Kā-Shue (Letters Home) Play

Kā-Shue (Letters Home) was the first mainstage play in Aotearoa to reflect on the Chinese New Zealand experience.

Playwright and actor Lynda Chanwai-Earle debuted the solo show at Circa Theatre in 1996, which was directed by James Littlewood. The play was formally published in July 1998. Kā-Shue was considered groundbreaking at the time because Chanwai-Earle wrote “with love” about the positives and negatives she observed in her community, celebrating it and criticising it. By showing audiences in Aotearoa the Chinese migrant experience was not homogenous, Kā-Shue cemented itself as an influential play in the history of Aotearoa theatre. The script is a prescribed text for theatre students across high schools and tertiary institutions in Aotearoa and was adapted for film in 1998 so it could be distributed to schools. The show has toured around the world, including seasons in Hawai’i, Ireland and China.

Kā-Shue tells the stories of Jackie, Abbie and Paw-Paw, three generations of Chinese women in the same family. The Leung women experience love, loss and family conflicts – and discover the ways they are different and alike. The story is non-linear, transitioning between key moments for each generation in the 1930s, 40s, 50s and 80s. Chanwai-Earle places Chinese history on the stage as she writes about the Cultural Revolution, the Tiananmen Square massacre, the Sino-Japanese War and New Zealand’s poll tax.

In an interview with The Spinoff, the playwright said she did not want to “sanitise history” by portraying it through “rose-tinted glasses” and that her frank characterisations of flawed Chinese people had offended members of the Chinese Anglican Church and the New Zealand Chinese Association at the time. Chanwai-Earle is a fourth-generation Chinese New Zealander who does not speak Cantonese fluently because her mother was “too ashamed” of her own “rustic” Cantonese to teach her. But she chose to integrate Cantonese vocabulary and phrases into the play, a political act of reclaiming her heritage. ‘Kā-Shue’ itself translates to ‘home book’, “a poetic term that incorporates notions of home, love, and alienation.”

Chanwai-Earle dedicated Kā-Shue to her family, whose history is embedded into the story. While the play is deeply personal, Chanwai-Earle writes that it is also “a universal story about immigration, about the systematic alienation of particular immigrant groups” and “about immigrant women, struggling to make for themselves a sense of home and identity.”

While Kā-Shue has five characters, the play has a history of being performed by a single actor. When it debuted, Chanwai-Earle played all the characters herself out of necessity, as there weren’t enough Chinese theatre actors in Aotearoa in 1996 to cast in different roles. The tradition continued and Chanwai-Earle herself has performed solo in recent seasons of the play, including at Auckland Writers Festival in 2022, Hamilton’s Meteor Theatre in 2021, and TAHI Festival in 2020. Like many Aotearoa plays, minimal props and set are required to perform Kā-Shue. To transition between characters, Chanwai-Earle prefers that a singular actor portrays different characters through changes in voice and body language.

The groundbreaking Kā-Shue returns — The Spinoff

Kā-Shue at Playmarket

Playwright’s note, cast of characters and an excerpt from Act One — Project Muse