It’s so strange to me that I’ve never met Dr. Anna Sulan Masing, author of Chinese and Any Other Asian: Exploring East and South East Asian Identity in Britain, because whenever I talk to her, I feel like we’re just catching up from our last hang. Her work—whether this book, her Whetstone podcast on the history of pepper, her collaborative food research project Sourced, and the magazine Cheese—always digs deep into how identity, place, history, and food are inextricably intertwined in the stories of who we are, down to the bone.

In our conversation, which took place in January, I kept relating her work to some of the Caribbean writers and thinkers I love best: She writes from an island perspective, and not just literally because she grew up in New Zealand and resides in London, but because she so strongly and unapologetically writes from the perspective of periphery, of liminality. It is the writing of mixed identity, of a history that only colonialism made possible. Most of my favorite work and thinking comes from people who occupy such marginal spaces.

Another great part of this conversation was the clarity on the money aspect of writing a book when you’re financially responsible for yourself: Anna tells us about taking a part-time job in a restaurant and being able to afford only six weeks to get the book done. These are stories emerging writers need to hear.

I briefly mention our conversation from 2020, and it’s interesting to see the changes and the overlap. Here is a bit from our 2025 conversation: