In staging a lost piece of Australia's migrant heritage, playwright Anchuli Felicia King says we're speaking to our ancestors.
Set to premiere in Sydney after being lost to time, The Poison of Polygamy is a gold rush epic, the first of its kind to describe the Chinese-Australian experience.
But King doesn't beat around the bush.
"The original novel is actually really racist," she told AAP.
First published in serial form in 1909, it wasn't until 2019 when it was rediscovered by historian Mei-fen Kuo, who was researching early Chinese-Australian newspapers.
Subsequent research identified the writer as Wong Shee Ping, a newspaper editor, Christian preacher and republican revolutionary.
"It was an extraordinary lost piece of our history - a lost migrant history - that I felt deserved a wider audience," King said.
The adaption of the "rollicking saga" follows Sleep-sick from Southern China to the Victorian gold rushes back to China.
Sleep-sick is a young man, addicted to opium and debt-ridden, who leaves his faithful but long-suffering wife Ma in search of fortune in Victoria.
He charms and cheats an eccentric cast of characters as he traverses oceans, until he meets his match: the seductive and cunning Tsiu Hei.
The novel reads much like a manifesto - Ping's social parable where the author decries the evils of polygamy in China, and advocates for Western-Christian monogamy as the way forward.
But the 'poison' isn't limited to opium or polygamy and this is where King deviates from the original.
While the two agree the metaphorical 'poison' is racism and oppression of Chinese migrants - for King, it's about how migrants can also be complicit in colonialism systems.
"As I was adapting the novel, I was thinking about different kinds of systems of inequity, how a lot of these inherited Western ideals around capitalism, despoiling the land, being settlers here," King said.
"The original novel had really horrendous descriptions of First Nations people.
"I definitely wanted to have my play to be a commentary on why Chinese migrants ended up both working in solidarity with but also being massively racist against First Nations people."
La Boite Theatre chief and diversity advocate Courtney Stewart directs the play, alongside an entirely Asian-Australian cast.
The Poison of Polygamy is at the Sydney Theatre Company from June 8 to July 15.
