All Sorts of Asians

It was a Saturday night in Sydney, and twelve of us Asian playwrights were wandering around looking for a place to drink after the Lotus workshops, sponsored by Contemporary Asian Australian Performance and Playwriting Australia. A drunk white man teetered between us. He looked in at one Chinese girl’s face and said, ‘You’re Asian.’ He then looked at the rest of us, ranging from a dark-skinned Singhalese to a pale-skinned Vietnamese to an Indonesian Muslim wearing the veil, and exclaimed, ‘You’re all sorts of Asian!’