In front of a Chinese restaurant in suburban Brisbane, the real Law family and the pretend Law family are assembled for a photo, but one special person is missing.
"Where's me?" yells Benjamin Law. "Ben! Where are you?"
The pretend Ben finally emerges from the restaurant and both families cheer.
"Trystan!" they cry. "Get over here!"
Trystan Go is the young actor cast to play Benjamin Law in a TV show based on Law's 2010 memoir The Family Law, about growing up in Queensland with his occasionally inappropriate, often hilarious divorced immigrant parents and four siblings. Law, an author and journalist who regularly contributes to Fairfax's Good Weekend, has returned to the set one month into the five-week shoot, this time bringing his family to meet the actors who are playing them.
It makes for a slightly surreal scene as the crew shoots the series' opening sequence, where Ben is celebrating his 14th birthday with his family in a Chinese restaurant. The real Law family act as extras, sitting metres away from their pretend counterparts as the actors recite lines that the Laws have heard, many years before.
"Ai-ya, no birth is easy!" cries Fiona Choi, playing Jenny, Ben's Malaysia-born mother.
"Everyone thinks birth number three will be easy, because the woman is already stretched out! But I still remember you pushing out!" she says to fake Ben.
"Like someone cutting me with a knife! Stab, stab, stab in my vee-vee!"
The real Jenny Law can confirm it: she said this.
"That's my words, that's my lines," she says. As in the book, Law's mother, described as having "no filter", delivers some of the biggest laughs.
Jenny and Danny, Law's China-born father, met the actors playing themselves early in the piece so that Choi and Anthony Brandon Wong, as Danny, could learn the nuances of their Cantonese accents. Today, Jenny met the rest of the pretend Law Family.
"Now I have 10 children!" she says.
The show had its genesis in 2008, when Law wrote a script for his PhD in television writing that was "loosely based" on his family, with an exegesis on Asian representation in TV.
"The stuff that was there not necessarily the most robust or three-dimensional," he says.
Even now, Australia's cultural diversity is grossly under-represented on our screens. Matchbox Pictures, which isproducing The Family Law and which recently produced ABC2's Maximum Choppage, with Lawrence Leung, is a notable exception.
"They've become what we joke is the Asian mafia of TV production, but it's still rare," says Law, who co-wrote the screenplay with Marieke Hardy. The cast is nearly entirely Asian-Australian.
"As much as we're not positioning it as an Asian show – it's an Australian comedy about family and about divorce – it doesn't escape me the significance of seeing so many Asian faces on screen because I certainly didn't see that growing up."
The Family Law is due to air on SBS in early 2016.
