BY ANNA SULAN MASING
Read an exclusive excerpt from “Chinese And Any Other Asian” by Anna Sulan Masing. Photo credit: Patricia Niven.
Gender
I became acutely aware about my racialised place in the world at the same time as I was beginning to understand desire, sexuality and my body. My gender, and how it intersected with race, was my crucial and brutal introduction to realising exactly how my difference played out in public. My identity was not my own but seemed to belong to the world at large. It was for others to decide who I was.
Those awkward teenage years were where I experimented with make up (too much of it, poorly applied), or wearing boys’ T-shirts, loose-fitting to cover any curves, outfits bought at the army surplus store. I ricocheted between wanting to explore my personal identity and gender, and wanting to hide from the world and the predatory looks I was receiving.
At eighteen, I didn’t just feel the looks, but I heard the words that put my body on a stage for others. Everyone is beautiful at eighteen. Then, like now, my hair was long. I’d discovered hair straightening
products, and I was desperate to tame my hair, make it obedient. I had just stopped dancing and playing sports so everything about my body was slowly softening. I weighed 50 kilograms, had a C-cup bra size, and strange men in the street would tell me I had ‘big tits for an Asian’.
A renowned amateur theatre director told me if I wanted to study theatre in London, I should audition for the ‘proper schools’ because: ‘I was just the right type of exotic they’d want.’ What she meant was I was different enough to be interesting, but familiar enough to be desirable, non-threatening, not dangerous. The ‘right’ things were my whiteness, my thinness, my youth, my long hair. I felt like she was describing a product for sale.
It was 2000 and for a moment in time, I was perfect – for a very specific lens. To be told that your flavour of difference is OK in other people’s mouths is bitter. I was navigating racialised gender and sexuality at a time when celebrity magazines were ripping apart women like it was war or sport. I have a joke about how white men flirt with me, trying to guess where I am from, without me uttering a word.
Then I speak with the broadest New Zealand accent I can muster, and their disappointment is palpable. They want something far flung, ‘exotic’. The most common guess in a dimmed bar is South America – Chile or Peru, usually – from white men who have been to South America for three to six months (any shorter they know it’s a holiday, any longer they know they don’t know anything). These men have insisted that I must know Spanish even after I’ve said ‘No, I said I’m half Malaysian!’ I am but a blank exotic canvas for fantasies to be projected on.
I remember being a child at ballet, and the mothers discussing making sure outfits were adjustable so that when we grew they didn’t have to make or buy a new character skirt and the like. One of the mothers nodded to me, and said to my mother: ‘Well, yes, your girls mature faster than ours, don’t they?’ with a slight hand gesture demonstrating curves. I remember thinking, what was my body going to do that my white friends’ bodies wouldn’t? The sexualisation of my body was seen at the age of eight.
When you are othered, you are hyper-aware of how much space your body takes up. The racism in school was contained to microaggressions that I could brush off, but entering into the adult world, for me, felt dangerous. I had internalised so much about the ways I could be acceptable, palatable, that I was constantly aware of when my body was misbehaving. My hair was frizzy, my skin marked by freckles, spots, moles. My body was rounded and my thighs were built for running through jungles,
whereas Asian women were (I thought! Media told me!) supposed to be small and delicate.
I have spent so long trying to tame myself, trying to choose an acceptable racial identity or an ambiguity or to lean into my whiteness. Every day, I still think about how I can move through space, how I will meet with people and I ask myself: How will they see me? What do I want them to see? In a world now of video calls, my face becomes a site of uncomfortableness and is fraught with (self) hatred.
I spent a week on Zoom calls with white people. During one interview, with a really lovely and interesting white woman, I became aware of our physical differences. The width of my nose, the slant of my eyes, the pallor of my skin mid-winter when it really needs to see the sun – everything felt in contrast to her, and my internal systems interpreted that as negative.
Vera and I were on a podcast once, and we spoke about these moments where you stop and realise ‘shit, I’m not white!’ These moments are jolting. In a very visceral way, you realise you are not ‘the norm’ in a white world, and that is understood as A Bad Thing. It is often gendered as well
as racialised. That Zoom call was yet another moment of self-realisation – of being ugly, of being unacceptable, of ‘shit, I’m not white!’
I only realised how much that Zoom call affected me two days later, after I had back-to-back Zoom calls with people for this book. An abundance of Asian faces! I was positively bouncing off walls with enthusiasm for life. I stopped and thought about the week and the way I had felt. Seeing myself reflected (albeit online) was incredibly important. It normalised me; I didn’t have to think about my body, my face in the spaces I was occupying. I was able to simply exist.

About the author
Dr. Anna Sulan Masing is an academic, poet and journalist. She co-founded SOURCED, a public research platform that explores our global food and drink systems; and is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Cheese magazine. Anna Sulan’s 10-part narrative podcast Taste of Place, by Whetstone Radio Collective, explores colonialism and nostalgia through the history of pepper; and her 2025 podcast To Be Delicious: a cultural context of MSG in Britain by Lecker, looks at ESEA racism, diaspora, and the future of msg and umami. Her debut book, Chinese And Any Other Asian, will be published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in February 2025.
Anna Sulan has written in a number of publications, including BBC World Table, CNN, Guardian, Foodism, Good Beer Hunting, Waitrose, Apartamento. Her work has been shortlisted at the Guild of Food Writers and Fortnum & Mason Food Awards. She has spoken at various symposiums around the world on the topic of drinks, sustainability, heritage, gender and identity.
Her doctorate was investigating storytelling practices of the Iban, a South East Asian indigenous people of which Anna Sulan is part of. Her PhD looked at how those practices migrated, and how identity changes when space and location changes. This looked at the intersection of performance, gender, farming practices, and identity. Photo credit: Patricia Niven.