A woman who tightly clings to Chinese traditions. A man of mixed heritage caught between two cultures. A cosmopolitan girl who would do anything to fit in. And a newcomer fresh from Mainland China.

Characters in a multilingual Fringe Festival production, all four are vying for a chance to immigrate to Canada through four rounds of trials — a quiz on pop culture, a physical test involving “Asian sports,” a test on office etiquette, and a dating game — in a reality-TV-style battle to decide who would best fit into their new home.

Through the contest, the four learn to play by the rules of the immigration game, wrestling with Western stereotypes to gain acceptance and become viewed as a “model minority” and “no threat.”

“It’s Big Brother meets Hunger Games meets immigration,” said Aaron Jan, director of Silk Bath, one of the three Culturally Diverse Artist Projects in the Toronto Fringe Theatre Festival, which begins Wednesday and runs until July 10 at the Tarragon Theatre.

Produced by the theatre collective of the same name, Silk Bath is the brainchild of Jan and friend Bessie Cheng, both graduates of the York University theatre studies program who had a hard time relating to traditional Eurocentric productions and decided to form their own company to tell their stories.

When the duo started on the project late last year, they knew they wanted to use the game-show format to explore the dynamics of culture, power and racial politics. However, they didn’t have a clear storyline or specific characters in mind.

Jan, a second-generation Chinese Canadian from Hamilton, asked his Caucasian friends to set aside political correctness and share with him what really came to mind when they looked at his face.

They came up with the list: bad driver, bad teeth, smart and polite, very passionate but emotionally distant, timid and non-sexual.

“The view is not fair, but there are some truths to it. That’s what terrified me,” said Jan, 24. “We put labels on people and they fade into your skin and become part of you.”

Born and raised in Toronto to Chinese parents from Hong Kong, Gloria Mok, the show’s producer, recalled the lunch table at her high school, where “white performing” visible minority classmates eating sandwiches would sit together in one corner, while the “F.O.B.” — a.k.a. fresh-off-the-boat immigrant students — would be having fried rice and other traditional food in another.

“There’s definitely a hierarchy within the Asian community, too,” said Mok, 24, who graduated from the University of Guelph with a degree in theatre studies and history.

The contest idea, she said, reflects the competition among immigrants for the acceptance and recognition of the mainstream community, which sets the rules and norms.

With the prototypes of their characters in mind, Jan, Cheng and Mok held auditions to find four actors who could fill the bill with their own stories and life experiences.

The initial auditions were for actors from various Asian groups, but the group soon realized that the show — which features English, Cantonese and Mandarin interspersed — needed a Chinese-speaking cast able to speak the three languages, to capture idiosyncrasies and cultural jokes.

The auditions were conducted more like job interviews; actors were asked about their ideas about what it means to be Asian, and their personal stories became part of the plot.

In the scene involving the test of work etiquette, the characters are asked to show the judges what they do when their boss criticizes their work.

New Girl, played by Cheng; Clementine, played by Dorcas Chiu; and Mutt, played by En Lai Mah, were all rewarded for their submissiveness, but Old Lady, played by Amanda Zhou, got a buzz in this round for fighting back and being confrontational.

During the dating game scene, Old Lady describes dating an Caucasian colleague.

“We eat Chinese food uptown in an American-style restaurant because he wants me to feel at home in an area that makes him feel at home. We eat Western-style Chinese food displayed rather elegantly, with most of the portions too small or inedible,” she says in a monologue.

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“However, the eating of such objects opens me up somehow, even though it has nothing to do with the food I was raised with. Because although he is strange, and white, and has no interest in me beyond my complexion.”

Jan said the idea of labels is to make people conform to the roles expected of them and associate only with those who acclimatize and adopt these stereotypical traits.

“We continue to label people. It really hurts us, all the little pushdowns,” said Jan. “I’m guilty of it, too. It has to stop. It needs to stop.”