“I Like Being Brutal”

A conversation with Dr. Anna Sulan Masing about identity, durian, and writing.

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.

After the paywall below, you’ll find the audio, video, and the full transcript.

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:

Alicia: Well, I put one quote from the book into the chat that I really loved, that was especially about food and the nonsense of the phrase “food brings us together.” You write: “How can we be diasporic when our entire educational and cultural upbringing is rooted in the greatness of Britain, while in the sunshine, we dreamt of a white Christmas.” I just freaking loved that line. It reminds me of Walcott. Obviously, I’m always thinking about Derek Walcott. Can you talk more about that line and also how you arrived at telling a story and then you're smacking us with a bit of poetry that's really beautiful—how did that come about, and what is the notion of diasporic when even the imagination is stuck in the empire?

Anna: Yeah, and the word diaspora is something I've been using really in the last five years to ten years, right? Probably since my PhD and things like that, when you start to label and understand where you sit within this kind of cultural and economic context, you have to label yourself, and these labels are not really ones that you necessarily choose, but you kind of select. Because other people have said, “these are the labels you can choose; choose one.”

I was really interested in that, like what does it mean? I've always sort of felt like I was British; I came here because I was like, I'm going to study theater in London, and that's the place to be. Well, New Zealand theater is amazing, why didn't I think that was the place to be? Why was I trying to get to the other side of the world and live this dream? I do want to say that part of that is an Iban cultural history of travel and things like that, but still, why here? Why this? Why that?

Every time I think of my childhood, it’s me with a head in a book about fucking Henry the Eighth and all his wives. Like, why? You know? And then I think about New Zealand, and I'm thinking of the rolling hills of New Zealand. I'm like, what? No, they are rolling hills, but that’s not why I think of them as rolling hills.

I'm really fascinated with the kind of anglicization of all these colonial, ex-colonial spaces and it's just trying to navigate that. And I don't really have the answer, right? Like it's just trying to navigate where this feeling of belonging that I have for England and the UK, and, specifically, that I have for London [originates]. Then I keep coming up against these terms that are othering, even if I am choosing the term diaspora myself. Also this literal or physical idea of diaspora, which is this idea of there being a home place, right, that you kind of disperse from—but how do I disperse from something when I don’t feel like I have one locale? I would say that a lot of New Zealanders and Malaysians don't necessarily feel like they have one locale, because they've grown up reading all this stuff as well. It's not even just people of my generation: I would say that this is happening now, specifically, with the sort of onslaught of American media, with Netflix or any other kind of media that we get. So you know, what feels like home and what you watched at home—suddenly you know more about what it is to be an American high schooler, which is so weird.