Visual Diary #1
(CW: Some of the images below may be distressing. They do not reflect the beliefs of the writer or Proudly Asian Theatre.)
Written 18th May 2020
So there’s this play I’m writing. Well, it’s a play I’ve been trying to write for almost two years now. I’ve worked on it longer than I’ve worked any real job in my life. I have 15 distinct versions of the play on my laptop in at least 2 different formats each, and that’s only keeping track of the versions that actually made it to work-able/read-able draft stage. It’s a nasty little beast, and it’s constantly changing not only because I want to change it, but because it feels like the world I’m trying to write about is constantly changing. It all feels too much to write about.
I initially thought up of How To Be A Great White Man towards the end of 2018. I imagined it as a send-up of the manifestos written by white supremacist mass murderers, which always seemed like a pre-requisite before they go on their killing sprees to me. It was meant to be very tongue-in cheek, very internet, very irreverent and very fun.
And then in early 2019, an actual white supremacist terrorist attack actually happened in our country, and I didn’t want to write that piece anymore.
But I knew a few things: I knew I wanted to write something that would challenge me as writer. I knew I wanted to allow myself to write something a bit out of the box. I knew I wanted to write something more abstract and less narrative-based. I knew I wanted to write something different, something a little bit angry and maybe a little bit spicy.
So I wrote a different piece. I tried to write something that was largely pan-Other and less about being the specific kind of minority that I am, and I realized it was boring and pretentious and it was rubbish. So I wrote something else that focused specifically on the experiences of my younger self and it was rubbish. So I wrote something else entirely that was about far too many different tangentially related issues on the wider topic of race and gender and identity politics, and by that point I couldn’t even say what the play was trying to say anymore.
Now it’s 2020, and racism against Asians is less about eating dog or buying land and more about being violently beaten up in public. People are seemingly incapable of differentiating a government and its people more and more each day. People want someone or something to blame for this pandemic and the world is a very scary, confusing place. How To Be feels like it takes place in a different universe from the one we are currently living in, and I felt very lost.
I tried to do a bit of spring cleaning with my play. I thought: maybe she’s just a bit of a fixer-upper. Maybe if I dissected the play, scene by scene, topic by topic, I could figure out how to fix the play. I found myself ending up with less and less, and I had even less of an idea of how to go forward.
This is my long-winded way of saying that I’ve decided to re-write my play – again. From scratch, mostly. It wasn’t an easy decision – I’m a hoarder by nature, and there’s quite a few things from the old draft that I’ll miss. But I know it’s the right decision because now I know what I don’t want. All the previous drafts were just part of the work I had to do to write the play I wanted to write all along
P.S. When I tried to put my finger on the essence of How To Be, I realized that I’ve assembled a moodboard of memes, screenshots and various images that make up the spirit of How To Be. The images above are part of the memeboard, and you can find more here.
(CW: Some of the images linked may be distressing. They do not reflect the beliefs of the writer or Proudly Asian Theatre.)