Cut Chilli Community Events

On July 13 and 20, ICAV hosted two community events in Sydney, Australia, thanks to funding from the Australian Federal Government, ICAFSS Small Grants program provided by Relationships Australia’s Intercountry Adoptee and Family Support Service (ICAFSS). These events were organised in collaboration with New Ghosts Theatre Company and the playwright, Chenturan Aran.

ICAV had worked with Chenturan for the past year to provide lived experience into the script. Huge thanks to the Sri Lankan adoptees, adoptive parents of Sri Lankan adoptees, and Sri Lankan adoptee academic who generously gave their time and experiences to Chenturan. I also spent time with the cast helping them to understand the complex realities of living as an intercountry adoptee in Australia.

Cut Chilli is a play about a Sri Lankan male intercountry adoptee, raised in Australia by white Australian parents. Many who attended the events wanted to better understand how a play could be so accurate to our complexities without the playwright being an intercountry adoptee. So I asked Chenturan if he’d share why he decided to write Cut Chilli. Here’s what he wrote:

I’m not an intercountry adoptee. I’m the child of Sri Lankan Tamil migrants who fled the Sri Lankan Civil War following the Black July Riots in 1983. I was raised in Perth, Western Australia.

I started writing Cut Chilli because I thought telling the story of a brown boy in a white family would be a great metaphor for my experiences as brown boy in a predominantly white country. Through this work, I felt I could explore the assimilation pressures and internalised racism I experienced growing up as the child of migrants.

However, once I started researching, I realised the confusion and alienation experienced by intercountry adoptees is ofter more extreme than it is for the children of migrants. The adoptee experience is often marked by a lifelong grief around the loss of their biological parents and homeland. Furthermore, intercountry adoptees are often pressured to express a gratitude about being saved, while their loss is overlooked.

Adoptees also face barriers to accessing their past due to adoption fraud, poor record keeping, and obstructive governments and families.

I realised, it was important for me to do my research and tell this story faithfully, while touching on my own experiences of cultural longing and racial alienation.

The main character, Jamie, is often told not to fixate on being different. He is told his skin colour is irrelevant to his identity and that he belongs in the McKenzie family. Nevertheless, he is constantly reminded of his racial difference by those around him – including schoolmates, relatives, and waitstaff. It’s a kind of gaslighting – being told that you belong and that you shouldn’t complain, but then repeatedly being Othered in subtle and overt ways. This is an experience shared by both adoptees and the children of migrants.

Furthermore, often People of Colour go through a process in young adulthood where they want to reconnect with their ancestral culture. This yearning for the past speaks to a desire to expand our identity beyond the present moment – to understand who we are and why we are in Australia. It is also a desire to create a positive relationship with our ethnicity and skin colour. Often, the beginning of this process is marked by anger toward the dominant culture that pressures us to disown our heritage. This anger can alienate oneself with friends and colleagues.

This is a play about having difficult conversations with people we disagree with, and how we conduct compassionate open dialogue so that we can share our truth with others.

The play includes a recording of my mum singing her favourite Tamil hymn. It is sung by one of Jamie’s ancestors and accompanies the line – “In our village, grandmothers massage our babies’ faces. My son, your face is an ancestral mountain, carved by mothers who dreamed you beyond their lifetime.” This line is a message to adoptees, and all human beings, that we exist due to a long ancestral chain of survival and love.

Cut Chilli is a play about immense loss, imperfect histories, and clashing narratives. It takes vulnerability to share your pain. It also takes vulnerability to listen to someone else’s, especially when their story challenges your own. If we find a way to listen, we can find a deeper, broader story that has space for multiple truths.

For me reading Chen’s words above and seeing his play, I just felt so validated as an intercountry adoptee! Thank you Chen! You truly have seen our community and understood what is so often not talked about. You have eloquently articulated what some struggle to name or describe and your play has created a wonderful platform to open up discussions that are often too difficult. I personally found it really interesting to see the connection between your life as a child of migrants and our life as intercountry adoptees.

Below are some of the photos from our 2 events:

I hope that in the next little while, New Ghost Theatre Company and Chenturan will be able to share their plans about this play being made available to be seen around the rest of Australia. I highly recommend seeing it if you get the opportunity and here is some of the feedback from our community about the play: