East & Southeast Asian Heritage Month Celebration

**Topping & Company East & Southeast Asian Heritage Month**

Join a celebration of East & Southeast Asian (ESEA) heritage featuring a panel of three powerhouse writers: Anna Sulan Masing, Katie Goh and Alice Mah. They will discuss their new books, Chinese and Any Other Asian, Foreign Fruit, and Red Pockets.

Chinese and Any Other Asian by Anna Sulan Masing:

This is a must-read for anyone interested in the makeup of our multicultural society.

Asian food is mocked as unhealthy and Asian restaurants as dirty. ESEA women are exoticised and sexualised, and assumed to be the nanny of their mixed-race children. The ESEA community was scapegoated for the Covid-19 pandemic. Here, Masing explores what it means to be East & Southeast Asian in Britain today and celebrates the varied experiences that make up ESEA identity.

Foreign Fruit by Katie Goh:

'A sharp-sweet memoir of change, identity and hybridity. I loved it' KATHERINE MAY, author of Wintering

The orange we know, waxed in vats, gathered in red netting and stacked in supermarket displays, is not the same orange that grew from the first straggling orange grove that took root on the Tibetan plateau, part pomelo and part mandarin. The orange is a souvenir of history. Goh explores the orange as a means of understanding the world, and herself within it. What she finds is a world of violence, colonialism, resilience, survival, adaptation - and of unexpected beauty and sweetness against all odds.

Red Pockets by Alice Mah:

During the Qingming Festival, people return to their villages in China to sweep their ancestors' tombs, making offerings to prevent them from becoming hungry ghosts of misfortune. Yet for the past century, a time ruptured by war and revolution, many tombs have been left unattended. Mah returns to her family's rice village and discovers that her ancestors are almost forgotten; there are no tombs left to sweep. Instead, there are incalculable clan debts to be paid. What do we owe to past and future generations? What do we owe to the places that we inhabit?

Mah's research on pollution gives way to growing eco-anxiety in a crisis of spiritual belief.

Anna Sulan Masing is a writer, poet & academic based in London and the co-founder and EIC of Sourced, a public research project, and of Cheese: The Magazine of Culture.

Katie Goh is a writer and editor. Her award-nominated essays, journalism and criticism have appeared in the Guardian, Gutter, Wasafiri, Dazed and gal-dem. Her book The End: Surviving the World Through Imagined Disasters was a Reviewer's Choice for The Big Issue's Independent Books of 2021.

Alice Mah is a writer and Professor of Urban and Environmental Studies at the University of Glasgow. Her award-winning research focuses on toxic pollution and environmental justice, the subjects of her books.