Miss Peony

Miss Peony is a 2023 trilingual comedy by Chinese-Australian playwright Michelle Law, in which Lily enters the Chinese-community beauty pageant she despises to honour her grandmother's ghost. Performed in English, Cantonese and Mandarin, it is set for HSC English EAL/D Module A: Language, Identity and Culture.

Miss Peony, by Chinese-Australian writer Michelle Law, was first staged at Belvoir St Theatre in 2023 and grew in part from a childhood memory: at eleven, watching the Miss Hong Kong pageant, Law saw an Australian-accented contestant - someone who looked like her - eliminated after answering a question in English. The play opens on the death of Adeline, a former pageant queen, and her refusal to go. Bound to her grandmother's ghost by a jade bracelet, Lily - tattooed, working at a bar, planning to move to London - agrees to enter the Chinese-community beauty pageant she despises, partly from grief, partly to be free. Through the pageant's rounds at a Sydney casino she is thrown together with her rivals Marcy, Joy and Sabrina, four women so easily read as stereotypes of Asian femininity who become friends whose depths surprise each other. The hot-pot restaurant scene is the turning point: over a shared meal the contestants confess the misogyny, family debt, exile and longing each has hidden behind a pageant smile, and Lily, who came to escape her community, discovers she is at home in it. The comedy pulls in a queer romance, a subplot of sexual harassment by a powerful man, and a recurring Li Bai poem that carries the weight of inherited culture. Written to be performed in English, Cantonese and Mandarin with concurrent surtitles - after Law's own grandmother could not follow her earlier play Single Asian Female - it resolves not in a simple win but in reconciliation: in death Adeline and Lily reach a new understanding, which sets them both free.

The trilingual staging is an ethic, not an effect: it decentralises English, and because no spectator holds every language, the form imposes the diasporic condition of incomplete understanding on everyone in the theatre. Within it, language maps the family's borders - Adeline speaks Cantonese and Lily answers in English, assimilation dramatised as the loss of a shared tongue - and Law refuses to play second-language English for error. Joy's broken-English quip asking whether Lily, bound for England, wants to be colonised again lands the play's sharpest postcolonial joke, so the register the mainstream would dismiss is exactly the one that sees clearest.

Belonging, in the pageant's direct-address frame, is always a public verdict: the audience assumes the role of the pageant audience, and identity becomes something performed under a communal gaze. Sabrina's love of Miss Peony is a hunger for representation - pageant contestants were the first people she saw on TV who looked like her and were succeeding rather than being exposed on current-affairs television - while the community's own labels, "ABC", "fob", "banana", carry a hierarchy of authenticity and the lateral violence built into everyday speech. Marcy flings Lily's condescension back at her, reminding her that she once said she would rather be dead than be like them, voicing the migrant's knowledge that the assimilated rank her as a life not worth living.

Inheritance is literalised by magical realism: the grandmother's ghost, bound to the jade bracelet, is the past refusing to pass on, an expectation physically present in the room. Lily acts first from debt, entering for her grandmother, but the pageant's ranking machinery is finally turned on its head by Adeline's blessing, "you were always enough. I believe you can win just as you are.", inheritance transformed from a crown to earn into permission to stop earning.

Against Lily's fantasy of erasure - starting anew somewhere else, whatever the destination - the play sets Marcy's counsel that starting anew can be overrated and that it is better to fix what you already have, relocating the cure for displacement from the next city to the community already around her. And the comedy keeps swerving from joke into hidden hurt: the hot-pot scene hosts Marcy's feminist critique of the pageant's own machinery, delivered in English and then Mandarin, before Joy's bathetic thanks - to Lily for her words, and for her eggs - turns rivals into a collective, tenderness delivered as a joke.