Stephanie Sy-Quia's Amnion won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. She is a keen gardener and linocut printer, as well as a fourth generation printer.
Budgie Montoya is a Filipino-born, London-based chef and the founder of Sarap and Alpas. His cooking is shaped by memory, migration, and identity, drawing from his journey growing up in Australia, working in Western kitchens, and reconnecting with his roots through food. Known for bold, soulful flavours and a deep love for storytelling, Budgie brings a fresh, personal take on Filipino cuisine to the table.
Katie Goh is a writer and editor. Her award-nominated essays, journalism and criticism have appeared in publications including Port, the Guardian, Gutter, Wasafiri, i-D, Dazed and gal-dem, and she is an editor for Extra Teeth literary magazine. Her book of essays The End: Surviving the World Through Imagined Disasters was a Reviewer’s Choice for The Big Issue’s Independent Books of 2021 and shortlisted for the inaugural Kavya Prize in 2022. She grew up in the north of Ireland and lives in Edinburgh. Her debut book Foreign Fruit: A Personal History of the Orange was published in 2025
£50+ ticket fee, including three-course meal
11.30am, Talk & Lunch starts at 12pm
Foreign Flavours: the power of food
Food is often a key part of diasporic identities. Recipes, ingredients and flavour memories are able to travel, shared and experimented with. But recreating dishes in new spaces can be tricky with different ingredients and equipment. These new spaces can create complex relationships with nostalgia, memory and home. Food also works as a way to create belonging and connectivity, and can be a useful way to look at difficult topics from the history of colonialism, labour and power dynamics between the global north and south.
Food is a necessity, it is also luxury, labour, trade, businesses, brands, livelihoods and agriculture. It cannot exist without the care of human hands to nurture into existence, prepare for consumption, or be served to you in a restaurant. Our foods have travelled the world and shaped culture communities. Foods from East and South East Asia have become mainstream in the West – from rice to soy sauce and kimchi – and flavours have become ‘trends’ driving media articles on the ‘rise of Filipino food’ or ‘our obsession with matcha’. Our foods have been appropriated, assumed to be cheap, called dirty, or fetishised. But how can we think about food beyond cliches, trends, exoticism or the fallacy of ‘food brings us together’?
Chinese And Any Other Asian ends on a chapter about food, therefore it felt appropriate to finish this Sunday Salon series with a focus on food and a meal. Anna Sulan Masing invites three writers who use food as ways into topics and exploring themes. They all use food, not as a way to bring us together, but to challenge the way we think about the world, ideas of connectivity and identity.
Past events
Sunday 2 March
The first in the series starts with a big topic - ‘Chinese-ness & the violence of homogenisation’, featuring authors Jenny Lau and Daisy Hung, and academic Xiao Ma. The topic will explore what it means to be ‘Chinese’ in the UK, the commodification of Chinese New Year, political conflation of the individual and state, and how to address the ingrained racism that lead to race-based violence during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Daisy J. Hung is a diversity practitioner, writer, and artist, advocating for social justice across personal and professional spheres. Her debut book I Am Not A Tourist is out at on the 13th March and explores the Chinese experience in the UK.
Xiao Ma is an early-career researcher working at the interdisciplinary intersection of heritage, migration, and urban studies. Xiao's PhD project examined the cultural complexities of London’s Chinatown from a heritage perspective.
Jenny Lau is a writer, community organiser and Chinese food cheerleader. Her debut book An A-Z of Chinese Food (recipes not included) was published in January this year, and is an interrogation and deconstruction of the complex ideas of Chinese identity, history and culture, through the lens of food.
Sunday 11 May
Performing identity: ESEA exclusion and inclusion in film, theatre & tv
Our media is a very immediate way to see our society reflected back at us - but what do we want from these spaces, and what does representation actually mean?
This talk will explore what our stories look like and address questions around agency and creativity. How do we tell our stories when they are full of grief, trauma and violence - or are we simply performing our identity for others? What are ways to navigate the power imbalances in creative industries, and being able to simply earn a living in a precarious industry? And how do we support each other in creating a diverse representation of ESEA people in the arts - an identity that isn’t defined simply by borders or ethnicity.
Two years ago Miss Saigon was ‘reimagined’ on the stage in Sheffield, which met with criticism from many in the industry asking: why was this play being put on, in a publicly funded art space? Madame Butterfly was performed in 2022 at the Royal Opera house, in yellowface. Crazy Rich Asians was criticised for casting Henry Goulding, a non-Chinese, in the lead role, and 2021 saw the first East Asian family written into a soap opera…
We haven’t even begun to understand our place in the arts - what would a reckoning look like?
Dr Diana Yeh is Reader in Creativity and Social Justice in the Department of Media, Culture and Creative Industries, City, St George’s, University of London. She works on racism, migration, cultural politics and activism. She is founder of ESEAHub and Principal Investigator of the project, ‘Responding to COVID-19 Anti-Asian Racial Violence through Community Care, Solidarity and Resistance’ funded by Resourcing Racial Justice and the UK Higher Education Innovation Fund.
First generation Malaysian-Chinese immigrant Vera Chok (they/them) is an actor, performance maker, writer, and comedian. Vera often creates collaboratively and across various media. Key projects include writing for The Good Immigrant, feature film, Dream Agency (EIFF; Best Film at London Independent, Aarhus and Jakarta Film Festivals), and the theatre productions, The Paper Man (European tour) and Rice! (UK-Malaysia), funded by The British Council. Vera has performed on most of the major stages in the UK, starred in Channel 4's flagship drama, Hollyoaks, playing the head of the first ever ESEA family on British TV, and was a Semi-Finalist in the 2024 New Comedian of the Year Awards. With Masters in both Archaeology and Anthropology (Oxford) and Creative Writing, (UEL), Vera’s practice excavates the intricacies of belonging and community through play. Angry Yellow Woman, Vera's debut poetry collection, is out now.
Vik Sivalingam is a London based Theatre Director who has worked in theatres around the UK. He is a graduate of the Birkbeck’s MFA in Theatre Directing and Warwick University’s Postgraduate Award in Teaching Shakespeare.
As a director and trainer of actors, he has worked in conservatoires nationally and around the world including Brazil, India, Malaysia, The Netherlands, Germany and Italy. He was a full time faculty member at LAMDA and was Course Leader of LAMDA’s BA (Hons) Professional Acting programme from 2020- 2023 leaving this position to undertake a PhD at University of the West of Scotland as the Vice Chancellor’s Studentship candidate. Research interests include Shakespeare and Actor Training in the 21C.
Sunday 14 Sept
A colonised body: the gendered site of South East Asia
South East Asia is a wildly diverse part of the world, it has ancient trade routes that have brought different religions, cultures and people to the region, as well as its indigenous communities. But within the UK these different identities are often reduced to a selection of dishes (roti canai, chicken satay, nasi lemak, laksa), hyper-sexualised women within war narratives, noble peasant-farmer-savages that need civilising, and of course the ‘eat, pray, love’ tourism vision of ancient religious spaces to find yourself. The multiplicity and complexity of communities, individuals and spaces get lost, and everyone thinks that peanut sauce is satay!
This plays out in many ways in the UK, such as the hidden Malay identity in the UK where, for example, food journalists continuously make the mistake of calling all food from Malaysia ‘Malay’, and Singapore is identifiable for its Chinese culture (think Crazy Rich Asians). Or, where Indonesia is defined by either a hedonistic Balinese beach party (a narrative constructed by the Dutch in the 19th century) or a conservative feminine image.
This panel discussion will unpick colonial narratives that are still at play in the British imagination; it will also explore the idea of gender and the effects of colonialism on the body in space - how we can or can’t take up space, how we are allowed to behave in different spaces, and moving between the UK and ‘home’.
The talk will mainly focus on Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia, who share similar colonial histories, and feature three women in creative industries that are re-shaping the identities of South East Asia:
Nur Khairiyah ‘Khai’ is a Muslim-Malay creative producer based in London, originally from Singapore. She holds an MA in Creative Producing from Central School of Speech and Drama. During the pandemic, she launched RUMAH, a platform dedicated to empowering Asian diaspora creatives in the UK, and in 2022, she was nominated for the Asian Woman of Achievement by NatWest. Khai has served as the Associate Producer at Brixton House, where she supported the annual Housemates Festival from 2023 to 2024. She also worked as the Tour Producer for Spare Tyre’s sensory show On the Beach, designed for older adults living with dementia and their carers.
Khairani Barokka is a writer, artist, translator and editor from Jakarta. In 2023, Okka was shortlisted for the Asian Women of Achievement Awards in the Arts and Culture category. Okka’s work has been presented widely internationally, and centres disability justice as anticolonial praxis. Among her honours, she has been a UNFPA Indonesian Young Leader Driving Social Change, a Delfina Foundation Associate Artist, Editor of Modern Poetry in Translation, an Artforum Must-See, and Associate Artist at the UK’s National Centre for Writing. Okka's latest books are 2021's Ultimatum Orangutan (Nine Arches), shortlisted for the Barbellion Prize, and 2024's amuk (Nine Arches), longlisted for the Jhalak Prize; her speculative nonfiction debut is Annah, Infinite (Tilted Axis, Aug 19 UK, Nov 11 US, 2025).
Rahel Stephanie is the founder of the acclaimed supper club Spoons, dedicated to bringing authentic Indonesian cuisine to the global stage. Recognised as one of the most exciting voices in food today. From sell-out events to a national rollout with Wagamama, she has partnered with brands like GANNI, appeared regularly on Sunday Brunch, and was named "Chef to Watch" by British Vogue. Her work blends creativity and authenticity, with an unwavering mission to educate people about the rich and diverse culinary heritage of Indonesia. Most recently, Rahel was invited to be a guest chef of Masterchef UK. In addition to her culinary achievements, Rahel's presence on NTS Radio Showcases her ability to curate culture beyond the plate, making her a multi-disciplinary force in the worlds of food, music, and lifestyle. As of2025, Rahel continues to captivate audiences, solidifying her place as a leading figure in the global supper club and creative scenes.