When Merlynn Tong was growing up in Singapore she was fascinated by Australia.
She recalls the images she saw in advertisements – of the ocean, kangaroos and Sydney Opera House.
"I thought everyone surfed when I moved here," she says.
"I lived in Perth, and all my housemates were from the country, so everyone was a farmer. No one knew how to surf and I was really surprised by that."
It's a preoccupation that she shares with the protagonist of her latest play, Golden Blood, which opens at Griffin Theatre Company at the end of June.
Golden Blood's main character, named simply Girl and played by Tong, carries a toy koala under her arm and dreams of moving to Australia to study veterinary science.
Tong came to Australia at the age of 21 to study theatre, after she worked in advertising for a few years in Singapore.
"I was born as an artist in Australia … Getting my whole education, my inspiration, my mentors, my collaborators – everything has been born here."
Girl gives up her dream of moving to Australia to stay in Singapore with her gangster brother – who moves in with her after their mother dies by suicide when she is 14 and he is 21.
But Girl remains attached to a romantic ideal of Australia.
"It feels free there you know / Like everyone respects each other / No lies / No dark history / No oppression / Everyone gets a fair go," Girl tells her brother, known only as Boy (played by Charles Wu).
Tong laughs: "I think Girl maybe has done a little bit more research than the real Merlynn has. I don't think I knew the term 'a fair go' [growing up in Singapore]. I think I learned that here actually."
Golden Blood is directed by Griffin associate artistic director Tessa Leong (Wherever She Wanders) — and is one of two plays written and directed by Chinese Australian women to premiere in Sydney this month.
The second is Michelle Law's Top Coat, directed by Courtney Stewart (who is incoming artistic director of Brisbane's La Boite).
Their works are part of a wave of Asian Australian theatre making by women in 2022 – alongside two upcoming adaptations: Melina Marchetta's Looking for Alibrandi by Vidya Rajan (Malthouse/Belvoir), and Alice Pung's Laurinda by Diana Nguyen (Melbourne Theatre Company).
"[It feels] bloody phenomenal … We're all going up at the same time," says Tong.
The power of empathy
Michelle Law's Top Coat is a body-swap comedy – in the tradition of movies like Freaky Friday and the homegrown Dating the Enemy (which starred a young Claudia Karvan and Guy Pearce).
In the play, Chinese Australian manicurist Winnie (Kimie Tsukakoshi) swaps bodies with one of her clients, the white TV executive Kate (Amber McMahon), after a mysterious electrical event.
"It is a story about representation, privilege and what it means to fully embody someone else's life experience," explains Law.
"I really wanted people from very different worlds to swap and become aware of their own unconscious biases, and their own assumptions about each other's lives."
Director Courtney Stewart stresses that the play is especially poignant after the lockdowns and enforced isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic.
"I think having an experience where you literally have to walk in someone else's shoes provides us a way back to each other," she says.
That call to empathy feels timely, if not urgent, at a time of ongoing anti-Asian sentiment in the wake of the pandemic – exemplified in Australia by inflammatory comments from government ministers about China.
Some pundits believe that such negative rhetoric led to swings against the Coalition in electorates with large Chinese Australian communities at the election in May.
Law makes the point that racism against Asian people has been part of Australian society since Asian people migrated to Australia during the Gold Rush – with a resurgence in the 90s with the rise of One Nation.
"I feel like the last couple of years has really unearthed all of the resentment that people felt towards Asian people in Australia," she says.
Asian-born Australians make up 10.4 per cent of the overall population, according to the 2016 census.
Despite this, Law says, "you see very little Asian representation in narrative stories – you see it a lot on reality TV, but that reinforces the idea that we're good for cooking and in service roles, as opposed to being a protagonist in a life story".
"And for me, this [Top Coat] is like a small antidote to that [narrative]."
Creating a shorthand
Golden Blood director Tessa Leong has long admired the work of playwright and actor Merlynn Tong.
"[I feel] a deep love and connection with Merlynn as an artist and what she brings to the stage in her writing and in her performance," says Leong.
Leong remembers seeing Tong pitch her one-woman play Blue Bones at an arts market in Karratha, Western Australia, after which she rushed to introduce herself to the playwright.
Blue Bones went on to premiere in Brisbane in 2017, starring Tong, and won six independent theatre awards, including Best Female Actor, Best New Australian Work and Best Mainstage Production.
Golden Blood is the first time that Tong has worked with an Asian Australian woman as director on one of her shows – and their similar cultural backgrounds mean that they have a kind of "shorthand" in the rehearsal room.
"Things to do with being a woman, and things to do with being Asian, we just have that in common already, so I don't have to explain too much," Tong says.
In Golden Blood, Boy hatches a hare-brained plan to make money by encouraging people to invest in bars of gold.
"[Tessa and I] both had the experience of, when you're born, people give you little gold bars and things like that, and how gold and the Chinese culture sometimes is almost hand-in-hand," says Tong.
That shorthand extends to their audience as well, who may have a richer experience in the theatre if they share Tong's background. She includes jokes in her plays that are geared to people from Singapore and Malaysia.
"As I'm performing, you can hear them laugh and it's so satisfying," she says.
It's important to her to open up the theatre to neglected audiences – the kinds of people who don't think that theatre is for them.
"People come up to you and tell you that it's one of the first shows they've seen," she says.
"It's just wonderful to share that love I have obviously for people similar to me and for the craft that I love so much."
'The only Asian person in the room'
Tessa Leong is also excited to see stories about being Asian Australian – as well as stories told by Asian Australians – in theatres across the country.
"I never thought this would happen within my career, to be perfectly honest," she says.
"I have been very used to being the only Asian person in the room everywhere I go."
But she gives credit for this rise – or rather wave of recognition – to Contemporary Asian Australian Performance (CAAP), run by writer, broadcaster, producer and theatre maker Annette Shun Wah.
"[She] has been championing us for decades in all different ways," says Leong.
"I think it's easy to forget that in the 80s and the 90s, people like Annette and William [Yang, theatre maker and photographer] were making work and being renowned for that, and it's their efforts that have made this happen."
The Lotus Playwriting Project – an initiative from CAAP and the now-defunct Playwriting Australia designed to address the under-representation of Asian Australian writers in theatre – was a starting point for both Merlynn Tong's Blue Bones and Michelle Law's first play, Single Asian Female.
Single Asian Female, which premiered in Brisbane in 2017 – the same year as Blue Bones – before touring Australia, was the first Australian mainstage production with three Asian leads.
Law acknowledges the influence of Shun Wah and CAAP, and is pleased that young people have this wave of work by Asian Australians to draw from – and build upon.
"It's really exciting to be part of that wave that's creating opportunities for other people and creating a platform for those voices. Because I never really saw that growing up," she says.
Top Coat director Courtney Stewart, who also gained experience through CAAP's Directors Initiative, adds: "[That wave] is why you see so much growth, because when you see it, you can believe it. If you don't see it, you don't know that you can go and do that."
Stewart has assembled a team of Asian Australian creatives to work on Top Coat – including two people from STC's Design Associate Program for First Nations and culturally and linguistically diverse designers: Kate Baldwin as lighting designer, and James Lew as designer.
They're joined by assistant director Tiffany Wong and sound designer Michael Toisuta.
"It felt really, really important that we were very considerate about who we were bringing on board to tell the story," Stewart says.
"We're not all the same; we all come from different Asian diasporas. I think that point of diversity is really important – the diversity within diversity."
The next generation of leaders
Courtney Stewart's priority when she takes on the role of artistic director at La Boite will be centring and engaging First Nations voices and models of collaboration and creativity.
"We can only understand how we can engage with storytelling in this country if we centre the people who were here first and have been carrying on that tradition for over 60,000 years. To me, I feel like that has to be the way forward," she says.
She intends to start by listening to First Nations creatives about their history with the company and addressing any issues.
"I want to make that a priority of engaging with that community at every step of the way as I work out what kind of AD the company needs me to be," she says.
Tessa Leong too is one of many working towards structural change in Australian theatre.
She was involved in developing advocacy body Theatre Network Australia's Equity Action Plan – an effort to embed inclusion and diversity in all areas of the industry, including in programming and leadership roles. She is also working on Griffin's Equity Action Plan.
For her, the aim of structural change is to embed inclusiveness in organisations, and in artists' practices.
"I feel there's a long way to go … I think we need to work really hard to make sure that we are including everyone from the word go, and that goes across class and income and geography and background," she says.
New Asian Australian stories
The first wave of Asian Australian stories on Australian stages in the 80s and 90s often explored migrant or refugee experiences, overt racism and feelings of 'otherness', says Leong.
"[Those plays were] important for making space for non-white stories being on stage and telling impressive stories of human triumph," she says.
But now she says there's room for a wider range of stories about Asian Australian experiences.
"It feels to me that we're at a new stage of what Asian Australian art and theatre can be.
"What I'm really excited [about] now is that we're taking another step into a much more nuanced and rich conversation about what it's like to live in a contemporary world that acknowledges many different experiences of culture, heritage and ancestry."
Merlynn Tong almost didn't apply for the Lotus Playwriting Project because she didn't know if she was "Australian" enough.
But she was encouraged by a colleague to put herself forward – a decision that kickstarted her career.
Now, thinking about being programmed by Griffin, whose focus is new Australian work, she feels emotional.
"It's actually really moving for me … It's the acknowledgement that I am a part of this society too, [and] that my work matters," says Tong.
"It just feels like it validates my very existence."
Golden Blood runs from June 24-July 30 at Griffin Theatre Company. Top Coat runs from June 26-August 6 at Sydney Theatre Company.
