Posted by Tom Carr on March 1st, 2022

On the night of the lunar new year (February 1st) I and my colleague Kath had the privilege of supplying copies for the signing event of the inaugural collection of East Side Voices at The Standard hotel.

Edited by Harper's Bazaar's own features director Helena Lee, it is a chorus of East and Southeast Asian experiences and tributes ranging from Katie Leung's childhood in Glasgow to starring in Harry Potter as Cho Chang, to June Bellebono's cultural trans awakening through the Myanmar's historic festival of Taungbyone Pwe, to Will Harris’ wonderful poem ‘After “The Quinine Plant”’, to Lee's own reflections on the boxed-in nature of Asian-ness in western film and mainstream media.

It was fitting that the event was held at The Standard hotel as the works of this collection of British Asian writers, actors, poets, models, editors, chefs, restaurateurs, journalists and so many more, speak centrally on the standard of respect that they are rightfully due but are so infrequently given.

The East Side Voices had its initial launch as a community platform at The Standard in early 2020, but just as they were beginning to collate their experiences, the pandemic hit. However, this wouldn’t stop them from sharing their stories with one another. Like so many of us during lockdown, the community turned to zoom and video-calls to keep themselves connected.

“I was listening to the model Naomi Shimada’s lyrical voice reading her ode to her beloved obaa-chan (grandmother) over Zoom. Naomi was experiencing chronic pain in her hands, so I typed for her while she spoke, and we edited the piece together for the book. As dusk fell, I found myself transported by her words to her world of growing up in Japan.”

For so many of us, the lockdowns were incredibly difficult expanses of time. For Asian communities, however, it was especially strenuous. So often, the discourse of the epidemic centred again and again on the virus being of ‘Chinese origin’, and so often with discourses such as these, East and Southeast Asians were bundled together as though they were one community and not a vast array of countries, peoples, cultures, and lives that diverge as easily as those in the West. Alas, ignorance so often comes with panic and over the past two years during Covid, as Lee states in her introduction, in the spring of 2020 attacks against East and Southeast Asian communities in the UK had a threefold increase of hate-crimes against them. Not only this but Filipinos, who make up the majority of NHS nurses, were the single largest nationality to die of Covid in May of that same year.

However, that night at the Standard was not a night of sadness or of grief, but one of euphoria. As the contributors to the book gathered, chatting and signing each other's copies, it was easy to see their excitement at being in the same room. What had been missing for so long was the joy of personal conversation, the leaning ins, the smiles on the faces of people enraptured and nodding for their speakers to continue. Here was a group of brilliance who had been separated for so long finally able to share in celebrating each other’s voices. Helena Lee, as an incidental nod to Zoom’s contribution to the collection, even had her parents witness the evening via videocall through her laptop.

To sum up the spirit of both the evening and the collection, I’d like to tell you of the brief conversation that Katie Leung and I had that night. We had been talking about accents and their fluidity, mine being a strange muddle of West London and Donegal Irish, hers of course being the swift and melodic Glaswegian that any lover of Harry Potter would recognise as an iconic feature of the films. She said to me, “Be proud of it and old tight to it! Don’t let them get it from you.” Her words stayed with me after that night, and I think it is because she also captured not only my attention, but also the very spirit of the collection we were celebrating that night. These talented members of the diaspora were doing just that, they were proud, and they were holding tight.

To end, I’ll leave you with this last quote from Helena Lee:

“There is always room in this world for more stories, and all of us have the history of migration in our veins. I hope that East Side Voices inspires you to look for more of these tales so that they, and we, can be better heard.”