Chinese and Any Other Asian Anna Sulan Masing
Event details
‘Chinese’ or ‘Any other Asian’. The boxes that people of vastly varied East and South East Asian (ESEA) heritage have to tick when declaring their ethnicity on many forms in the UK.
Anna Sulan Masing, author of Chinese and Any Other Asian, will explore this shameful sweeping together of a diverse heritage and experience. East and South East Asian people have lived and worked in the UK for centuries, fought for the British Army in both world wars, have influenced British culture through food, writing, music and art in a multitude of ways. And yet this influence is often overlooked and even ignored.
People of ESEA heritage experience unique forms of racism. Asian food is mocked as unhealthy and Asian restaurants as dirty. ESEA women are exoticised and sexualised, and assumed to be the nanny of their mixed-race children. The community was blamed and scapegoated for the Covid-19 pandemic.
Join Anna Sulan as she explores what it means to be East and South East Asian in Britain today, and celebrates the multiple elements and varied experiences that make up ESEA identity.
A must-attend talk for anyone interested in exploring the make-up of our multicultural society.
This event will take place live on Zoom Webinar. You will receive a link to join a couple of days before the event and a reminder an hour before. During the event, you can ask questions via a Q&A function, but audience cameras and microphones will remain muted throughout.
Book sales
You can buy copies of many of our speakers’ books from Fox Lane Books, a local independent bookseller and Festival partner. In some cases, author signed bookplates are available too.
Photo credit: Patricia Niven
About the speaker
Dr Anna Sulan Masing is an academic, poet and journalist. She co-founded SOURCED, a public research platform that explores our global food and drink systems; and is Co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Cheese magazine. Anna Sulan’s 10-part narrative podcast Taste of Place, by Whetstone Radio Collective, explores colonialism and nostalgia through the history of pepper; and her 2025 podcast To Be Delicious: a cultural context of MSG in Britain by Lecker, looks at ESEA racism, diaspora, and the future of msg and umami. Her debut book is Chinese and Any Other Asian (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2025).
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