W&N signs Masing’s ‘powerful’ exploration of East and South East Asian identity

Weidenfeld & Nicolson (W&N) has signed Chinese and Other Asian by  Anna Sulan Masing, an academic, writer, poet and podcaster of New Zealand and Iban descent. 

Editorial director Maddy Price acquired world all language rights to the “short, powerful and punchy” exploration of the East and South East Asian experience and identity in Britain from Holly Faulks at Greene & Heaton. It will be published in February 2024.  

On many forms in the UK where ethnicity needs to be ticked, the space for East and South East Asia is ‘Chinese or Other Asian’, the publisher explains, representing a shameful sweeping together of a vastly varied heritage and experience.

East Asian people have lived and worked in the UK for centuries and have influenced British culture through food, writing, music and art in a multitude of ways, yet this influence is often overlooked or ignored, and the unique forms of racism experienced by people of ESEA heritage is often dismissed or downplayed because of a ‘model minority’ myth, it continues. 

Price describes the book as “powerful, moving and illuminating” and one she has been longing to read herself for years. 

“There is so much to celebrate and share about East and South East Asian culture, as well as pain and difficulty to dive into,” she said. “Anna Sulan Masing is the perfect person to grapple with the complex issues of ESEA identity, heritage and culture in an informed and engaging way that will reach beyond people with direct lived experience of these issues and will appeal to anyone who wants to learn about living in a multicultural society.”

Masing said the book was conceived from a place of frustration. “I have seen, heard and been part of a diversity of stories that are rarely given space,” she explained. “It is incredibly important to me to interrogate why these stories are not valued in the way they should be.

“In this book I will look to the past to then see what our future can look like, investigate the dynamics of power and the joy of togetherness, to write a nuanced picture of the many ways it is to be of East and South East Asian heritage in the UK.”

Masing specialises in ideas around race, identity, home and belonging, and her doctorate looked at how identity changes when space and location changes. As well as a journalistic career, the author is one half of podcast Voices at the Table, was a contributor to the anthology East Side Voices and will be launching a new podcast series, Taste of Place, with Whetstone Radio Collective later this year.