Alternative Roots Part II: Finding Community and Questioning the Everyday

Introduction by Janejira Matthews

Alternative Roots Festival took place last month in Hoxton Hall, London. Encouraging artists from East and South-East Asian heritage to share their work, the festival offered an impressive range of mediums from contemporary dance, workshops and installations. Our guest writer, Namy Yu, joined us to delve into themes of belonging and a search for community – a search that for several artists at the festival was clearly a prominent part of their being in the UK. Enlightening perspectives yet also discovering tension, the works Yu viewed at the festival proved to examine what is often taken for granted in everyday life against the backdrop of a minority being.

Rat Eater (Act 1) by Lanyun Huang (Finch) starts with a balloon-headed performer munching down rats and rubbish. The performance creates tension through sound: dropping water, heavy breathing from the rat eater, and whispers mingling throughout the room. Huang tries to follow the trail with a rope, but she cannot see inside the balloon. She would like to go forward, but she struggles. The whispers create a thrilling vibe of desire and anxiety. The audience can see the performance up close, as if we are secretly peeking into her private worlds.   As a guest journalist who has not been exposed to this type of performance, I felt fascinated to experience this intimate and secretive act.

In the second act, the audience is invited to a darker side: taboo. Two doctors enter in erotic and sensuous costumes to start surgery. Throughout the surgery, we see that Huang imagines herself in a swimming pool. Above my head, digital linguistic fissures appear, scattering her words. As the procedure continues, I start to wonder what is fantasy, and what is reality. Is Huang swimming and fantasising about the erotic surgery with lust, or is she yearning for purity and innocence?

Rat Eater (Act 1) ends with the naked Huang left behind on the operating table, exposing herself as if she is the subject of a queer psychic experiment. The performance makes me question what reality is in a wider sense, and how it builds anxiety and what makes people question their identities.

Image: Reading workshop led by Clare Chun-yu Liu | Photographer: Joy Chao

Clare Chun-yu Liu, a visual artist, opened the workshop by expressing how much Minor Feelings: an Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong has expressed her ideas and feelings as accurately as possible. For me, Minor Feelings became one of the top non-fiction reads I felt connected to as an ‘other’, alongside East Side Voices: Essays celebrating East and Southeast Asian Identity in Britain by Helena Lee, Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging by Afua Hirsch and Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge.  What makes Minor Feelings particularly special for me is that it touches on racial trauma and a sense of belonging as a ghosted minority in society and history.

The book describes the concept of minor feelings as “the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed. Minor feelings arise, for instance, upon hearing a slight, knowing it’s racial, and being told, oh, that’s all in your head. […] after her reality has been belittled so many times, she begins to doubt her very own senses. Such disfiguring of senses engenders the minor feelings of paranoia, shame, irritation, and melancholy.”

After introducing ourselves, the workshop panels read through selections from the book. It was interesting to see how diverse the panels were, including East Asian British, East Asian American, Taiwanese, Chinese, European, Caucasian British, and more (including a Korean immigrant myself).  We reflected on what we are “grateful” for. It was fascinating to hear from other participants how different generations and immigrant status have affected the intensity of gratefulness and belonging. As an immigrant who has lived in the UK for over sixteen years, not by my own voluntary choice but due to expectation, those two conflicting factors created mixed feelings that hindered being grateful but caused challenging emotions around diaspora for me.

I raised a point that the depth can be varied depending on how we interpret our experiences; however, as a minority, East and Southeast Asians face racial discrimination. As I could see several other participants were white, I asked them if they had witnessed racism and how we (all) could tackle the issues. One laughed politely and said he had not witnessed any racism. Even though it was not his intention, this simple act exposed the possible fragility and limitations of white perspectives, highlighting the significance of Park Hong’s book.

The author, Cathy Park Hong, said, “Unless we are read as Muslim or trans, Asian Americans are fortunate not to live under hard surveillance, but we live under a softer panopticon, so subtle that it’s internalised, in that we monitor ourselves, which characterizes our conditional existence.[…] But what does that mean? Does that mean making ourselves suffer to keep the struggle alive? Does it mean simply being awake to our suffering? I can only answer that through the actions of others.” East and Southeast Asians often make up a minority group, not only in the UK but also in other parts of the world, throughout history. Thinking about Park Hong’s book during the workshop makes me wonder if internalised monitoring leads to us soften our voices for the sake of fitting into the “good minority” image, and what the damage is. It is about time for us to think about how to grow allyship to feel recognised and included.

Due to the limited time, we had to close our discussion. I would like to express my gratitude to Clare, who led the workshop with an inclusive approach. It was a great pleasure to join the workshop for East and Southeast Asians with full engagement.

Image: X&J/Many Projects - 2025PCM | Photographer: Joy Chao

X&J’s film installation 2025PCM splendidly presents a London home, a flat measuring one cubic meter, onto a 90-degree folded screen. The “cost of living crisis” has not been the most frequently used term until after the COVID-19 pandemic. X&J presents 2025, a projection-mapped film installation at the intersection of immersive media. It is very cleverly made with 3D film production techniques made for 90-degree building facades around London.

Inspired by Xin’s first studio in London, the film captures only the essentials of everyday life: having a cup of coffee, noodles, a banana for breakfast, studying, reading and chatting with friends in a flat, chatting online with family, having dinner and going to bed, decorating and cleaning the room, playing a guitar, or hosting a friend visiting with a dwarf sunflower as a thoughtful gesture.

The sunflower is looking outside as the darkness starts to fill with the night coming along. Like the sunflower, Xin attempts to live alongside the absurdity of London’s housing market, searching for sunlight and a sense of belonging to survive in London. Seeking even a glimpse of sunlight reminds me of my own experience searching for a welcoming community as a minority. I’m grateful that 2025PCM, alongside the Alternative Roots festival as a whole, has caught sight of hope as well as the struggle that can come with being a minority identity in the UK.