Written by Kate Herbert 21 Nov 1994
This article published in The Melbourne Times around late Nov or early Dec 1994
Sydney-based actor, Anthony Wong believes having no positive roles models is discouraging for aspiring young Asian actors. "Imagine going to a movie house and seeing someone who looked like yourself portrayed as an idiot, raped of their dignity and dehumanised and multiply that by thirty years and that's what my experience has been like. It has a really damaging effect on your self-esteem."
Wong is a Chinese-Australian who has lived here all his life and speaks a negligible amount of Chinese. He admits he feels like an outsider on many levels. "When I go see Australian movies ... there are many aspects of Australian culture I relate to and then again I'm excluded on all other levels."
He recently went to the Hong Kong film festival and found "it was so wonderfully validating seeing Asian actors and actresses in lead roles playing complex people." Simultaneously, because of the specifically Hong Kong Chinese culture, there are other levels on which he felt excluded. "It's very odd having one foot in each camp."
Australia may have integrated the concept of a multicultural, multi-racial, multi-lingual community into our daily lives, but the film and television industries have not yet caught up. With Justine Saunders and Lydia Miller, Wong met with several commercial television executives earlier this year to discuss increasing cultural diversity on Australian television to represent the reality in the community. The reponse was almost ridiculously narrow-minded.
“’Commercial television isn't meant to be reality. It's meant to be fantasy.’ And I looked at Justine and Lydia and we said, 'How come your fantasy is Anglo-Saxon? White, middle-class and heterosexual.' They didn't have an answer for that."
Wong suggests that television executives and casting agents point the finger at training institutions that produce few trained actors from cultures from other than WASP backgrounds. Strangely, television has a habit of using untrained and often incompetent kid-models in its soaps these days, so this argument hardly counts.
"Every justification is pulled out of the cupboard to justify maintaining the status quo.
'We won't be able to get the people. The Australian public just don't want to see Asians or Kooris. They want to see their own people'." Apart from the fact that Australians are ‘these people’, Wong believes this argument is also fallacious.
"Look at the success of Annette Shun Wah and the commercial success of The Joy Luck Club, The Wedding Banquet, Dragon, Farewell My Concubine, The Last Emperor. Mainstream films with lead Asian actors will strike a chord with Western audiences so this a totally outmoded notion."
When the industry does use Asians on screen, Wong believes they fall into four recurrent stereotypes. Firstly, the enemy: members of the Japanese Yakuzah or Chinese Triad. Then the exotic, delicate beauty we can admire from afar or those who are easy sex objects. There is the image of the sage old man with a goatee who quotes Confucian wisdom and lastly, the demeaning roles of servants and house boys "who get tapped on the head and bring in the tea."
"I know Asians who are television producers, fashion designers, Justices of the Peace, choreographers. Where are these people on our screens?", asks Wong.
It is now time, after years of acceptance, to act politically and publicly on this issue.
From the beginning of his acting career Wong decided to deal positively with a work environment which cast him as an outsider. Being negative “would have been suicidal psychologically… Eleven years down the line I cannot deny there are glaring inequalities...It is important for someone to speak up."
Wong praises Melbourne theatre director, Bruce Myles, who employed what has become known as "Colour-Blind Casting" when he cast Wong in Louis Nowra's The Temple, last year. The role of Nick Albert was obviously not Asian but even so, one Melbourne critic described him as "Laurie Blake's Japanese adviser." Do all Asians look alike to him?
A further criticism by Wong of Western screen representations of Asians is that they over-sexualise Asian women and under-sexualise the men. "Asian women are portrayed to be disempowered sex objects and the Asian men are portrayed as almost devoid of sexuality...It's a very powerful way to strip an entire race of its power."
It is unacceptable for Caucasians to play Asians, says Wong, "given the situation that there's a lack of equality in Australian casting. My principle, my philosophy is that all actors, regardless of race or sexual preference or anything, should be able to play a diversity of roles. If we had a truly egalitarian society where I could go for the kinds of roles that Russell Crowe goes for, for example. I would say 'Go for it!'" Which, of course, is a scenario which remains in an ideal world.
Emotionally, his response is different. "I've seen too many white actors play Asians in such demeaning, demoralising, dehumanising ways that I 'd have a pretty negative reaction unless they were going to play an Asian character with incredible truth and complexity."
It is the dreadful stereotype of the buck-toothed Charlie Chan which has exacerbated the problem and trivialised a whole race. But a stereotype is often the basis of comedy.
“In Wogarama, I was playing a stereotype”, says Wong. 'However, I've done enough other things in my career to counter-balance that. It's always a question of balance...If we had Asians in regular complex roles in film and television, then a stereotype would mean very little."
The Media and Entertainment Arts Alliance, Actors Equity division has attempted to set up a series of guidelines encouraging producers of Commercial television to diversify in its casting and production. According to Wong, it acts more as a reminder than as a policy. Once again it is up to the people in power to implement the suggestions.
Wong sees Asian actors being employed as "otherness machines" or to portray a particular issue. "It's as if the Asian characters are wearing a placard saying, “I'm Phillipino" or "I'm a battered Chinese housewife" and often the program does not encourage you to see beyond the placard."
There is little exploration of the Asian Australian experience on an urban level. "A recurrent theme in film is World War Two Burma railway and Japanese brides," says Wong.
Is there an Australian soap which has Asian next-door neighbours?
Recently, Wong talked about the issue on Radio National program, Arts Today, and was invited to speak at a cross-cultural casting forum at The National Performance Conference in Melbourne in October.
Wong describes being an Asian actor in the west as "like going to a banquet and the Maitre D' says to you, 'You're not to eat anything except the prawn crackers.'...And most of the time you're not even invited to the party. So", he says with a wicked giggle, "I just gate crash."
The protest about the non-presence of Asians on screen is not a sudden event. "It's been building up over generations...Asians have been living in the West for many years integrating the ideas of democracy, self-assertion, political activism. "Certain world events - e.g. Tien A Min Square and the emergence of Michael Chang as a top tennis player – have had implications.
"It's not any one event that triggers it. It's like the 100th monkey syndrome ...It's all gathering in the collective unconscious and then it bursts in one part of the world and people are inspired by that to then take up their own political activism."
The movement to improve the status of Asian actors in screen and theatre is further advanced in America. Asian-American actors such as John Lone, Joan Chen, B.D. Wang who won the Tony award for M. Butterfly, Jason Scott Lee and Brandon Lee have raised the profile of the Asian actor. Much of the credit is due to the Asian-American Theatre which has pressured organisations and unions to political action. Remember the kerfuffle when Jonathon Pryce was to perform the Asian-American role in Miss Saigon In New York?
"Hollywood cannot be complacent anymore. They cannot expect that they can release a movie dragging the old Asian stereotypes out of the closet....and expect the Asian-American community to bow down and accept that." There was vigorous protest in the Asian-American press about The Shadow starring John Lone, which featured a 'Confucius says' kind of thing", explains Wong.
In the U.S., much of the action has been initiated by the Theatre community rather than the screen world and theatre in Australia, says Wong, has been much more willing to accept a range of actors. Theatre is where Wong has had most success breaking the straight jacket of stereotyping. But he believes it is in film and television "where you build a public profile, where you learn you reach a position of recognition, where you can put bums on seats - and that gives you the power to make better decisions in theatre. Screen being a popular medium is where the impact must be felt."
What are our solutions to this problem which is essentially a symptom of short sightedness on the part of directors, producers and writers who are not representative of our whole community? Do we legislate? Invoke Equal Opportunity laws and Affirmative Action clauses?
Wong believes this can create new problems. It could disguise the problem. There is a quota system in the United States which, says Wong, forces producers to employ Asian, Black, Hispanic actors but they can use them in token roles.
"Extras are black or Asian, but the main cast stays white. "The producers can sit back glowing with politically correct pride saying, ’We've done our bit. We've been progressive in our casting’ when all you have seen is an Asian cook in the background frying the dim sims.
"Maybe we need an Asian-Australian theatre or specific funding from Australia Council to fund specifically locally produced work by local Asian dramatists. "
We are all affected by the portrayal by the media of a world populated almost exclusively by the Blond and the Beautiful. But how would one feel growing up watching a screen which does not even acknowledge the existence of your race or else represents your racial group as appalling stereotypes?
It is always a matter of placing members of a particularly invisible group in the arts in positions of creative power: writer, directors, producers, funders. There has been a move by women artists to penetrate the predominantly male arts bureaucracy which is very slowly affecting the marketplace.
Australia does not have a David Henry Hwang (U.S.-Chinese writer of the award-winning M. Butterfly) nor does it have an Asian-Australian Theatre Company. A good model adn precursor would be the developing Koori performance culture with the evolution of the Black Swan Theatre Company, Jack Davis' and Sally Morgan's plays and the Aboriginal and Islander Dance School in Sydney.
Again, at the hands of Myles, Wong played Toni, a male prostitute transvestite, in Michael Gurr's Award winning play, Sex Diary of an Infidel.
"Playing Toni was a huge breakthrough for Australian theatre 'cos here was an actor who on the surface appeared to be a sleezy sex object in some people's minds and turns out to be the angel of the piece."
Wong has been cast in a number of roles in which he is playing sexually assertive characters which, he believes, goes against the stereotypical attitudes to the Asian male. In the Chinese erotic poetry in Gastronomica, as The Swan for South Australian Theatre Company, as Toni and as David in Unidentified Human Remains. "I find it delicious," he quips cheekily.
Training institutions can take initiative by taking affirmative action by targeting applicants from Asian cultures rather than pleading 'nobody applied'. Wong expressed concern that "NIDA [National Institute of Dramatic Art, Sydney] is supposed to be colour blind but it had never been colour blind."
It seems that it is information that the community needs. If we are not Asian-Australians, we probably do not even notice the problem. "It's not important enough. It's not in people's consciousness," says Wong. Our theatre and television industry is Anglo-centric. Not until people get up in arms, hit the press in force, make the public sit up and take notice, will the situation change. So, start talking about it - Now!
KATE HERBERT 21 November 1994
