ESEA Lit Fest: Highlights by Mailé Nguyen

The 2023 ESEA Literature Festival, the UK's first East and Southeast Asian literary festival, was held this September in partnership with the ESEA Publishing Network. The event combined a series of panel discussions, workshops, and readings from some of the most exciting contemporary ESEA voices in literature and the wider cultural landscape in the UK and beyond. Mailé Nguyen's dispatch from the festival explores the burgeoning of the ESEA term and community, as well as the event's efforts at positing alternative and new ESEA futurities at both individual and collective levels.

Though it accounts for the fastest-growing ethnic group in the United Kingdom, ESEA (East and South East Asian) is an unfamiliar term for many. The terminological history of the acronym is difficult to trace, even for some within the ESEA community. When I arrived in London as a Master’s student last year, finding deliberate ESEA communities required patience and necessitated befriending an “insider” person within the demographic. Coming from an Asian American organising space, I was surprised to find that the ESEA acronym was a relatively recent canonisation in the UK. According to a 2021 VICE article, the grassroots organization besea.n (Britain’s East and South East Asian Network), launched the first ESEA Heritage Month in 2021 in response to the increase in anti-Asian violence amidst the pandemic. Poor ethnic classifications in the UK census are partly to blame for the ambiguity surrounding collective Asian/Asian British identity in the UK, with only Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and Chinese listed on the 2011 and 2021 censuses. Everyone else had to self-identify as “Other Asian.” Recent organising efforts from ESEA-identifying networks are attempting to reckon with this othering, calling for critical consciousness and intentional identity-based organizing. Like other ethnic labels, ‘ESEA’ embodies the ambition of solidarity for disparate groups seeking visibility within a domineering culture. But does the designation manage to unify the diaspora under the premise of anti-racist activism? Or does the configuration encourage fragmented renderings of the sweeping saga of East and Southeast Asian identities? By way of an answer, the inaugural 2023 ESEA Literature Festival aimed to disrupt the cycle of ESEA erasure in the UK publishing industry. 

On September 23rd, 2023, a sizeable crowd amassed on the top floor of the Foyles bookshop on Charing Cross Road, London, as writers, translators, and literature lovers came together for the inaugural ESEA Lit Fest. Day tickets had quickly sold out as many were eager to see what standards this first event of its kind would set. Championed by the ESEA Publishing Network (ESEAPN), the event gathered prominent voices spanning several industries. ESEAPN was founded in 2022 by Joanna Lee, commissioning editor at Atlantic Books, and Maria Garbutt-Lucero, publicity director at Sceptre, to uplift ESEA writers in UK publishing. Lee and Garbutt-Lucero stated that they were influenced by other ESEA organisers such as Harper’s Bazaar’s deputy editor Helena Lee, who founded the East Side Voices salon in February 2020 to celebrate ESEA talent. Previously, the Bubble Tea Writers Network Facebook page, moderated by authors Maisie Chan, Mina Ikemoto Ghosh, and Alice Yu, existed to connect ESEA writers in the UK since its inception in 2018. The network had also hosted its own ESEA Authors LitFest at SOAS University of London just two days before the Foyles event. This only slightly confused me when I realised both the events were just connected in spirit and not officially, but nevertheless, the two festivals signal a flourishing ESEA publishing landscape. Still, many of the panelists and moderators from ESEAPN’s ESEA Lit Fest were also attached to the social circles of East Side Voices, including Helena Lee, authors Tash Aw, Rowan Hisayao Buchanan, and Sharlene Teo, journalist Zing Tsjeng, and literary agent Catherine Cho. The organiser’s Instagram page promoted the “all-star line-up,” promising to ambitiously dive into “everything from authenticity in food, remembering the past, the politics of ESEA representation, and some of the best poetry published today.”

In the festival’s opening panel, writers Tania Branigan and André Dao appeared in conversation with Paper Literary founder Catherine Cho to unpack the stories we inherit and the subjectivity of memory. Branigan and Dao offered thoughtful contemplation on the relationship between history and fiction, recognizing that memories evolve to fit the contexts of the time. Indeed, we can often use literature to not only reframe the past but also collectively imagine and build new futurities. In the panel, Branigan observed that memory is not only an act of retrieval but also an act of creation. A journalist for The Guardian, Branigan has written a piercing work of nonfiction titled Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution (2023), while Dao’s debut novel Anam (2023) blends reportage, memoir, and fiction to tackle family memory, specifically to better understand his grandfather. As a teenager, Dao discovered a photocopy of an old Amnesty International newsletter in his family home that revealed his grandfather was an “intellectuelle non-communiste” imprisoned in Saigon during the war. Both writers agreed that writing about war-steeped histories necessitates special care as it involves potentially interfering with the protective shroud surrounding memory. When writing about his grandfather’s life, Dao noticed that certain oral histories did not align with historical records or stories from other family members. But then how could the devastation of the war ever be accurately or adequately remembered? When his grandfather passed away halfway through Dao’s documentation project, which eventually became Anam, he shifted his scope from pure memoir to something that could capture the grandeur of his vision. By reimagining his grandfather’s painful history, Dao offers us the opportunity to know the past differently and in doing so, forge new vocabularies with which to envision the futurity of ESEA narratives, especially those buckling under past trauma.

In a similar vein, Branigan’s Red Memory was borne out of attempting to sift through the fevered social catastrophe of the Cultural Revolution through a series of personal profiles. The period proved to be a still-sensitive subject even four decades later, as evidenced, Branigan explained, by some of her interlocutors’ reticent self-censorship. She noted that despite the commonplace history we all know, there is a historicised separation from the ongoing grief of a not-so-distant past. Well-placed at the beginning of the festival, Branigan and Dao positioned the audience at the precipice of our collective opportunity to forge new futures from older, established norms and narratives. Literary engagements with the past can help us better liberate and emancipate ourselves from the narrow lanes and rigidities of tradition. Emboldened by the new possibilities of this futurity, eventgoers were then faced with the question of 'How?' How do we move past our individuated histories and continue forward collaboratively? Other panelists took different approaches, from challenging expectations of authenticity in ESEA cuisines to queering relationships to poetic resistance. When it comes to literature in particular, its task, especially when evoking history and memory, is to free the present generations from one-dimensional portrayals of the past. Through a less-rigid relationship with memory as an absolute truth, we can reflect on our own fallibilities and can thus conceive the future more openly.

As an Asian American adoptee, I myself have many qualms with the Asian diaspora’s fixation on heritage and tradition as cultural crutches. Without a personal generational history, I’ve often pastiched my own Asian identity together from the community’s rich fabric. Therefore, I was particularly impressed with the panelists’ critical responses to ESEA identity formation and the myth of authenticity. Perhaps this is one of the benefits of recent ESEA organising in the UK—that the community is becoming more aware of the pitfalls of identity politics so pervasive in Asian American activism, and actively countering it. Within Asian American and ESEA spaces, the topic of representation is noticeably at the forefront of all identity discourse. Such outcry for diverse representation has led companies, nonprofits, and other white-dominated career spaces to launch “Diversity and Inclusion” initiatives to bolster self-congratulatory statistics. Often, I find that conversations surrounding ESEA representation fall short. Many identity roundtables turn into stunted conversations on whether or not a specific media portrayal was authentic to our own life experiences, which always conclude with yet another call to get more Asian faces in leading roles and in writers’ rooms. In one of the festival’s panels, Michelin-starred Ikoyi chef Jeremy Chan and Mandy Yin of famed Malaysian restaurant Sambal Shiok spoke with Helena Lee on how “authenticity” as a standard for non-Western cuisines has outlived its purpose. The chefs challenged our existing relationships with culinary and cultural tradition and contemplated the act of cooking as its own kind of praxis for rebuilding collective memory and newer culinary futures. One of the standout panels of the ESEA Lit Fest—evidenced by how quickly the speakers’ books were purchased—more deeply scrutinised the politics of ESEA representation. Xiaolu Guo, filmmaker and 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award winner for her autobiography Nine Continents: A Memoir In and Out of China (2017), and Booker Prize-longlisted author of The Harmony Silk Factory (2005) Tash Aw, joined VICE Editor-in-Chief Zing Tsjeng to reflect on what exactly constitutes ‘meaningful’ representation, claiming that the term bears the heavy task of living up to the responsibility placed upon it. Aw invited us to consider how we, ironically as the global majority, have the burden of expectation to always represent ourselves within limiting Western cultural frameworks.

One of the main issues Aw and Guo tackled in their panel is how the English language intrinsically impacts how ESEA communities are both othered and connected through literature. Given the colonial filter through which all of our stories are told, the panelists warned against the tokenisation and ethnic essentialism that can arise from these consequently fabricated modes of (un)belonging. Through Western colonial gazes, only Western-palatable voices trickle into the mainstream consciousness of ESEA narratives. As a result, the scarcity of a truly varied mix of ESEA voices places the onus on the loudest voices to represent the whole. But who benefits from this controlled recognition? Who is left behind?

This panel’s insights deeply complicated the question of ESEA literary futurity. However, Guo and Aw’s open conviction was a necessary disruption to the same pallid calls for representation to which the festival could’ve fallen victim. Guo and Aw further wondered if we might one day shift away from well-known, narrow, and clichéd templates of immigrant stories to experiment with newer, more expansive ways of storytelling. Guo speculated on how topics might shift to capture ecological anxieties and art’s relationship with artificial intelligence. Following suit, Jeremy Chan and Mandy Yin reflected on how we could collectively move past the typical Lunch Box immigrant stories (wherein diasporic children are teased for their “weird lunches” at school), to dig deeper into the politics of consumption for Asian restaurateurs in the West. Similarly, Branigan and Dao also spoke about their experimentations with form, trying out new ways of blending biography, fiction, and memoir through their work, for instance. Ultimately, while we carry the burden of representation, we also have the opportunity to co- and re-construct our own collective and individual ESEA and Asian American narratives to fit the needs of our own time. After attending this festival, I felt invigorated with the possibilities presented by the day’s panelists. More than just calling for representation, the panels embodied how far ESEA identity discourse–despite being so fresh, too, in the UK–has come in such a short time. The ESEA Lit Fest had what seemed to be a head-start on conversations still brewing among their Asian American literary counterparts. For instance, the 2023 Asian American Literature Festival was abruptly canceled by the Smithsonian this year, so I was especially grateful for the opportunity to attend the ESEAPN event. Upon further reflection, I am curious too about the fragmented overlap between the ESEAPN’s ESEA Literature Festival and the Bubble Tea Writer’s Network’s ESEA Authors Literature Festival just days before. Claiming to be the UK’s first ESEA literary festival becomes a bit puzzling when the events took place within the same week, but I hardly think it’s productive to argue the value of getting there first. Hopefully, we will see the growth and collaboration of both groups as necessary trailblazers in the UK publishing space. In the best of ways, audience members walked away from ESEAPN’s ESEA Lit Fest with more questions than answers. While it was unclear if the futurity of ESEA literature was the organisers’ primary goal, the various panelists eloquently pushed the narrative of ESEA publishing forward. Regardless of who got there first, the ESEA Lit Fest imagined ESEA futures as open and possible and always evolving to be more complex than before, pushing forward through collective power.

Cover image: ESEAPN founders Maria Garbutt-Lucero (left) and Joanna Lee (right) at the ESEA Lit Fest, courtesy of the author.