Writing Home(s): Reflections

With another East and Southeast Asian (ESEA) Heritage Month in the rear view, I am – in classic ESEA fashion – reminded of something my grandma used to say.

(Our people cannot be stopped from writing about our grandmas. In undergrad, I was part of a small writing scholarship program with just a few other students, one of whom was also of ESEA descent. On the day we started our creative nonfiction unit, we discovered that we’d both written essays about our respective deceased grandmas’ cultural and personal idiosyncrasies, plus the unprocessed trauma driving them. And the kicker: we were the only ones who wrote about that.  It’s basically a reflex at this point.)

Anyway, my grandma used to tell my mom to start giving me more space, because as kids grow up, “they like the freedom”. 

Here in 2026, Scotland’s ESEA communities are growing up, and we do indeed like the freedom; in fact, we need it. We need the freedom to define ourselves – not merely as individuals, but as collectives sharing journeys and goals and fears and struggles – without having to prove our ability to assimilate into sociopolitical hegemonies. We need the freedom to revisit our heritages on our own terms, to inhabit their infinite complexities. 

That was the theme that emerged again and again during SBWN’s first in-person ESEA Heritage Month event, ‘Writing Home’. Organised and hosted by our amazing Co-Director Sean Wai Keung, and co-hosted by me, this afternoon of readings and discussion that showcased the wide range of creativity and expertise among Scotland’s ESEA writers, from social science and activism (Mai-Anh Vu Peterson) to comics (Chris Lau Manson) to poetry (Tim Tim Cheng) to podcast scriptwriting (Dr Noby Leong). 

As someone whose Japanese and Filipino heritages are often overlooked in mainstream categorisations of East Asian identity, I was relieved to see a real diversity of ESEA heritages and nationalities represented among the featured authors. Vietnamese, Hakka Chinese, Hong Kong Chinese, Indonesian, Malaysian Chinese, Australian, English, and Scottish – and that’s just among four people! 

The venue, The House Arts Collective in Glasgow, was very intimate and informal, making the event feel a bit like a house party. Adding to the atmosphere was the sense that we’d all come together because we wanted to, because this was a time for sharing and connection and support. Here we didn’t have to justify our Asianness or our anger. We didn’t have to scrounge for scraps of recognition. We could rage; we could laugh; we could wax lyrical about our favourite snacks from the diaspora; we could be. 

We exchanged secret histories – both those we keep to ourselves and those that were kept from us – in poetry and casual conversation. We talked protests, organising, activism, anti-capitalism, creating new systems. 

And from this emerged the implicit question: when we ‘write home’, where is the home that we’re writing to, and what sort of home are our words building? 

Mai-Anh, reading from the book on ESEA activism in the UK that she co-authored, highlighted the need for us to move past proving our right to join in homogeneity. She talked candidly about her own experiences as co-founder of besea.n, where much of her initial focus was on validating our claims to Britishness. However, she said, she realised that the real need was for the systems that govern Britain and ‘Britishness’ to change, rather than for us to merely be seen as acceptable by our oppressors. 

Chris’s walk through his comics creation practice included a section on magic realism as anti-colonialist resistance. He noted that for many of us, magic and the supernatural are part of our reality, in the gods and ghosts and good/bad luck dichotomies woven into the fabric of our upbringings – from the number 4 to burning treats for your ancestors’ ghosts to eat in the spirit world to never sticking chopsticks straight up and down into a bowl of rice. In other words, being an ESEA person often means living in realities beyond the concretely objective, which in turn lets us access richer experiences and greater knowledge than restricting ourselves to the Western dichotomies imposed upon us.

I won’t say too much about Tim Tim’s poetry, mainly because I urge you to experience its organic, precise yet passionate lyricism for yourself rather than relying on my meager descriptions. All I will say is that the poems they read (selections from their latest book, The Tattoo Collector) were very vindicating for me, a person who longs to say the quiet parts out loud but is too frequently held back by fear. They highlighted how Western Anglophone poetic systems of language as cachet are underpinned by white-centric and/or colonialist classification, whether in Scotland or Hong Kong. Their poems captured the certainty of uncertainty that so many of us feel in being who we are.

Finally, Noby took us on a delightful (and delicious-sounding) journey on how he crafts each episode of his podcast exploring Malaysia’s history through food. For him, food is a way into unpacking national identities that contain within themselves numerous cultures and histories: the Malay-Chinese Peranakan community, the South Asian presence in many of Malaysia’s 100+ national heritage dishes, the recipes of survival during the Japanese occupation, the indigenous peoples trying to reconstruct their heritage – in one case, through old colonial textbooks containing illustrations of traditional tattoos. 

Despite the many differences between these four incredible talks and readings, they all pointed to a similar conclusion. The ‘home’ that we write is so much more than belonging. It’s where we start from, where we come back to, where we restore ourselves and each other. It’s finding words that make our voices and give us the freedom to grow in the directions that allow us to flourish.   

I left with the overall sense that I’d been part of something quietly but unapologetically subversive, not unlike how historical accounts describe the genesis of major social and political movements. More often than not, they start with a small, impassioned group in a single room, drawn together by the desire to create a better future. Or – in this case – to create a better home where we can rest and build and hope, where our words make a foundation that can never be undermined.