East Side Voices: Essays celebrating East and Southeast Asian identity in Britain

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There were various infomation that I did not know and were horrified to learn, such as the fact that Filipinos make up the largest ethnic group of nurses in the NHS and in 2020 were the single largest nationality to die from Covid. It’s a precarious business simply to stand up for your rights, especially if you are poor or a person of colour; and it unfortunately remains the case that those in power usually don’t appreciate being held to account. I've read books like The Good Immigrant, but never one that's focussed entirely on the experiences of east Asians in Britain. Meeting Helena Lee and Sharlene Teo at the Brockley Literary Festival was such a privilege, and now finally reading the collection of essays - wow! I’ve observed how these discussions have attempted to be more reflective, more self-interrogative, as people travel and read widely, and pride themselves upon being culturally engaged…trying to explain being Chinese-Malaysian to anyone in Europe is a curiously dispiriting experience in which the simplicity of one’s identity – which feels so clear and obvious – suddenly becomes torturously complicated, a source of confusion and even, in these days of cultural sensitivity, a cause of anxiety.

East Side Voices: Celebrating ESEA Identity - Southbank Centre East Side Voices: Celebrating ESEA Identity - Southbank Centre

You won’t be able to bring any bags over 40 x 25 x 25cm into the venues, so please leave large bags at home. In another essay, it was informed that Filipino nurses were the ones assigned most to the Covid wards in the UK during the critical times. We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers.Claire Kohda is a literary critic, violinist and the author of WOMAN, EATING, a literary novel about a young, mixed-race vampire trying to navigate the London contemporary art world.

East Side Voices by Various, Helena Lee | Waterstones

The essays discussed sexuality, gender, and class, which are all very important topics that are still problems today. Food and the making and growing of the food were the thread that tied so much together: the rhythms of farming, the myths of farming, the spirits and gods and souls of everything in the jungle. Not British Born smacks of the ‘foreign born’ spiel often echoed in political discourse in the worst corners of right wing Twitter. Shimada, Teo, and Buchanan’s contributions to the collection was particularly brilliant (in my opinion).

There was the sucker-punch of emotion when the novelist Claire Kohda discovered that her Caucasian grandmother had deliberately whitened her skin in a portrait that she painted of her as a child – a discovery she added to her piece as a postscript months later. These stories and poems of culture and history continues to make me feel so special in me being mixed race and encourages me to continue to embrace it, learn about both sides of my history, and celebrate both sides in new ways. It's quite difficult to review essay collections as a whole, but this one showcases a range of perspectives and experiences and is well worth reading, full of nuance and essays exploring complex senses of self.

East Side Voices by Various, Helena Lee | Waterstones East Side Voices by Various, Helena Lee | Waterstones

Helena Lee: I like to start early at the beginning of the week and try to get ahead with a fresh mind. Middlesex when Helena Lee describes how upset she'd get doing her Chinese school homework and feeling like the language didn't belong to her anyway. There are perpetual, two-dimensional stereotypes that persist, which ladder up to a lack of empathy and culture of othering, which means that we are essentially invisible – often left off the news and diversity agenda as well. This routine would always play out at the end of family dinners once I’d left home and, this time around, it felt both familiar and oddly comforting – because it had been a while since our last dinner.

A strong, compelling, and quietly beautiful collection of stories that have gone untold for too long, from voices that have too often been sidelined from the artistic mainstream. East Side Voices is a collection of essays by people with East and Southeast Asian identity living in Britain, exploring culture, self, family, race and fitting in or standing out. This important book, which is full of wit and insight, sheds light on aspects of racism that are often overlooked and it offers welcome exposure for a collection of voices that are too often sidelined from the cultural mainstream.

East Side Voices: Essays Celebrating East and Southeast Asian

Listening to other people debate your origins in your presence is a disconcerting experience, but it’s one that I’ve become accustomed to over nearly three decades of living in Europe. In general, I loved how almost every essay touched on delicate, underappreciated topics with a great sense of nuance and rhetorical poise, something which I feel is lacking from a lot of writing focused on Asian identity which sets out to attack certain tropes and cliches but risks falling into others. HL: The Masterplan – Oasis’s album of B-sides, all of Kazuo Ishiguro’s work, and one of Eileen Cooper’s paintings – either ‘Learning to Read’ or ‘Sentimental Mood’. Katie Leung, a Dundee-born actor, is most famous for her role as Cho Chang in the Harry Potter films. Naomi was experiencing chronic pain in her hands, so I typed for her while she spoke, and we edited the piece together for the book.Many pieces reference meagre cultural representation and insulting stereotypes in TV and film, such as the contribution by Katie Leung, the Glaswegian actor cast as Cho Chang in the Harry Potter films.