Spotlight on OzAsia Festival artistic director Annette Shun Wah

‘What does this say about how writers or directors are imagining Asian people if you only see Asian-Australians as hookers and gangsters?’

OzAsia Festival Artistic Director Annette Shun Wah. Picture: Prudence Upton

Annette Shun Wah is artistic director of OzAsia Festival and executive producer of Contemporary Asian Australian Performance. Her worst job was working as a teenager on her Dad’s poultry abattoir

Have the types of roles on offer to Asian-Australian actors changed since you were acting?
When I was acting in the mid-90s pretty much the only role for an Asian actress was to play a waiter in a Chinese restaurant. If you fast-forward to the 2000s many of the young Asian-Australian actresses I work with will almost all tell you that 90 per cent of the roles they are asked to audition for are to play sex workers. The men will tell you that 90 per cent of the roles they are invited to apply for are drug couriers or gangster-types. On the one hand it’s limiting for you as an artist. But more importantly, what does this say about how writers or directors are imagining Asian people if you only see Asian-Australians as hookers and gangsters?

Is it getting better?
It is. Recently we’ve seen Hungry Ghosts on television, the Vietnamese ghost story which had about 30 Asian-Australian actors. Before that there was The Family Law. On stage, work that Contemporary Asian Australian Performance has been doing with some of the bigger companies through our Lotus Playwriting Project has seen a lot more playwrights starting to come through like Michelle Law. And a very exciting playwright – not through us, but through her own talent – Anchuli Felicia King premiered last year with not one, but three plays including a world premiere at the Royal Court in England.

Catherine Van-Davies and Anthony Guilbert in a scene from SBS drama Hungry Ghosts. Picture: Sarah Enticknap

You wrote a cookbook (Banquet: Ten Courses to Harmony, 1999) and have worked on performances combining food and theatre such as Double Delicious. Is food an important thread in your life?
I wrote Banquet with my partner Greg Aitkin as a response to the rise of Pauline Hanson in the mid to late-90s. I wanted to remind people of the long history of the Chinese in Australia. That book was not really a cookbook; it was about the history of the Chinese in Australia through their connections with food. Often when I talk to people about Australian multiculturalism the response is “oh yes we are so multicultural, look at all the wonderful restaurants and food [we enjoy]”. And it used to really get my goat. The fact that you can go and eat a lot of different foods does not mean you’re engaging in any depth with the people who are cooking food for you or the culture from which that food comes. But food can be a meeting point for us to go deeper.

Did growing up with your Dad’s poultry abattoir in Queensland in the 1960s shape your work ethic?
It absolutely did. Running a farm in those days was really hard work. One day there was one particularly awful task, which was burying a whole bunch of dead gangrenous chickens with my mother. I vowed: When I grew up this was not what I was going to do for a living. I would have a comfortable and clean job. So I had to keep that promise to myself.

OzAsia Festival won’t be going ahead this year but we hear you will be doing a talks series.
That’s been a real up and down, being appointed director of OzAsia Festival and then finding out pretty quickly soon after that we can’t have a festival this year because of travel restrictions. The work I’m doing with OzAsia is a natural progression from the work I’m doing with CAAP; I want to make sure the festival represents the Asian-Australian work and talent that is around at the moment in the context of it being an international multidisciplinary festival. This year it will be a talks series to stop and look and reflect a little bit about where we’re at and the important conversations to be had at this point.

Annette Shun Wah is curating online series OzAsia Talks to be presented from October 20. More details announced soon at www.ozasiafestival.com.au