After her mate Charlie (Zielinski) accuses Jane of having “white fever”, Jane sets out to try and “pop her Asian cherry”, a series of awkward dates with Asian men follows and, eventually, a reconnection with a childhood friend, Yu Chang (Crazy Rich Asians’ Chris Pang).

Chapman hopes the series, which also stars Roz Hammond and Greg Stone, will both represent the adoptee community but also reach a wider audience.

“Sometimes I watch things that touch upon race and marginalised experiences and I find them overly sentimental or overly didactic … speaking just for myself, I think that’s not true of my experience.”

Plot-wise, says Chapman, White Fever is fictional, but it’s also deeply personal; the “in-between” feelings of not quite being one culture or the other are drawn from her own life.

“That feeling of … that push and pull towards and away from your roots and in this case for Jane, her Korean-ness, is something that I’ve been exploring for a while.”

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Chapman says growing up she was never comfortable with her “Asian-ness”, much like Jane.

“That story has been told many times, but it still rings true – not just for adoptees but immigrants and Asian-Australians. I wanted to be like all my friends, like Edi in the show – blonde and blue-eyed … I didn’t want to be associated with Asian stuff,” she says. “Jane spent her whole life trying to be Aussie and fit in with her family and friends and she’s got this great life, so when all this stuff comes up, it’s confronting for her.”

Chapman, who met her birth father 10 years ago, and visits him in Korea every couple of years, was also adamant that real members of the community be involved; in a scene where Jane attends an adoptee dinner, most of the actors are real-life adoptees.

“We tried to keep it as authentic as possible. A lot are mates, people I’ve known for over a decade, and we also did a casting call-out,” says Chapman. “Even though I’ve been working in the adoptee community for over 10 years, new ones that came out of the woodwork, so I’ve already met a few others just from doing the show – and hopefully there will be a few more.”

Another part of White Fever is also addressing the lack of representation on our mostly lily-white screens; Chapman is perhaps best known as an actress for her long-running role on Wentworth as Kim Chang, one of the prison’s “Asian gang”.

“I was a supporting role for a long time, but my character didn’t really evolve much,” she says. “There are a lot of great changes happening in the industry, but it’s still pretty slow. A lot of the reasons I’ll get a casting brief or a role is because they need some quote-unquote diversity. So there’s still a long way to go. To be honest, I find it really difficult to get meaningful acting work in Australia.”

Change, she says, can take a long time. “Like Jane – she wants change to happen overnight and that’s, unfortunately, not how humans work,” she says. “Even if you see a problem with yourself and the world, to actually change is hard.”

She’s hopeful White Fever will resonate with all kinds of viewers, and the series even ends on a cliffhanger.

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As for the title, “it’s for Google to answer”, says Chapman, if it’s a real term. “It’s an in-your-face title and obviously a flip on the term ‘yellow fever’, but it’s also about the fact that we want to put labels on things.”

Jane, she says, sees the world in black and white, which is why she comes up with such reductive ideas such as “curing” herself by sleeping with Asian men.

“It’s very simplistic and that’s why it’s so funny, but labels can be problematic,” says Chapman. “But they’re very human – they help us make sense of the world around us.”