Two for the show: Heard the one about the Pakistani Elvis and the Chinese Elvis at the Fringe?

He performs an affectionate but tongue-in-cheek show in which he makes fun of his Chinese roots, cooks his audience Dim Sum and gets his elderly sound guy, whom he jokingly calls "The Colonel," to dress up in a spectacularly ugly Aztec-design jumpsuit, a relic from one of Elvis's more psychedelic sartorial misadventures. He also introduces us to some of the many tribute acts on "the diverse Elvis spectrum," showing slides of Indian Elvis, Mexican Elvis, Jewish Elvis, Finnish Elvis, Female Elvis, Black Elvis, Disabled Elvis and Midget Elvis. He sings a few Elvis numbers too, but while he certainly does them justice, they're not really the main focus of his hour.

By contrast, Sal Bashir, "the only British-born Pakistani Muslim Elvis tribute artist in the world," is all about the songs. In his show, Bend It Like Elvis, he keeps the banter to an absolute minimum so he can squeeze in as much music as possible. Whereas Hyu often plays the musical interludes in his show for laughs, Bashir takes his singing extremely seriously and, despite being clad head to toe in almost skintight black leather, he puts a huge amount of energy into his dance routines. It's the voice that's the real highlight though: close your eyes midway through his renditions of In The Ghetto and Blue Suede Shoes and it's almost as if the real Elvis has entered the building.

In terms of their performance styles, then, these two ethnic Elvi clearly inhabit opposite ends of the Elvis spectrum, yet in many ways they have led similar, almost parallel lives. "In our cultural backgrounds they want you to be doctors, solicitors, barristers, accountants, things like that," says Bashir. "When I first started out as an Elvis tribute act my parents did not approve."

Bashir grew up in "a hard, hard area of Kenning Town" in London's East End. His father, a first generation immigrant from Pakistan, worked night shifts at the Ford plant in Enfield for 32 years. Money was tight. For the Bashir children, getting "a good job" wasn't just something to show off to the neighbours about – it was a means of providing financial support for the rest of the family.

Hyu was also under pressure to succeed in a "respectable" profession, albeit for slightly different reasons.

"I'm Chinese, but not directly from the mainland," he says. "My ancestors were indentured labourers who were moved to the West Indies in the 1830s. My grandfather, Dr Hyu, became the only qualified doctor in the whole of Guyana. My father also got a place at Bart's in London to train, so it was beholden on me to go, as the brightest of my generation. I got a place at Bart's in 1985, but I didn't go. My parents were living in Germany at the time, so they weren't present to give me a lot of physical pressure. I just thought, 'You know what? I don't want to do this,' so I went to drama school instead. That was quite traumatic. It was a bit of a family schism. We basically didn't talk for a while."

Neither Bashir nor Hyu set out to become Elvis tribute artists – in both cases, fate had a hand in shaping their careers. Bashir fell in love with Elvis when he was growing up in the East End.

"When I first heard his music it was like headline news for me," he says. "The first record I heard was back in 1967 and then I got into the films and it took off from there.

"About 11 years ago, I went to a karaoke bar in Stratford, East London and I sang a song that happened to be a Roy Orbison song, and somebody spotted me and asked me if I would like to go on the circuit as a rock'n'roll singer. I worked for them for about two and a half years, performing mainly Elvis and some rock'n'roll, and then I decided to set up my own business, and I've been performing Elvis tributes ever since."

Hyu, meanwhile, got into the Elvis business via the acting route.

"I was in a play called Martha, Josie and the Chinese Elvis, by an award-winning playwright called Charlotte Jones," he says. "As far as I was concerned, it was just another job, but by the end of the show I had so many letters backstage saying 'we loved the play, please could you do my daughter's wedding as Elvis' that I thought, 'Yeah, I'll do it.' That was in 1999 so I've been doing Elvis for eight years now."

Being an 'ethnic Elvis' isn't always easy though, and both Hyu and Bashir have been given a hard time because of the colour of their skin. Hyu remembers being abused by a white off-duty Elvis who kept aggressively asking him if he knew what Elvis's mum and dad were called, while Bashir tells the story of a time when an obnoxious Elvis fan at one of his gigs kept trying to sing over him. His solution? Launching into an obscure Elvis number that the clueless interloper had never heard of.

"There are some hardcore Elvis fans that totally abhor the idea of a Chinese Elvis," says Hyu. "I call them the Nazi Elvi. I'm not going to mention the guy, but there's a famous Evil Elvis who on his website actually says, 'If you're not white, you can't be Elvis. All these so-called tributes: wrong wrong wrong. Black, Pakistani… what a joke. They are insulting the memory of our King.' And the scary thing is that he's not alone. He has a whole bunch of followers who think the same."

Of course, the King himself was proud of his Cherokee roots and would never have approved of racism among his fans.

"Elvis's sound was universal, and his upbringing was multicultural," says Bashir. "He spent more time in the Gospel churches than in his own church – he loved black music.

"If you want to see what Elvis was about, you've only got to look at footage of him on stage and you'll see all these different people with different skin colours up there with him."

The evil Elvi may want to keep the King for themselves, but he is just as much of an icon in Asia as he is in the West. Hyu links his popularity in China and Southeast Asia to the huge popularity of karaoke there, while Bashir believes he is such a hit on the Indian subcontinent partly because the silky, sequined costumes he wore later in his career strike a chord with the locals.

Perhaps as a side-effect of this Asia-wide Elvis mania, both Bashir and Hyu have found their parents are now much more accepting of their chosen career path.

"These days, our families are totally proud of the fact that we're singers," says Hyu.

"Yeah, but that's because we've become successful," grins Bashir. "If we were signing on they'd be like, 'I told you so.' He slips from his own East London accent into broad Punjabi. 'Now eat your dhal and go to your room.'"

&149 ChineseElvis – The King from Beijing is at clubWEST @ Quincentenary Hall, Royal College of Surgeons, 3:15pm daily, until 22 August; Bend It Like Elvis is at the same venue until 25 August, 4:30pm, daily.