child of the civil rights, Vietnam and hippy eras and his writing reflects much of that progressive mindset.

His works have explored Chinese people’s experience from their first arrival in the modern US. After the first wave of immigration following the discovery of gold in California in 1848, the Chinese worked the mines, grew the food and built the railroads but were treated savagely by the dominant white population.

Suffering racist lynchings and mob attacks, their ill-treatment ran native Americans and African Americans a close third, To cap it all, the Exclusion Act of 1882 — only repealed in 1943 — specifically targeted the Chinese, banned miscegenation, denied them citizenship and turned them into aliens even unto the umpteenth generation.

Chinese Americans have played an important part in US radical politics since the civil rights movement of the 1950s. Perhaps the reason they are so far ahead of the British Chinese in fighting racism and exclusion is down to numbers, Hwang explains.

“When I was a kid, the majority of Asian Americans had actually been born in the US. We were inspired by the Black Power movement which expanded into a general third world power movement that Asians were part of,” he says.

"Since 1965, US immigration law has not favoured working-class labourers from Asia but people with tactical skills. So you have a generation of Asian immigrants who are upper class and educated with certain notions of entitlement that they apply to the US political system."

With that background, it might be expected that they are more likely to vote Republican than Democrat but that wasn’t the case in the last election, where 84 per cent of Asian Americans voted for Obama, Hwang says, the largest of any group except for African Americans.

"There's been a tendency for the Asian American community to split because a lot of Chinese Americans were anti-communist, but nobody really cares any more and so Democrats are perceived as being more fair to minorities. And Republicans are seen nowadays as being anti-science."

Asian American actors were lightning-fast in supporting the British east Asian struggle to take on the theatre establishment over the omission of our third largest ethnic minority from the stage.

Within days, while we were stunned rabbits in the headlights, both Hwang and the Asian American Performers Action Coalition (AAPAC) issued statements critical of the RSC's "laziness and lack of artistic integrity" and the "contradictory and fallacious nature" of their argument.

"We're pretty good on race sometimes but terrible on class. The US has obviously fallen short of its ideals but the ideal of equal opportunities is still there.

“So when Asians advocate equal opportunity in the States it's consistent with the Asian impulse to assimilate in a way that maybe is not as much as in Britain."

Hwang’s play Yellow Face garnered rave four-star reviews. A lone critic said it was irrelevant to a British audience but, as Hwang says, the play is about “some of the pitfalls in trying to create a multi-cultural society. It seems to me that would be relevant here."

As long as history doesn't veer into Pacific conflict and the Chinese don't suffer the same fate as Japanese Americans in 1942, which Hwang acknowledges is a slim possibility, we may have advanced the cause of anti-racism.

Each victory should be celebrated but "equal opportunity" is merely the first step to true equality and to that end we are going to have to look at what Hwang has to say about class.

Runs until June 16. Box office: (020) 7281-8813

Anna's 4 star review of Yellow Face

[EDIT: date of the Chinese Exclusion Act corrected to 1882 — not 1888.]

David Henry Hwang comes to London: Yellow Face at the Park Theatre

Anna Chen and David Henry Hwang in the Park Theatre (Thanks to Kathryn Golding for snapping this one)

Anna and Dr Amanda Rogers at Thursday's Yellow Face press night

Amanda and Charles Shaar Murray on press night

Kevin Shen (who plays DHH in Yellow Face) introduces today's Q&A session with David Henry Hwang and Dr Amanda Rogers

Amanda and David in the Yellow Face Q&A

David Henry Hwang

To the spanking new Park Theatre in north London for the British premiere of David Henry Hwang's Yellow Face only 20 years after David's Tony-award winning M Butterfly which starred Anthony Hopkins was a smash hit on Broadway and beyond. (As he wrote one of the few parts for east Asian women, practically all young actresses have played the chilly Comrade Chen in various productions ... including me!)

It's a sparkling stylish comedy, witty, clever and very tightly directed and acted. And it's made a timely appearance in the wake of the RSC The Orphan of Zhao controversy, having something to say about the absurdity of judging human beings by their skin.

Actor Kevin Shen, who produced and stars as the leading character (a certain award-winning playwright called "DHH"), said his production company had offered it to all the theatres who turned it down on the grounds it wasn't "commercial", so thank heavens for the Park Theatre for having the vision to take it on.

My review will be published in the Morning Star on Wednesday. I gave it four stars.

You have until 16th June to catch it.

Review, interview, South China Morning Post column, and video of the Q&A to come ...

East Asian actors in Young Vic love fest: Opening the door

British East Asian Artists L to R: Michelle Lee, Lucy Sheen, Anna Chen, Jennifer Lim, Amanda Rogers, Paul Hyu, Kat Golding, Daniel York (minus Broderick Chow, Hi Ching and Chowee Leow) 

A fab time was had by all at today's long awaited Open Space event hosted by Improbable at the Young Vic in London. It was scheduled last year but acquired an added significance when the British East Asian Artists had a widely publicised run-in with the Royal Shakespeare Company over their questionable casting of The Orphan of Zhao (in a triple-bill with Brecht's Galileo and Pushkin's Boris Godunov). Complaints flooded in from across the globe and helped draw nearly 200 participants including actors, writers, and theatre and casting professionals to today's Opening the Door.

Pix by Anna Chen except for BEAA group shot taken by Ashley Thorpe on Anna's Lumix.

RSC Orphan of Zhao: British East Asian Actors' statement

The British East Asian Actors group (of which I am one) has issued a statement concerning the recent RSC casting debacle over The Orphan of Zhao.

British East Asian Actors
STATEMENT
30th October 2012

The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC)
The Orphan of Zhao

BRITISH EAST ASIAN ACTORS CALL FOR PUBLIC FORUM OVER RSC CASTING CONTROVERSY

British East Asian actors have challenged the Royal Shakespeare Company over the casting in its upcoming production of the classic Chinese play, The Orphan of Zhao by Ji Junxiang. Support for the British East Asian actors has spread globally with statements flooding in from Asian actors’ groups in America, Australia, Canada and other countries; as well as messages of support from theatregoers and the public on the RSC’s Facebook site.

Only three actors of East Asian heritage have been cast out of 17 and none have leading roles in any of plays in the World season trilogy of which The Orphan of Zhao is one. The RSC has only cast an estimated four East Asian actors in the last 20 years.

Actor Daniel York said: "This exclusion has been going on for far too long within the British stage and film industries. Colour-blind casting is a wonderful concept, unfortunately, it’s all one-way traffic. Something has to change. We are asking for fairness and a level playing field."

British East Asian Actors have released the following statement in response.

London, UK - For more than three weeks, we have protested to the RSC and the Arts Council England about the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of the Chinese classic The Orphan of Zhao.

Our concern is that there are only three actors of East Asian descent in a cast which consists mainly of Caucasians but no other Asians. This does not, in our opinion, represent "multi-cultural casting" as the RSC insists it is.

We have identified the following issues:

1) The RSC states that "It's certainly not the case that we've not employed any Chinese or East Asian actors". However, we have only been able to ascertain two actors of East Asian descent employed as part of regular seasons in the past 20 years, as well as two others in standalone productions - a clear shortfall. It also appears that, as far as we can gather, none of the three RSC Winter Season directors has any noticeable track record of employing East Asian actors and, in fact, only Gregory Doran appears to have done so, once, in the last ten years.

2) Of particular concern to us is the under-representation of East Asian actors in what is often described as "the Chinese Hamlet". Unfortunately, this is reflective of the entire UK theatre industry. The RSC assures us that the three East Asian actors (who we wish well) are playing "key" roles. Whilst we value and support all actors and would hope that all roles in a play are "key", none of the three East Asians in this particular production appears to be playing what can be described as a "leading" or "protagonist" role: a character who is central to the action and who drives the play. It is also clear that all three are roughly in the same age demographic and this belies the diversity and experience that exists among British East Asian actors.

3) British East Asian actors wish to participate in their own culture but this is being denied us. We are too often excluded from roles which are not East Asian-specific, yet when roles arise that are, we are also excluded. We applaud colour-blind casting, but colour-blind casting was created as a mechanism to afford more opportunities for all minority actors, not to give additional opportunities to Caucasian actors. At present, colour-blind casting fails British East Asians.

4) The RSC has cited the need to cast actors across three different plays as one reason for the low number of East Asians in the cast. It appears they were unable, for whatever reason, to countenance the idea of British East Asians playing leading roles in works by Ji, Pushkin and Brecht. It appears that white (and in some cases black) actors are able to play Chinese roles but not vice versa.

5) The RSC states that they met "lots and lots" of East Asian actors, yet we have only been able to ascertain eight. Aside from the three who were cast we only know of one who met more than one of the season's directors.

6) The RSC insist they cast "the best actor for the roles available" yet the visibility and quality of work available for the actors chosen to be leading players in the Company simply isn't attainable for actors of East Asian descent. There is no level playing field.

*****

It is clear to us that there is an industry-wide problem regarding the opportunities available for East Asian actors. Too often, actors from our background can only access auditions for poorly-written and stereotyped roles on television that require a heavy emphasis on being "foreign" as opposed to being integrated and three-dimensional members of British society. In the theatre, with the occasional rare exception, we are shut out completely from all but community and children's theatre, with opportunities to appear in classical and mainstream drama extremely rare.

We welcome a time when actors can play across race, gender, class or disability. However, this can only meaningfully occur on a level playing field to which we must ensure we have fair access.

As a publicly-funded company, the RSC has a responsibility to reflect the make-up of society. In order to tear down the limitation on East Asian actors, it is our heartfelt wish to see far more active outreach to our sector. When the Harry Potter film franchise was casting for an actress to play Cho Chang, applicants queued around the block, disproving the notion that people from East Asian backgrounds have no interest in the performing arts. At present, the message being sent out to young people from East Asian backgrounds is that a career on the stage is not available to them.

We welcome greatly the closing paragraph from the RSC's most recent statement on the subject:

"We acknowledge that there is always more to do and recognise our responsibility in this area. We want to explore the rich seam of Chinese drama further, and engage more often with Chinese and East Asian actors. We want to integrate them more regularly on our stages and hope that this production, and indeed this debate, will be a catalyst for that process."

In order to enable this to happen we request:

1) An apology and acknowledgement for the lack of consideration afforded us as an ethnic group with regard to the casting of The Orphan of Zhao and for the way East Asian actors have been marginalised.

2) A public discussion forum to be held in London with Greg Doran and the two directors of the other plays in the trilogy, with speakers of our choosing to represent our case. Similar to that held at La Jolla Playhouse, CA, when comparable controversy occurred with their musical adaptation of The Nightingale, the purpose of this is to enable us to work with the RSC in leading the way for the rest of the industry.

3) Ethnic monitoring of auditionees for both race-specific and non-race-specific roles and for that data to be freely available. We would also like to remind all Arts Council England funded theatre companies of Recommendation 20 from the Eclipse Report which highlighted several recommendations for theatre practice with regard to ethnic minorities including:

"By March 2003, every publicly funded theatre organisation in England will have reviewed its Equal Opportunities policy, ascertained whether its set targets are being achieved and, if not, drawn up a comprehensive Positive Action plan which actively develops opportunities for African Caribbean and Asian practitioners."

For too long East Asians have been left out of "Asia".

4) Further to the above we would like to see a clear measurable target in terms of engaging and developing East Asians actors as you do with a broad range of socio-economic and ethnic minority backgrounds with a view to seeing and casting them in future RSC productions.

5) We feel it is absolutely imperative that there be no "professional reprisals" with regard to any recent comments from within our community. East Asian actors and professionals have shown great courage speaking out about the clear inequality that currently exists within our profession, and we would like that to be respected. Too often, there exists a climate of fear in the arts world and we feel this is detrimental to free speech as well as to fundamental human rights.

We hope very much that we can all move forward together and gain greater understanding for the future. We look forward to working with the RSC, a company for which we all have the fondest love and respect.

British East Asian Actors
30th October 2012

Anna Chen
Dr. Broderick D.V. Chow - Lecturer in Theatre, Brunel University, London
Kathryn Golding
Paul Hyu – Artistic Director, Mu-Lan Theatre Co; Equity Minority Ethnic Members’ Committee member
Michelle Lee
Chowee Leow
Hi Ching – Director, River Cultures
Jennifer Lim
Lucy Miller – Associate Director, True Heart Theatre
Dr. Amanda Rogers - Lecturer in Human Geography, Swansea University
Daniel York

PLEASE NOTE:
The BEAA would like to correct erroneous reports in the press that the statement was written by Equity. It wasn't. As the statement says clearly, this is a statement by the British East Asian Actors group. This group is made up of academics, East Asian actors and representatives of East Asian Theatre groups in the UK. Two of the signatories are on the (Equity BAME committee) but the other nine are not.

PLUS
The article that kicked it all off: RSC casts Asians as dog and maid in Chinese classic.

Anna's review of The Orphan of Zhao in the Morning Star.

Review by academic Amanda Rogers.

The Orphan of Zhao: RSC casts Asians as dogs and maid in Chinese classic

The news that the revered Royal Shakespeare Company has not only given a measly three out of 17 roles in their production of the Chinese classic, The Orphan of Zhao, to Asian actors, but that these parts are for two dogs and a maid, has quite gasted my flabber. None of the main roles are played by Asians.[EDIT: two of the three asians and one black actor are working ONE puppet dog.]

We've been rowing about this for months alongside Anglo-Chinese actor and Equity BAME representative Daniel York who is leading the charge. [Edit: Daniel says the third out of three demon dogs is a black actor while all the main roles are white. WTF with the non-white non-human depictions?] His attempts to elicit a grown-up response from the RSC and the Arts Council have so far resulted in a condescending brush-off and a reprimand from the powers-that-be.

Yes, cross-racial casting is a wonderful idea— the problem is that it's all one-way traffic. What happened to diversity? Note the use of a Chinese kid in their promo material (above). If they actually had the courage of their questionable conviction, they'd surely have illustrated their wares with one of their leading actors. Instead, they lack the smarts to understand why courting Chinese audiences is going down like a cup of cold sick. They want our money but not us, and certainly not our involvement as equals in this Vale of Tears.

It's a shame that writer James Fenton, who has an impressive track-record as a progressive, has allowed the casting of his adaptation to be done along such colonialist lines. I always thought he was an anti-imperialist and all that entails.

I doubt we'd see the pillars of the culture pulling these stunts with the African-Caribbean or south Asian communities because they know they'd be exposed as something akin to white supremacists perpetuating dominance of the culture instead of using public funds to advance our consciousness beyond its current sorry state and represent everyone fairly.

Lucy Sheen, British Chinese actress and associate director of True Heart Theatre, writes:

At the end of the month The RSC will be staging an adaptation of The Orphan of Zhao.

This is a Chinese classic from the Yuan period thought to have been penned by the 13th century writer Ji Junxiang (蝝��?�蟡�). Not much known about Ji Junxiang. He was born in present day Beijing and wrote six plays. Only one of his works has survived and that is Yuanbao yuan Zhao shi gu'er - The (great) Revenge of the orphan Zhao ca. 1330 (頞�瘞�摮文��憭批�曹��). This was the first zaju, (Chinese: “mixed drama or play”) to have been translated into the western tongue.

This was one of the major Chinese dramatic forms. Originating as a short variety play from Northern China during the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127) and during the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368) it developed into a mature four-act dramatic form, in which songs alternate with dialogue.

The fact that the RSC are producing such a work should for the BAME (Black Asian Minority Ethnic) community cause for celebration - so why are not more of us hip, hip hooraying?

Company
Matthew Aubrey - Ti Miming
Adam Burton - The Assassin
Joe Dixon - Tu'an Gu
Jake Fairbrother - Cheng Bo
Lloyd Hutchinson - Han Jue
Youssef Kerkour - Captain of the Guard
Chris Lew Kum Hoi - Ghost of Dr Cheng's Son/Demon Mastiff
Siu Hun Li - Demon Mastiff/Guard
Patrick Romer - Gongsun
James Tucker - Zhao Dun
Graham Turner - Dr Cheng
Stephen Ventura - Emperor Ling
Philip Whitchurch - Wei Jang
Lucy Briggs-Owen - The Princess
Nia Gwynne - Dr Cheng's Wife
Susan Momoko Hingley - Princess' Maid
Joan Iyiola - Demon Mastiff

Out of a cast size of 17 only 3 BEA (British East Asian) have been cast. The three actors that have been cast in the production should be exceedingly proud of their achievement.
But only 3 out of a potential 17!. There are approximately 75 BEA actors and 82 BEA actress all of varying experience, training and expertise. You cannot tell me that from this pool the RSC could not have found at least two major male and female roles for the production?
If this was an adaptation of Liongo I doubt very much whether the Black Afro-Caribbean acting community would idly stand by as the major or pivotal roles were taken by Caucasian actors. I doubt very much whether the RSC when casting such a venture would ever dream of not casting black actors in such a production. So when then should we be any different? Why are the British-Chinese/East Asian not afford the same cultural, ethnic and racial considerations as our fellow Black Afro-Carribean and South Asian colleagues?
Are we so little thought of us? Are we that invisible and inconsequential to the society and the country of which we are citizens?
Yet our culture, our writing our art take pride of place in institutions around the UK. It is almost Pythonesque ...
And what have the Chinese ever given us in return?
Row -planting
Oh yeah, yeah they gave us that. Yeah. That's true.
And The Compass
Oh yes... the compass, Reg, you remember what navigating around used to be like.
All right, I'll grant you that Row -planting and the compass are two things that the Chinese have done...
And the seed drill...
(sharply) Well yes obviously the seed drill... the compass go without saying. But apart from the row-planting, the compass and the seed drill...
Iron Ploughs, Ships rudder
Harness for horses, Gunpowder, Porcelain, Toilet paper, Print - moveable type

'“To right an injustice, no sacrifice is too great.” While this concept doesn’t quite sit right with our modern sensibilities, it’s the underlying theme of the Chinese play “The Orphan of Zhao” ( 韏菜��摮文��), the origins of which can be traced back to 600-500 B.C.' Lara Owen talks to writer James Fenton.

Learning how to be Chinese.

"I'm Yellowface
I don't want to see you
I'm Yellowface
I just want to be you
Five minutes that's all it takes
To empty you out
Hey, them's the breaks."
From my poem, Yellowface, from my collection "Reaching for my Gnu"

When we are represented, this is what we get.

Brilliant hilarious response from across the Pond: "Pucker up, RSC, cuz I am bending over."

Dr Broderick Chow on Two Dogs and a Maid.

Bland response from the RSC on The Orphan of Zhao but the thread is well worth reading.

Watch the La Jolla Playhouse debate on The Nightingale in the US.

STATEMENT from US playwright David Henry Hwang: ""The ORPHAN OF ZHAO casting controversy says less about Britain's Asian acting community, that it does about the RSC's laziness and lack of artistic integrity. Early in my career, when I wrote Asian characters, production teams in America often had to expend extra effort to find Asian actors to play them. Yet they did so, both to maintain artistic authenticity and to provide opportunities for actors who are virtually never allowed to even audition for 'white' roles. By producing THE ORPHAN OF ZHAO, the RSC seeks to exploit the public's growing interest in China; through its casting choices, the company reveals that its commitment to Asia is only skin-deep."

Gregory Doran interview on Front Row. Plus RSC education course.

My article on the RSC The Orphan of Zhao casting now up at the Guardian website.

My review of The Orphan of Zhao in the Morning Star.

Review by academic Amanda Rogers.

British East Asian Actors release a statement.

Vincent Chin and Simon San: two murders, same indifference

Vincent Chin and Simon San were born and murdered decades apart on two different continents, but the common factor is the callousness and indifference with which their cases have been dealt with by the investigating police and prosecutors.



Justice is off the menu when it comes to these Chinese deaths. While the police finally admit that an acknowledgment of the racist dimension of Simon's murder by a white mob outside the family-run takeaway in Edinburgh in Scotland would have resulted in stiff sentences, the men have been given 24 months, 26 months and five years for the thug who landed the killer blow that smashed Simon's head against the pavement. As we all know by now, they will walk after serving only a third of that minus remand time. Only one year more than the sentence imposed on the laptop rioters who posted their encouragement of the unrest on Facebook. What is this telling us about values in Britain today?



This insulting sentence echoes the $3,000 fine and three years probation imposed on the white Detroit car-workers, Richard Ebens and Michael Nitz, who beat Vincent Chin to death with a baseball bat in front of witnesses one summer evening in 1982. Out on a bachelor party, Vincent was hunted down before finally being cornered in a McDonalds where he was held by Nitz while Ebens pulped his skull with the bat.



Both killings were preceded by racist epithets. The Wikipedia account says:

Ronald Ebens was arrested and taken into custody at the scene of the murder by two off-duty police officers who had witnessed the beating. Ebens and Nitz were convicted in a county court for manslaughter by Wayne County Circuit Judge Charles Kaufman, after a plea bargain brought the charges down from second-degree murder. They served no jail time, were given three years probation, fined $3,000 and ordered to pay $780 in court costs. In a response letter to protests from American Citizens for Justice, Kaufman said, "These weren't the kind of men you send to jail... You don't make the punishment fit the crime; you make the punishment fit the criminal."

After an appeal and a retrial, Ebens was cleared of all charges despite witnesses including two off-duty cops. The lenient sentences for Ebens and Nitz led to a galvanisation of US Asian Americans who then formed the pan-ethnic Asian American movement that's given the community some clout since Chin's murder. I wonder if San's case will prompt an equivalent marshalling of Asian community forces in Britain.



On Monday 12th September, Amnesty International is screening a film about the case by Curtis Chin: “Vincent Who?”, a documentary on Asian American political empowerment. He'll be part of a Q&A; session afterwards, with Paul Hyu (Chinese Elvis) and Col. Brian Kay OBE TD DL, Chairman of Islington Chinese Association.



Asian Pacific Americans for Progress & Islington Chinese Association presents

"Vincent Who?"

Monday, Sept. 12, 2011

7-9 pm

Amnesty International – The Human Rights Action Centre

17-25 New Inn Yard

London EC2A 3EA

Free Admission

Ticket reservations here







The Leith police dismisseth us, but the Lothian community pay their respects in this tribute.

Vincent Chin and Simon San: two murders, same indifference

Vincent Chin and Simon San were born and murdered decades apart on two different continents, but the common factor is the callousness and indifference with which their cases have been dealt with by the investigating police and prosecutors.

Justice is off the menu when it comes to these Chinese deaths. While the police finally admit that an acknowledgment of the racist dimension of Simon's murder by a white mob outside the family-run takeaway in Edinburgh in Scotland would have resulted in stiff sentences, the men have been given 24 months, 26 months and five years for the thug who landed the killer blow that smashed Simon's head against the pavement. As we all know by now, they will walk after serving only a third of that minus remand time. Only one year more than the sentence imposed on the laptop rioters who posted their encouragement of the unrest on Facebook. What is this telling us about values in Britain today?

This insulting sentence echoes the $3,000 fine and three years probation imposed on the white Detroit car-workers, Richard Ebens and Michael Nitz, who beat Vincent Chin to death with a baseball bat in front of witnesses one summer evening in 1982. Out on a bachelor party, Vincent was hunted down before finally being cornered in a McDonalds where he was held by Nitz while Ebens pulped his skull with the bat.

Both killings were preceded by racist epithets. The Wikipedia account says:

Ronald Ebens was arrested and taken into custody at the scene of the murder by two off-duty police officers who had witnessed the beating. Ebens and Nitz were convicted in a county court for manslaughter by Wayne County Circuit Judge Charles Kaufman, after a plea bargain brought the charges down from second-degree murder. They served no jail time, were given three years probation, fined $3,000 and ordered to pay $780 in court costs. In a response letter to protests from American Citizens for Justice, Kaufman said, "These weren't the kind of men you send to jail... You don't make the punishment fit the crime; you make the punishment fit the criminal."

After an appeal and a retrial, Ebens was cleared of all charges despite witnesses including two off-duty cops. The lenient sentences for Ebens and Nitz led to a galvanisation of US Asian Americans who then formed the pan-ethnic Asian American movement that's given the community some clout since Chin's murder. I wonder if San's case will prompt an equivalent marshalling of Asian community forces in Britain.

On Monday 12th September, Amnesty International is screening a film about the case by Curtis Chin: “Vincent Who?”, a documentary on Asian American political empowerment. He'll be part of a Q&A; session afterwards, with Paul Hyu (Chinese Elvis) and Col. Brian Kay OBE TD DL, Chairman of Islington Chinese Association.

Asian Pacific Americans for Progress & Islington Chinese Association presents
"Vincent Who?"
Monday, Sept. 12, 2011
7-9 pm
Amnesty International – The Human Rights Action Centre
17-25 New Inn Yard
London EC2A 3EA
Free Admission
Ticket reservations here



The Leith police dismisseth us, but the Lothian community pay their respects in this tribute.

Takeaway review: Theatre Royal Stratford East

Takeaway
Theatre Royal Stratford East

The cast were fab, the energy level of the production was sky-high, but why was all that talent wasted on a heartless non-story about such an unsympathetic character?

Takeaway, a musical touted by some as a long-awaited breakthrough for UK Chinese, is a delight in so many ways that it's sad to report that where it failed, it bombed big time.

British Chinese are easy to please at the moment. Having been starved of representations of ourselves for so long, the sight of five, yes, FIVE Chinese out of the nine-strong cast almost had me on my knees singing the Hallelujah Chorus. With one black, two South Asians and one white actor, the self-styled multi-culti Arcola Theatre in Hackney should eat their hearts out and only wish they could aspire to the rainbow head-count over at Stratford East, given as they are to all-white casts in plays about the mysterious Orient (see More Light).

The lovely Stephen Hoo (a Ricki Beadle-Blair regular) stars as Eddie Woo in this tale of an East London lad working in his Dad's takeaway, The Happy Family. (May I just say that sitting this close to a set with a big menu staring back at me had me salivating for ribs throughout? I'm that suggestible.) The conceit in writer Robert Lee's premise is wonderful: the Chinese male, commonly defined in colonialist terms as feminised and either asexual or over-sexed without the adequate equipment to fulfil the drive, is represented here by a handsome dude who wants to become a sex-god showbiz star.

That the sex-god is old-timer Tom Jones (who was always a bit of a joke before his savvy son gave him a make-over in the 1980s and made him sing Prince's Kiss) knocks the gilt off the gingerbread a tad, but the overall "thrust" of the hi-energy staging provides hardly time for a quizzical "Hunh?" before we're caught up in the next dazzling showstopper.

But toe-tapping tunes (Leon Ko), beautiful lighting (Paul Anderson) and design (Foxton) plus imaginative choreography (Jason Pennycooke) aren't enough to divert you from the gaping hole at the centre of the piece.

Lee has cast his net across the culture and trawled a haul of lurid clich矇s which he plonks almost wholly unmediated on the stage. As I've said before, restating stereotypes is not the same as subverting them, and the show shoves one long tidal-wave of negative depictions at us, albeit dressed up cute. There's much pandering to gems such as "Made in China" being synonymous with tat despite high end technology being produced there; "Britain has the class, not China"; "small eyes, smaller dreams". And there are even several references to small dicks. Yaaaaaawn! It's not the size of the stereotypes, hun, it's what you do with them.

Full of self-loathing dressed up with a modicum of wit, the John Chinaman song and the Ching Chong segment at the funeral could all have been blistering satire shedding light on the nature of such negative depictions. But all I came out with was a sense that the writer is ashamed of being Chinese. Similarly, the dream sequence ending Act 1 was promising and looked as if it was going to undermine the stereotypes, but what it really told us was that Eddie has nightmares about being Chinese. The actor who had to deliver those self-abasing songs deserves a shout-out: Windson Liong as the uncommunicative chef at The Happy Family does a solid job and should be given tons of work after this. (In fact there are no weak links in the acting department: Ozzie Yue plays the most sympathetic character as the hard-working widower trying to raise his wastrel son. His song about his hopes and dreams for Eddie is touching. And Shelley Williams stands out as the comedy star, nipping effortlessly from accent to accent: her turn as the drunk priest was hilarious.)

Unintentional absurdities abounded, like Pik-sen Lim's Madam Chu having fled Hong Kong when the communists took power. Hong Kong?!! She had to flee to Britain from British-owned HK, ya see. Right.

What really killed the show stone dead for me, though, was the repeated depiction of anyone who cared about the Morecambe Bay cocklepickers as loons somehow deserving ridicule and loathing, reinforcing the notion that real Chinese don't value life. Twenty-one of our poorest human beings died doing a shit job for poverty pay: picking the cockles that probably ended up in the freezers of takeaway businesses like The Happy Family. A handful of campaigners ensured that they weren't written off as mere "criminals" in the way some of Woo's fellow UK petit bourgeoisie were attempting to do.

Lee sneers at and satirises Chinese activism when it barely exists as a force, at least in terms of meaningful numbers. We need more. Woo's takeaway might not have survived the Foot & Mouth Disease accusation by government and swathes of the media in 2000 that the Chinese caused the outbreak if it hadn't been for a few activists, such as the one played by Gabby Wong, going into action and saving his Dad's business. The resulting thousand-strong protest attracted international media attention and resulted in an abject public apology and vindication from the minister, Nick Brown.

What's American writer Robert Lee ever done for UK Chinese, and what does he know about us? What did Lee do when Morrissey called the Chinese a subspecies? What's he saying about the current wave of Yellow Peril attacks in the media? Maybe he's been brilliant, but I've never heard of him and I've been paying attention. All he can do is bellyache about bunny-boiler girlfriends and obsess over a granddaddy figure whom his lead character seeks to emulate. He can't even establish his protagonist as an original, a sui generis, only a copy. Jeez, no wonder we have no equivalent of Anna May Wong.

Still, what's the trashing of a few Chinese if it means casting yourself as Not Other in the eyes of those you envy?

If Eddie Woo failed his A levels at 21, is he just too thick to comprehend other ways of looking at the world? Solipsistic and incapable of forging relationships, he skates on the surface of life, lying to his Dad and girlfriends, rude to the kitchen help. Others with a deeper connection to the world are a puzzle to him. That would have been a subject worth pursuing dramatically, but the suspicion lingers that this flimsiest of stories is largely autobiographical: the writer's own flaws and limitations writ large on the stage with no prospect of examination or exploration.

Takeaway life is not all there is to the Chinese diaspora experience. Characters who reflect a bigger world out there and a richer world within are excoriated by a tiny Tory mindset which hasn't developed beyond X-Factor TV show values.

The greatest musicals leave you moved and feeling somehow bigger: Carousel, West Side Story, Sweeney Todd. Even Blood Brothers has a tragedic plot under the pizzazz. But I left the theatre feeling I'd been party to something small and mean. Takeaway shrieks a lot but has nothing to say. In comparison with what other practitioners of this genre have achieved, this is vacuous, visionless tat. "Made in China", indeed.

UPDATE: Thursday 30th June 2011 A rather limp response in the Guardian from writer Robert Lee who can't tell the difference between anger and disdain, and who pleads the "irony" defence. Still has nothing to say about mocking the 21 cocklepickers who died at Morecambe Bay, either. Sample joke: the emergency services didn't respond to the dying Chinese who were trapped on sandbanks with the sea rising because they couldn't understand their accents. How droll. Glad to see the old stereotypes alive and well at Stratford East.

Lucy Sheen reviews Takeaway here

Gwei Mui not impressed here

TAKEAWAY

Book and Lyrics by Robert Lee
Music by Leon Ko
Directed by Kerry Michael
Set & Costume Designer Foxton
Musical Director Robert Hyman
Choreographer Jason Pennycooke
Lighting Designer Paul Anderson
Sound Designer John Leonard
Associate Choreographer Farrah Hussain
Assistant Director Amy Ip
Casting Sooki McShane CDG and Lucy Jenkins CDG

Cast
Marcus Ellard, Stephen Hoo, Natasha Jayetileke, Pik-sen Lim, Windson Liong, Gloria Onitiri, Shelley Williams, Gabby Wong, Ozzie Yue.

Takeaway runs at the Theatre Royal Stratford East until 9 July 2011. Tickets are £16 – £24 (concessions available). To book tickets phone 020 8534 0310 or visit www.stratfordeast.com.

Photos here

Racism for fun: Fu Manchu producer pleads irony on the BBC

Well, call me Kafka.

My contribution to today's Feedback programme on BBC R4 ended up as a cutting-room floor job in favour of a letter from another listener making similar points, which was good. At least it shows someone else could be bothered to write in about the god-awful throwback Fu Manchu In Edinburgh programme I wrote about the other week.

The Feedback producer had phoned me to record 45 seconds of my response for today's programme (13 minutes in — which I'm posting below) but didn't use the salient arguments. I KNEW the producers were going to plead "irony". Now, the word "irony" actually means something, and is not an all-purpose get-out-of-jail-free card. It means saying something literal but meaning its opposite.

There was no such device used on the Fu Manchu programme. Miles Jupp and his producer obviously thought it would be a great wheeze to play it straight, tapping into something dark lurking beneath the skin of a civilisation in decline (ours) and indulging it. Only, context is everything and there are real human beings — as opposed to the simian subhumans luridly gloated over in the programme — who are affected by this relentless poisonous drip. (And I don't just mean Jupp.)

Feedback presenter Roger Bolton introduced the item as being about "a factional documentary about a fictional character", which is fine in a vacuum. But the Yellow Peril scare never did operate in a vacuum. While the yellow press were vilifying the yellow man in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, contemporary voices were pointing out the racist nature of Sax Rohmer's writing which even his widow and biographer described as "obsessive".

Jupp naturalised these hateful representations while the producer used the lamest jargon on Feedback in an attempt to blind with science. They said, "The programme was deliberately ironic in tone." Oh, right. That old chestnut. Irony meaning, " The use of words to express something different from and often opposite to their literal meaning"? (Free Dictionary) Where in the programme were Jupp's expressions or utterances "marked by a deliberate contrast between apparent and intended meaning"?

In yet more slipperiness with the verit矇, they said the programme was "used to explore the cultural effects of the opium wars, the pattern of Chinese immigration in the 1870s, and the history of the Chinese students who studied at British universities." All subjects comprehensively covered in my Chinese In Britain series for Radio 4, but here turned on their head and exploited to "orientalise" and make "other" a group of people in dehumanising terms that went unchallenged. And today, it emerges, they want to have their cake and eat it: to have their fun with a racial group but plead that it was actually a social service.

Only a bit of fun? Yes, that's fine for a bunch of white males to say.

In the end, I was relieved they hadn't used my contribution. The producer's patronising last word appeared designed to make the correspondent, Tia Yang, sound under-educated and ignorant (which she is not) of the workings of such artistic endeavours, through the use of a barrage of buzzwords and critical theory terms such as "deconstruction", and questionable claims of "rigorous analysis".

May I say, this is the sheet of the bull? Ms Yang's instincts were right on the money.

How is restating the stereotypes the same as "deconstructing" them? Got in himmel, is the BBC seriously going to let them get away with a dissembling that relies, IMHO, on the hoped-for ignorance of the Radio 4 audience? Talk about dumbing down! A GSCE media studies student could deconstruct this flummery.

To cap it all, the producer claimed, "The programme takes racist stereotypes apart." And it was at this point, dear reader, that this little corner of the BBC transformed into the Ministry of Truth, where truth is lies and lies are truth. Where they state the opposite of what is real ... with no discernible irony whatsoever.

A Big Fat Fail.

Here's the text of my contribution. I'm going for a walk!

Fu Manchu In Edinburgh gleefully revived racist stereotypes of the Chinese I'd hoped were long-buried, and could have been subtitled, Racism For Fun.

Why present a Yellow Peril figure as if he was a real person complete with lurid wallowing in the very worst racism, dehumanising the Chinese as a race, linking us with filth, and presenting us as Bin Laden-like Western-civilisation-hating sub-humans?

There was no irony. No attempt to subject these prejudices and stereotypes of a bygone era to any kind of modern interrogation. Instead, they were re-imported, intact, into the present day. I can't imagine the BBC vilifying any other minority group like this.

The author Sax Rohmer had never met a Chinese person and was writing from malice and ignorance — the "experts" on this programme only have one of those excuses.

There's a woeful absence of Chinese voices in the media, so when the BBC fills the vacuum with degrading Sinophobic depictions such as this one, they do a grave disservice to a significant licence-paying section of the population.

UPDATE: Thursday 26th August 2010 Professor Greg Benton of Cardiff University writes to me on the subject. He wasn't impressed, either:

"Chinese are quite numerous in British society today, but ethnic Chinese are very underrepresented in the BBC and its programmes, which is a disgrace. This was not a very funny programme, and if it was meant to be ironic, the irony didn't work. If you're a young Chinese isolated in an overwhelmingly white school and community, as many if not most young Chinese are, you get a lot of mockery along these lines. Why not commission more work on that? First deal with the racist stereotyping - then we can perhaps afford to be ironic about it."

More sinophobic representations. Review of Sherlock Holmes Episode 2, The Blind Banker.

Sherlock and wily orientals: Blind Banker, Episode 2 review

SPOILER ALERT

Having missed the curtain-raiser of the Sherlock series last week, boo-hooing over the rave reviews, and tonight's show — The Blind Banker — promising to be more Second Coming than second episode, Loved One and I settled in to watch, even forsaking our TV pals over at Channel 4 in the Big Brother house just as Josie's nemesis Sam Pepper enters the fray.

Episode Two began intriguingly enough. The robotic woman from the Bing ad emoted in similar fashion as she mysteriously and inscrutably demonstrated the tea ceremony. I did wonder why a modern young Chinese Miss would be wearing a chipao frock in present-day London, but Loved One sniffed that she needed it for her job entrancing the tourists and demanded to know why didn't I do tranquility and ancient wisdom like writer Stephen Thompson's creation? After yelling that I am frikkin' peaceful when not being wound up, I admiringly noted her noble struggle with the accent, as actress Gemma Chan evidently speaks Chinese as orfentically as I speak it — that is: not at all. But I put this down to the obvious imminent revelation that she was really a Terminator-style android sent by Moriarty to wreak devastation on our imploding civilisation and the accent therefore was deliberately gauged to be unlike any known human language. A sort of error of the tongues.

Ah, so sinisterly clever.

In this reboot of the Sherlock Holmes franchise for BBC1, Arthur Conan Doyle's characters stay in the same Baker Street location but move forward in time to the present. Thus Martin Freeman's John Watson, like the original, is a former military doctor, wounded in Afghanistan. Ooh, topical as well as clever. And Sherlock (Benedict Cumberbatch) is a snotty skint smart-arse, verging on Withnail (only sober), perpetually dragging his friend into mischief. (Spot the borrow: Sherlock and Watson as Withnail & I — did Cumberbatch lose out on the Dr Who auditions and this is his consolation prize? — Blade Runner origami, Hammer Horror Fu Manchu, A Beautiful Mind graphics ...)

Suddenly, my heart sinks and I realise it's all Black Lotus, Tongs (you should see my Terror of the Curling Tongs), drugs and torture. For are we not a cruel race, as the clever programme-makers have noticed? A series of killings and a trail of yellow-themed clues lead our intrepid heroes into the dangers of Soho Chinatown where even the shop assistants are ... sinister. Very clever creators Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat, and their resident Sax Rohmer Stephen Thompson, plus assorted producers, editors, BBC bods and friends, uncleverly fail to pull the mindset out of the 19th century along with the update and sadly jam their heads up their collective fundament.

"With a brow like Shakespeare and eyes like Satan", lordy, here's a heart-of-darkness Chinese circus with their uncanny abilities and deathly tricks. Sherlock morphs into Nayland Smith (hero of Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu books) and has to fight assorted Yellow Peril villainy that is so dastardly evil and fiendish that a brother can kill his own sister (she wasn't a Terminator-bot after all) without breaking into a sweat.

Gillian Facebooks me that she's looking forward to them doing one of those pentatonic scale thingies, such are our expectations by now. They don't do that but they do kill off the Chinese female lead character as they must according to the rules of Anna May Wong Must Die!: she's sexotic so she has to go. And life in these heah parts is cheap.

I too am rapidly losing the will to live. Still, I am at least relieved that Sherlock is not as frenetic and hysterical as its Joss Whedon-wannabe stablemates Dr Who and Torchwood. Eventually, clever Sherlock identifies the McGuffin as being a jade hairpin worth nine million dollars or pounds or yen (I was having trouble concentrating at this point as I had to go feed my vampire bats and torture someone) and defeats the cruel circus-mistress by doing something-or-other that's very clever.

For much of the programme I was hoping clever Mark Gatiss et al would do something remarkable and witty with the wily oriental clich矇s that would leave me gasping with delight and applauding their clever audacity. This is, after all, the 21st Century and we all do irony now. Evidently this was beyond their capabilities. Unaccountably, they omitted the obligatory Limehouse opium den scene. WHY?

The idea of updating Sherlock Holmes is a spiffing wheeze. Nevertheless, there are some Victorian values which should be locked in a hansom cab back with the swirling pea-soup fogs.

Sherlock: The Blind Banker. Episode 2.
BBC1 9pm, Sunday 1st August 2010

Have you seen the script for The Blind Banker? Soo Lin Yao "a fragile little doll".

Laurie Penny in New Statesman.

Here's my poetic answer to the lazy prejudice of these stereotypes in a poem I wrote a while back: Anna May Wong Must Die!. It's at the end of this set I performed at the Farrago Summer Poetry Slam the other day.

More orientalism on BBC: Fu Manchu in Edinburgh

View from America — Mark Watches

Monique blog

Sherlock BBC

Lyndsay Faye at CriminalElement.com

Jonathan McCalmont on Sinomania in Boomtron.com

LUCY LIU TO PLAY DR JOAN WATSON IN CBS SHERLOCK HOLMES SERIES "ELEMENTARY".