ISSUE #1 SPRING
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all content produced by: Hanna Stephens Isabella Normark Jade Chao Jemma Paek Jess Routley Jun Pang Kay Stephens
Manifesto
We are a group of self-identifying South East/ East Asian womxn living within a British context. We have created this zine as a platform for Asian voices that are so often underrepresented and undervalued in mainstream political and feminist discourse. We believe in empowering each other through highlighting the collective frustrations and nuances of our intersectional experiences as a starting point for building a wider platform of solidarity. We aim to share our opinions, celebrate our creativity and build up a stronger collective voice for South East/East Asians.
daikon.co.uk daikon.media@gmail.com
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That I may be near you, and see your sights again; that I may cross this river and find my way back home; that I may trace the distance between your land and mine without a tremble in my fingers and without need for a straight edge besides; that I may know you again, and see you in a new light; that I may return to the dust that once stopped me from breathing; that I may find the harbour for the banks that threaten everyday to break loose; that I may no longer be a traveler; that I may set my sights without losing myself; that I may find an end stop and no longer be suspended Halfway here and halfway there.
words by Jun image by Hanna 4
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I come from a long line of women
previous page: image by Hanna
You do not say it outright but you trace it in my palm when you stretch and bend my hands predicting me promising futures Holding the weight of living up to your legacy I am lost for ways to show my gratitude To the women I carry with me in the lines of my palms
- Palmistry for Diasporics
this page: words by Bella art by Jess 8
Of my mother’s mother, I sit and wait Skin taut against bone, shredded with wear. I am teaching myself the colour of moonlight – White – I am learning that the folds above My eyes envelop the mysteries of the universe And then some. They want deeper valleys And more artful bridges; but there is obviously More than one way to be beautiful. I look at my reflection and cover up the parts of my face That are not enough. I am left with nothing but I can still see.
words by Jun 9
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As a woman I was taught self reliance they said it was liberation but it couldn’t free me As a woman of colour I toughened my skin but that was survival and it didn’t heal me As a femme of colour what I have learnt is that in the conditions where these defences are necessary what is more revolutionary than unlearning their cruelty for love and solidarity I am softening my skin
words by Bella image by Kay 11
Kimchi My mamma fed me garlic and fermented cabbage as I grew up. She then sprayed me with lemony perfume before I left the house: ‘white people will think you smell’. I smell lemons and I think of kimchi: orange, wrinkly, smelly. I smell lemons and I think of early morning coach rides to school with my hair plaited in two. My mamma cooked me beef brined in pear juice and noodles dressed in chili and pork belly charred on a portable grill in the middle of our kitchen table. We feasted on our homeland in secret, and then made pasta for my friends when they came to stay. We have a separate fridge for our kimchi, because it smells. My mamma taught me how to wash rice before you put it in the pressure cooker, swirled and swirled and swirled again. Our pressure cooker talks! It tells you when the rice is ready in fuzzy Korean. I ate rice every day. I eat rice every day. A meal is not complete without kimchi. There is a word in Korean – nigul nigul. It means when you have eaten too much butter, too much rich food, and you feel sick and not right and need something spicy to stop the nausea. My mamma gets this when she goes away, and her mamma does too. We could be anywhere in the world and mamma would need kimchi. She will find herself some kimchi. She brings hot sauce around in her bag. I used to scorn this, and now I find that I get nigul nigul too. I took kimchi with me to university and didn’t let anyone open my fridge door. My mamma started a Korean restaurant that sold people Korean food. Koreans eat differently to white people. We share food and pickle things and debone each other’s fish, and wipe each other’s mouths, and offer the first and last bites to the people sitting next to us. My mamma’s friends would raise the pitch of their voice a little when they came to visit. ‘It’s so authentic!’ ‘May I have a fork?’ ‘How do you eat it?’ ‘It’s quite strong’. White people have a funny tendency to apologise for strong flavours. Mamma charged £3 for a bowl of kimchi, and I found that ridiculous. And then Korean food got ‘trendy’ and people queued up for hours for a taste of her kimchi, her £3 kimchi that they’d mostly leave. White people love kimchi. And now I see kimchi everywhere, stuffed with tomatoes, stuffed onto hotdogs, cooked with cheese, with truffle oil, with nigul nigul food. I see people swallowing their kimchi tacos and their kimchi omelettes and their kimchi infused ice creams. I see kimchi, my orange, wrinkly, smelly cabbage, and I think of my hair plaited in two, my mamma apologising for the smell of garlic, my mamma cooking me my roots, my mamma and her separate kimchi fridge, my mamma, my mamma.
words by Jemma opposite: art by Jess 12
next page: image by Kay 13
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I have long had a very split relationship with the Chinese-Malaysian part of my identity. Growing up I was often made to feel like this part of my identity was not my own. By this I mean my awareness of being and presenting part Chinese was usually forced upon me – by men shouting ‘ni hao’ at me in the street to get my attention, by people studying mandarin trying to practice what they’ve learnt on me (I only speak English), by people asking me where I’m from when my answer of London doesn’t match up to their desires to open up about how they visited Hong Kong six years ago on a stopover to Australia. My family are from Malaysia, not China and I have never been to mainland China nor do I have any connections with the place in any physical sense. In desiring me to be this Chinese puppet, people who want an outlet for their exoticism have in many ways made me feel distant from the Chinese part of me. In a recent fit of rage at a catcaller who was racializing me , I shouted “I’m NOT Chinese!” in a desperate move to distance myself from my features that keep marking me out as an object for orientalist attention. On the other hand, spending my holidays in Malaysia with my Grandparents and aunties and Hong Kong with my cousins felt a natural part of myself too. Every summer these same Grandparents and cousins would come and stay in the house opposite mine for two months over summer. Going over the road to watch my grandma frying keropok (what western people like to call prawn crackers, even though they are obviously not crackers) and sharing a small plastic bowl of ikan bilis with my cousins and brothers, came to define my summer holidays and I’d wait all year until they came again. This part of me that feels so comfortable being Chinese is very much linked to a sense of safety. Sit17
ting at the worktop table at my Great-grandmother’s shop-house eating fried rice noodles, I am safe and I am completely free to feel Chinese. Laughing with my brothers about strange Cantonese phrases we’ve picked up from family, I am free to feel Chinese. In the streets and in a majority white city, I do not feel comfortable unless I assert myself as English. I simultaneously see my Chinese Malaysian identity as something completely inseparable from me and as something I have to detach myself from in order to protect my mental and occasionally physical wellbeing. Only today three grown men leered at me from a park bench, shouted ‘Ni Hao Ma’ at me and then went on to threaten me physically when I found the courage within me to shout back at them. Though I had planned to write this piece over a month ago, until this incident today I didn’t know where to start. So this is it really, I am motivated to write and talk about these issues so I can finally reclaim my identity and take it back out of those hands who snatch it in the street. It would not have been safe for me to lash out at those three men today, so instead I’ve come here to start this project and I only hope this inspires other people reading to realise that it is possible to take back control from people who undermine you every day.
art and photography by Jess
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images by Hanna
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ハーフ “Are you Japanese?” “Yeah… well I’m half” Half Japanese, half English, or hafu – as if I’m divided down the middle, one side of me British, white, the other Japanese, Asian. But it’s not a simple 50:50 split. The reality is a lot more complex, nuanced and fluid. In the past I’ve felt an internal mismatch between my Japanese and English identities, like they couldn’t peacefully coexist. I’ve also felt slightly distant from and rejected by Japan, no doubt influenced by the lack of connection to my family there and the fact that I grew up here in London. Being a shy tomboy who couldn’t speak Japanese that well at Japanese Saturday school didn’t help me either and so I didn’t have Japanese friends. I reacted by distancing myself from Japanese things, believing that I didn’t need or want to be Japanese because I was doing well in English school. It wasn’t until I felt othered because of mental health issues in my English school that I started to get interested in my Japanese identity, maybe because at this point I had lost all hope of assimilation. When I went to Japanese classes for my A Levels I finally became friends with other half Japanese people. We spoke a mixture of English and Japanese over sushi and ramen, waved English and Japanese flags during the world cup and identified similar difficulties with our identities. I was the first time I felt like I could fuse my Japanese and British identities together. But they knew a lot more about Japanese dramas, songs and culture than I did. I felt compelled to explore and connect with the Japanese side of my identity more, realising I had some catching up to do. I went to Japan on my gap year for 6 months, lived in a shared house in Tokyo and worked in Muji and at a magazine publishing company. In this time my confidence in speaking Japanese grew and I got a lot better at reading kanji, funnily enough mainly as a result of predictive text. I went to my local bathhouse and joined a painting class in my neighbourhood. I got to know my mum’s cousin who made me really feel like a part of her family and also introduced me to her mother-in-law’s student who taught me how to play the koto and shamisen, two traditional Japanese instruments. At the end of my stay I travelled around, armed with my new language skills. I had such a great time and felt more connected to my Japanese-ness than ever. However, I was constantly asked to speak and teach my housemates English and people found me interesting specifically because of my English blood. It was a strange contrast to England where 23
English would be the last thing I was seen as. The two jobs I was working also hired me specifically because of my English speaking skills and the white/western privilege being mixed British with Japanese definitely got me places. I felt accepted for being English but not for being Japanese. Nevertheless, this was the trip I needed to feel more confident in claiming and celebrating my Japanese identity. Doing this trip alone was important to me as it was deeply personal and, as cliché as it sounds, my gap year really helped me find myself in many ways. But when I started uni, I felt this sense of hypervisibility for being Japanese. It wasn’t long before me and my friend were labelled “Asian 1” and “Asian 2” and we engaged in self-deprecating humour as a way to deal with our surroundings. At a fancy dress night, my pikachu costume I had bought in Japan seemed to mark the invite for some casual racism that I was “asking for” and people in my accommodation block would paint me with tired stereotypes of being good at maths or always eating rice (my rice cooker went straight into the drawer after that). On top of the constant academic work, micro-aggressions tired me out and I reacted by losing ties with the Japanese-ness I had so caringly nurtured. I stopped playing the shamisen, stopped Japanese painting and didn’t keep up my Japanese speaking. Whilst my English writing skills grew, my Japanese suffered. It wasn’t till I started to think about and discuss issues of racism in my second year of uni that I realised what was happening. Rather than being understood as a Japanese and English person with my own personal ways of forging connections with both, I was being reduced to some constructed and homogenous Asian identity. After that I felt empowered to (re)claim an East Asian identity. It felt a bit strange because I never labelled myself as East Asian before, I was always half Japanese, half English. But being East Asian to me is about understanding the ways in which racism operates against me, in turn shaping the way I navigate my Japanese and British heritage. I see it like this: whilst I am racialised as East Asian in a British context, internally I am Japanese and English. But given that in a Japanese context my whiteness is highlighted there are extra complexities on how I claim an East Asian identity and navigate being Japanese and English. Whether or not I enjoyed it at the time, I am so so privileged to have learnt Japanese from a young age and be able to visit Japan on quite a regular basis. Being able to speak the language and be familiar with a lot of the customs and food has really helped me to claim and be proud of my identity. I am now rekindling my connection to my Japanese identity in my own personal and diasporic way. writing and image by Hanna next pages: images by Kay
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谢谢 감사
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ありがとう