Nahyeon Lee reboots Friends in The First Prime-Time Asian Sitcom

Auckland writer and film-maker Nahyeon Lee. Photo / Jinki Cambronero

THE VIEW FROM MY WINDOW

What would happen if you took a TV show like Friends and made all the characters Asian? Kiwi-Korean writer Nahyeon Lee decided to find out.

I loved Friends quite deeply. Everyone did, right? It was really comforting and helped me through a lot of dark times.

The trick with sitcoms is they create such a parasocial relationship that the characters are like your real friends — your surrogate family — because every single day you're in the intimacy of their world. It's not until time passes and you see how the politics of the world have changed that you reflect on something like Friends and begin to feel its age.

I wrote The First Prime-Time Asian Sitcom, as part of an initiative run by Proudly Asian Theatre called Fresh off the Page. Around that time, I was doing my master's in screen production at the University of Auckland. The movie Crazy Rich Asians had just come out and Asian stories were kind of in vogue.

I felt as though I was in this paradoxical place where I had all these incredibly valuable opportunities but that they were hugely limiting at the same time, pigeonholing the sort of work I was expected to make. So I came across the idea of creating sitcom archetypes with an Asian twist and exploring how politicised it is when you add ethnicity to the characters.

As you can probably tell from the title, it's about an all-Asian sitcom that's been commissioned for prime-time TV. Dev, who's Indian, is kind of inspired by Chandler. He's the nerdy one. Angela, who's Chinese, is "Rachel"; she's incredibly privileged, but there's a lot of fun in her sort of narcissism. Ana Marie is Filipino and, like Monica, is the maternal figure who holds the group together. Then there's Josh, the Korean character, who is more of a K-drama archetype — a kind of golden child that doesn't really exist right now in American TV.

First, the audience gets to watch the sitcom itself. Then you begin to see how it's been received and all the compromises and challenges that were involved in the process of it being made. It also pushes into the terrain of the absurd pressures we place on ourselves within the Asian creative community, shouldering the weight of expectation to make something that represents all of Asia, which is a huge continent with multiple ethnicities and languages and vibrant cultures.

Lee describes her play as a black comedy. "Anger can morph into something quite funny. Those two things can sit alongside each other." Photo / Jinki Cambronero

In many ways, it's a very angry play, but anger can morph into something quite funny. Those two things can sit alongside each other. And rage can be really liberating. Not kicking up too much of a fuss and not taking up too much space — making ourselves smaller — was a form of survival for our parents. Now we're reaching a new stage where we won't stand for it anymore. I won't stand for it anymore.

Where we're rehearsing, in the Auckland Music Theatre building, there's a history of all their previous productions in the foyer with old photographs and posters. They're lovely, but it also speaks to the homogeneous type of theatre that's existed in Auckland. In the 20s, there was an all-Pākehā production of Tutankhamun, which is an interesting idea to grapple with.

My family came here from Korea when I was just 6 weeks old. Growing up under my parents' roof, I was deeply entrenched in Korean culture but began to lose it when I started school and was expected to assimilate into New Zealand culture, whatever that means. So I became this diaspora child who didn't feel deeply connected to my Korean heritage but also didn't feel quite Kiwi enough, even though I've been raised here my entire life.

When I go back to Korea I feel a deep sense of home sometimes. Everyone kind of looks like me and they sound like my parents. The food is like what I have on my dinner table every night. So there's a strange pull, but at the same time it's very jarring because my Korean is not up to scratch, so communicating is hard. Very quickly they can distil that I'm a foreigner there. So it's beautiful, but it's also heartbreaking because in some ways you can see what you have lost.

We're still excavating what it means to be Asian in New Zealand and that's really exciting, fertile ground. There were people before us who paved the way and now we're passing the baton on to each other to see what changes we can make. The question is whether this change is sustainable or long-term. The real legacy will be what happens next.

As told to Joanna Wane

Writer, film-maker and producer Nahyeon Lee makes her playwriting debut with The First Prime-Time Asian Sitcom, directed by Ahi Karunaharan, at Q Theatre's Loft from November 3 to 27 (see silotheatre.co.nz). Lee is now working on the pilot for Asian8, a web series set in a private girls' school, and has received seed funding for a horror screenplay.