Having a certain former US first lady request our 2020 edition of Bazaar Art was also a massive career highlight. The facility includes a height-adjustable bench, tracking hoist system, a centrally-placed toilet, a height-adjustable basin and a shower. Listening to other people debate your origins in your presence is a disconcerting experience, but it’s one that I’ve become accustomed to over nearly three decades of living in Europe. HL: I love coming across new voices – we featured Ruth Negga, Lily James, Gugu Mbatha-Raw and more in a young actresses portfolio near the start of my Bazaar career, and they’ve all gone on to become global and Bazaar cover stars. Many of their wives never knew what happened to them, and their children grew up believing they had been abandoned.

East Side Voices: Celebrating ESEA Identity - Southbank Centre

With contributions from actors, novelists and poets, among others, this riveting and important book covers themes of family history, racial identity, assimilation and difference. Forthcoming events include a Debuts Night, in partnership with publisher 4th Estate on 16 February, featuring authors Cecile Pin, Wiz Wharton and Nicola Dinan as well as a preview of RF Kuang’s Yellowface.There were essays written by journalists, poets, actresses, and even chefs, so I learned so much from them. The evening is hosted by Helena Lee, founder of the East Side Voices salon and editor of East Side Voices: Essays Celebrating East and Southeast Asian Identity, and features poetry, discussion and live readings by contributors to this first-of-its-kind anthology. I’ve since found out that the St Michael brand was phased out in the year 2000, making this bag at least 20 years old. So many small things were so relatable to me in this: the non-verbal ways Asian parents express their love, the unspoken shame of divorce for east Asian people, the embarrassment over things your parents do (like collecting pee in a bucket in the bathroom for fertilising plants), name pronunciation, the list goes on. This routine would always play out at the end of family dinners once I’d left home and, this time around, it felt both familiar and oddly comforting – because it had been a while since our last dinner.

East Side Voices, edited by Helena Lee review – reflections East Side Voices, edited by Helena Lee review – reflections

A first book of its kind: a collection of essays from the perspective of East and South-East Asian voices in Britain, curated and edited by Helena Lee. Surely an Italian would be affronted if they were constantly mistaken for being French; someone of Malaysian heritage should certainly not be conflated with a person from Vietnam. As well as launching a cultural platform, I wanted to put together a collection of writing that had the space to explore the richness of what it meant to be British and part of the diaspora, that looked at big questions of identity and dispelled the myth of homogeneity, but also highlighted the details of both the everyday and the extraordinary: marriage and divorce, growing up in the suburbs, dropping out of college, mother-daughter relationships and so on. The most powerful and disturbing piece is by novelist Claire Kohda, who describes her philistine English grandmother’s treatment of her: “When my cousins once visited my nan and grandad at the same time as me and my parents, they received little bags of sweets and chocolates, while I sat and watched empty-handed from a corner of the room.We look around the kopitiam table as we trot out these habitual phrases, noting the variety of friends present, some mixed-race, others in mixed-race relationships, all of us drawn from different ethnic and religious backgrounds. As a non-ESEA person, but someone who is fascinated by Asia, it was a delight to read and I found many similarities to my own life despite the obvious differences. I found out that, after seven continuous months at sea on his first voyage, my dad had noticed that the white British officers and crew spent six months at sea at most, with some serving four-month contracts before getting tickets to fly home to be with their families. This book was a great insight into the lives of individuals in the East and Southeast Asian (ESEA) community living in the UK, and some of the difficulties they have faced as a result of being from this community. Slowly regretting putting this off for so long because this was amazing and it took me less than a day to finish.