In an interview with The Guardian, Jane Campion candidly discussed ‘being on the verge of closing a deal to shoot an adaptation’ of Rachel Kushner's 2013 art world novel The Flamethrowers (Pulver 2014, n.p.). Reno, the protagonist, is an emerging land artist who gets by on her secretarial job as a film lab ‘China Girl’ and the novel details her experiences of liminality as she is used to better service the artmaking of others. However, after a year of media speculation, all discussion of the Kushner adaptation ceased and it was announced in March 2016 that Campion would instead produce a follow-up series to her crime drama Top of the Lake, intriguingly subtitled China Girl (O’Connell 2016). With this follow up to the first season, Campion and co-writer Gerard Lee interpret facets of Reno's story across two character doubles to focus again on a missing, pregnant young woman of Thai extraction, this time named Cinnamon (Thien Huong Thi Nguyen), and Senior Detective Robin Griffin (Elisabeth Moss), the Caucasian detective intent on solving her case. Produced by the Sydney-based production company See-Saw Films (Lion (Garth Davies, 2016) and Widows (Steve McQueen, 2018)), Top of the Lake: China Girl balances the two characters to reflect on the cast at large, imitating the central conceit of The Flamethrowers.

While it is not uncommon for projects (like the Kushner adaptation) to be abandoned, given that it is such a coincidental and particular moniker imbued with a history of malfunction and exploitation, I see the China Girl subtitle of Top of the Lake: China Girl, and the woman it represents, as demanding critical attention, especially because of how infrequently any Chinese women, let alone Asian women, feature on Australian primetime television. Though it is filmed and set on the land of the Gadigal people in Sydney, Australia, the international broadcast of Campion's second season explores the liminal Antipodean space between Australia, New Zealand and the nearby Southeast Asian region. Though ‘China Girl’ refers to the first episode discovery of the body of the pregnant Cinnamon, an undocumented immigrant from Thailand, it also crudely precludes her narrative function, the nickname referencing celluloid film colour and laboratory aim density (LAD) development and processing. A woman's portrait (termed a ‘China Girl’) is commonly cut into film leaders (Figure 9.1).