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Lynda Chanwai-Earle in Kā-Shue, returning to the Auckland Writer’s Festival this month. (Photo: Dianna Thomsen Photography, Image Design: Tina Tiller)
Lynda Chanwai-Earle in Kā-Shue, returning to the Auckland Writer’s Festival this month. (Photo: Dianna Thomsen Photography, Image Design: Tina Tiller)

BooksAugust 15, 2022

The groundbreaking Kā-Shue returns

Lynda Chanwai-Earle in Kā-Shue, returning to the Auckland Writer’s Festival this month. (Photo: Dianna Thomsen Photography, Image Design: Tina Tiller)
Lynda Chanwai-Earle in Kā-Shue, returning to the Auckland Writer’s Festival this month. (Photo: Dianna Thomsen Photography, Image Design: Tina Tiller)

Sam Brooks interviews Lynda Chanwai-Earle, playwright of the groundbreaking New Zealand-Chinese play Kā-Shue, which is returning to the stage as part of the Auckland Writers Festival.

Paw Paw’s entrance in Lynda Chanwai-Earle’s Kā-Shue is one of the most memorable in New Zealand theatre. She’s in Hong Kong in 1941 as the sounds of Japan’s invasion approach, clutching a baby that is a few months old. She packs to flee the country, while directing a monologue, panicked and angered, at the child, about what she plans to do with her. She tries to find an heirloom, and then in a tragicomic moment, it’s been in her pocket all along.

It’s a moment that defines Kā-Shue (“Letters Home”). The show, which turns 26 this year, was playwright and journalist Lynda Chanwai-Earle’s first. It follows three generations of Chinese-New Zealanders sending letters back and forth to each other, from the aforementioned Paw Paw to Jackie, who ends up back in Beijing for the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. 

When Chanwai-Earle debuted the show at Wellington’s Circa Theatre in 1996, it broke new ground as the first major show by a Chinese-New Zealander that focused on an immigrant family across generations. There was no tokenism of the characters, nobody was pushed to the side or made a joke of. These were Chinese-New Zealanders, voices unashamedly loud.

Kā-Shue has since toured across the world, to Hawai’i, Ireland and China. It has been published, and republished. It is a prescribed text across high schools and tertiary institutions. The show has had a dream run by any yardstick – now including its return to the stage this year as part of the Auckland Writers Festival.

Lynda Chanwai-Earle as Paw Paw in Kā-Shue at the TAHI Festival in 2020. (Photo: Dianna Thomson Photography)

“It’s been really amazing revisiting it,” Chanwai-Earle says. “There’s been such a really lovely response to it, and a desire for people to see it again, It’s the first big theatre piece that I ever wrote, and it’s been such a huge learning curve from that very first iteration back in 1996.”

Even though the show has been performed, in both prescribed and professional contexts, for years, it’s been some time since she’s stepped into those roles herself – 16 years, to be precise. Chanwai-Earle last toured the show to Hawai’i in 2004, and it wasn’t until 2020 when she was asked to put it on its feet again at Wellington’s TAHI festival, which specifically focuses on solo work. 

She jumped at the chance. “Then I thought, ‘Oh God, I hope I still fit the costume!’ If I couldn’t, then I’d have to have another made, because I’ve had two children since then! That was my biggest concern.”

To be performing Kā-Shue again now feels like a celebration for Chanwai-Earle. “I remember back in 1996, there was an absolute dearth of material,” she says. “There wasn’t anything that was actually speaking to our communities, our Chinese-New Zealand communities at the time.”

Lynda Chanwai-Earle as Jackie in Kā-Shue at the TAHI Festival in 2020. (Photo: Dianna Thomson Photography)

The show wasn’t just the first Chinese-New Zealand show that Circa Theatre had premiered, it was the first major debut of a show that focused on the Chinese-New Zealand community in the whole country. Two things were important to Chanwai-Earle: to include as much Cantonese as possible, which was difficult because she didn’t speak it (though she is diligently learning, and the most recent draft incorporates more), and to avoid viewing history through rose-tinted glasses.

“Some of the members of the Chinese community were appalled by the swearing and some of the really in-your-face stuff,” she says. She remembers members of the Chinese Anglican Church walking out because they were offended, and another incident when she performed for the New Zealand Chinese Association.

“They had a big gala evening, I was in between weird flamenco-style dancing and dancers with faux feathers, and then there was me,” she says. She chose to perform Gung Gung, Paw Paw’s husband, a “well-dressed, addicted mahjong gambler” with two other wives and a concubine. Gung Gung is like the rest of the characters in the show: flawed, irreverent, but ultimately extremely likeable. So, you know, human.

It did not go over well. “There was a whole sea of Chinese businessmen looking at me all conservative going, ‘What is this woman doing?’” It was another moment where what she was trying to do with Kā-Shue was lost in translation; the bridge between communities seemed, for a moment, to be one-way. “I don’t want to sanitise our history. I knew that my grandparents would be turning in their graves every time I do the show, but I do it with a huge amount of love. I believe so firmly that if you sanitise history, it’s a form of racism.

“Every single community has warts and all, every single community. I think you pay homage more, you do it with more love, when you’re honest.”

Lynda Chanwai-Earle in Kā-Shue at the TAHI Festival in 2020. (Photo: Dianna Thomson Photography)

That desire not to sanitise history links into Chanwai-Earle’s other career: journalism. In 2001, she was hired to work as a reporter and producer on Asia Down Under, a weekly show running from 1994 to 2011 that covered the stories of the Asian population in New Zealand. She worked there for three years.

In 2011, she became the founding producer of RNZ’s Voices programme, which runs to this day, focusing on the experiences of immigrant New Zealand “beyond the confines of the ‘diversity’ checkbox”. She believes her time as a journalist strengthened the material she’s written, which includes 2008’s Heat, about climate change, and 2011’s Man about the Suitcase, about the real-life murder of a Chinese student, which toured to Beijing and was almost closed down by the government.

“It was a steep learning curve, because I didn’t have a broadcasting degree!” Chanwai-Earle says. “TVNZ and RNZ took me on despite the fact I didn’t have that in my background, but I think the cross-pollination of the two disciplines, journalism and the arts, complements each other in a really good way.”

It also made her recognise that her work as a journalist and her work as an artist serve a similar purpose: to platform unheard voices, to tell unheard stories. “Journalism is a beautiful way of getting to understand people in a deeper, more meaningful way,” she says. “In every single one of my plays since I started working as a journalist, I have been enriched by that experience.”

Lynda Chanwai-Earle in Kā-Shue at the TAHI Festival in 2020. (Photo: Dianna Thomson Photography)

Although Kā-Shue remains the same, with little tweaks from Chanwai-Earle, the context is different. Asian theatre, especially, is bigger than it’s ever been in New Zealand. Companies like Proudly Asian Theatre, Agaram Productions and Prayas Theatre are programmed around the country, to sell-out houses and rave reviews. Auckland Theatre Company’s Scenes from a Yellow Peril was one of the best-received shows by the company in a while. Kā-Shue is now one of many shows that an audience can see in a calendar year that platform the Asian community.

Chanwai-Earle remembers being asked back in 1996 how it felt to be a torchbearer. “It felt bloody lonely. It felt sad. I want to have lots of people around me,” she says. She points to herself performing all the characters, when what she really wanted to do was to be able to cast every character. There were only a tiny handful of Chinese actors working in theatre back then. When she names them, they don’t fill out a full hand – Helene Wong, Leighton Young, Gary Young, herself. 

Where she originally sat closest to Jackie’s age and had to reach back to perform older, Chanwai-Earle now sits in between each character’s age, a bridge and conduit between them. It’s an appropriate shift – in the time since she wrote the show, she’s been a conduit for many people, and communities. 

She’s most excited to perform Paw Paw, the steely-minded, steelier-mouthed grandmother who stubbornly, defiantly, remains in New Zealand despite her husband’s wishes. Paw Paw is an audience favourite as well – even though she has had the hardest life of the characters in the story, she’s also the source of the show’s biggest laughs. 

“She’s such a beautiful character, and she’s so much like my mother now! She’s carrying the family, and there’s so much on her shoulders.”

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Kā-Shue continues to exist past Chanwai-Earle though, as it has for the past 26 years. If you’re a Chinese student studying drama, there’s damn few plays that have been published here – even now – where they could find roles that were written with a face like yours, a background that reflected yours, in mind.

“The deepest compliment I’ve ever had was a woman coming up to me and saying, ‘Oh my God, you’re the playwright, you’re Lynda’”, she says. “’I loved your play, it inspired me to become a drama teacher’.

“That’s the goal, right?”

Kā-Shue (Letters Home) will be performed as part of the Auckland Writers Festival with event dates from 24 to 28 August. 

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BooksAugust 14, 2022

Acknowledgements

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After three years as books editor, Catherine Woulfe is off for a stint editing New Zealand Geographic magazine. 

I always read the acknowledgements before getting stuck into a book. The best ones are fascinating, revealing, like getting a look inside the story engine. Other times they read like a tearful, half-cut launch speech. My version – my way of farewelling this amazing job and readers and colleagues and the writing community – is potentially mostly the latter. There will be cheese. Indulge me. I’m nearly done. 

Thank you to Duncan Greive for hiring me at 31 weeks pregnant and as stressed as I thought I could possibly get (lol, this was March 2019). The decision seemed so completely risky on his part that I tried to talk him out of it, to the point of offering a bunch of other candidates’ names as I left the interview. Thank you for ignoring that and then quietly setting about rebuilding my confidence. I am aware that I sound like a rescue dog. 

It’s hard to step back into work when for five years plus your whole world has been kids. But The Spinoff made it almost easy, and they did that by removing the guilt, by making it clear that kid stuff comes first. The number of times I said sorry, sick kids, or sorry, no sleep, or sorry, school holidays, and they were like “Cool, what do you need?” Extraordinary. That attitude permeates the whole place. It made me determined to level up for them. And it’s deeply, pragmatically, efficiently feminist. I’ve never seen anything like it in New Zealand media. 

Thank you to Mad and Leonie and Simon and Sam, Alex and Alice and Catherine and Mark and Tina and Calum. Thank you to poetry editor Chris Tse and his predecessor Ashleigh Young. Thank you to Unity Books. 

Thank you to Toby Manhire, for building a space so safe that it felt OK to write about hard things, as well as my embarrassing forever obsessions ie Twilight and The Hunger Games. Sorry I never got round to ranking the opening lines of great New Zealand novels. For the record the only one I remember, and therefore the best, is Sherryl Jordan’s: “Always at the heart of my life there has been fire.” Now you’re glad I never wrote it, eh.

Thank you to everyone who trusted me with their own hard stuff, and took risks, and the people who wrote their hearts out, and for all the times I opened an essay or a review and went, Oh holy shit, this is great. That’s the best part of this job, by miles. 

Thank you to Toby Morris for drawing me as Katniss.

Thank you to Paula Morris for only getting publicly pissed off at me once. I maintain my innocence.

Thank you to Paula Harris for writing me a poem when I was self-flagellating over not understanding poetry. 

 

you are the bath filled with green marbles

I slip into at night to wash myself

 

you are the letterbox overflowing with sleeping ladybirds

I check compulsively for mail

 

you are the curtains of pink candyfloss

I pull closed after the moon comes up

 

you are the couch made of turnips

I lie on as I wait

 

you are the carpet made of ripe figs

I dance over on summer mornings

 

none of this makes sense so it’s possibly a poem

none of this makes sense so 

 

you are the wheelbarrow full of silver bullets

I feed to the garden to make it grow

 

Thank you to Alice Tawhai for sending me a painting. It’s called Box of Birds and it’s bright blue and turquoise, with a shock of scarlet birds hooning out of a box up into the sky. I first saw it on her website in May, when my darling Dad was in his final agonising weeks, and even just seeing it as a thumbnail helped me to understand his death as a release, a bizarre and soaring thank fuck. The real thing lives beside my desk now, a humming, comforting presence, a gift. 

Thank you to Bingo and Bluey and Bandit and Chilli. 

Thank you to my daughter, who turned out to be a sleeper, and who snuffled and snored on my chest while I wrote this review and this one and this one. Thank you to my son, who learned to read while I had this job and reminded me just how cool that moment is, that moment you realise you can read anything. Anything! Thanks to my husband for eating so many puddings. Seriously, so many.

‘Help keep The Spinoff funny, smart, tall and handsome – become a member today.’
Gabi Lardies
— Staff writer

Thank you to Linda Burgess, who emailed effusive praise and support whenever I wrote anything. Thank you to Alex Stronach who answered all my gormless genre questions with enthusiasm and lols and repeatedly tapped into his mysterious networks to come up with writers and yarns. Likewise thank you to Sarah Forster and Briar Lawry, who let me bounce children’s publishing stuff off them endlessly. Thank you to the Brilliants, a group of mothers who write and look after each other. You remain the only good thing about Facebook. 

Thank you for The Absolute Book and Grand and The Mirror Book and Kurangaituku, for Āue and Sprigs and The Eight Gifts of Te Wheke and Atua. Thank you for all the superb books I’m forgetting. There are so many. Thank you to the couriers who traipsed up our shitty driveway many many times a week to drop off … I make it something like 2,200 books? I’m sorry I couldn’t rave about more of them. 

Thank you to the OGs Maurice Gee, Jack Lasenby, Sherryl Jordan, Gaelyn Gordon, Tessa Duder. 

Thank you to the world of New Zealand letters, for not being nearly as bitchy as I was braced for. 

Thank you for the Edward Cullen T shirt. 

Take care.

You can reach Catherine at bycatherinewoulfe@gmail.com

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