Boundaries > borders

Revisiting my 2023 Ins and Outs

You may have noticed that this is the time of year¹ when the endless lists written in the ‘Ins and Outs’ format are doing the rounds. These lists are written in varying degrees of tone; from the flippant to attention-seekingly spicy, crafted in the hope of a viral share, to the sombre and desperate (can we universally agree that genocide is a definite Out for 2024?). It’s starting to feel like these New Year lists have become an extension of the Spotify Wrapped post; a way to publish your politics, opinions and identity in one screenshot.

I wasn’t in the mood to do Ins and Outs for this year. But one habit I have been developing is to revisit old notes. As a compulsive scribbler, my desk is rammed with notebooks filled with pages of notes, always dated and titled, whether of fantasy menus or soundbites from a podcast. I am adamant that we generally don’t need more new ideas, we just need to remember the good ones we’ve forgotten. Yesterday, my notebook fortuitously fell open to the Ins and Outs list I had written while on a slow train to Bangkok exactly one year ago.

And so, today’s post will retrospectively decode what I had jotted down. The list:

Though I never published the list — it was intended to steer and evolve my work as a writer and community organiser — I am now sharing them for readers who are interested in doing the same work on their relationship to self, identity and community. Read on below to see the list fleshed out and reviewed. As ever, I would love to see your feedback in the comments section.

Out: tradition as a benchmark
In: creating your own traditions

In Fiddler On The Roof when Tevye says, ‘You may ask, “How did this tradition get started?” I’ll tell you!’ he immediately admits ‘I don’t know’ — thereby setting up one of the central points of tension in the plot of Jerry Bock’s musical. Can we really uphold tradition, family and survival at the same time?

‘Tradition’ is the Old Testament on which, time and time again, I see my fellow diaspora thump their flour-caked hands and rolling pins. It is not enough, in my opinion, to justify doing things because ‘that’s how it’s always been done’, if only because this precludes the [respectful] interrogation of traditions; both how they came to be, and how we can continue to evolve them.

‘If rituals bind a culture, how do you hold together a diverse community with no single shared tradition?’

This is the question I asked in ‘Building The Feast’, a piece that I recently wrote for Eating Better, in which I describe a newly invented tradition that my disparate group of East and Southeast Asian food lovers co-create with me every year. Do have a read.

Out: mourning fluency in mother tongue
In: learn the damn language, or explore non-verbal languages

I meet so many people who grieve their inability to speak their mother/father tongue, as if said language proficiency is already dead. I used to be that person; a bundle of embarrassment and resentfulness that my parents never taught me Cantonese or Hokkien. Now, well into adulthood, I learn what I can — one Chinese word a day is enough! — and recognise that language proficiency is a spectrum.

If you are not linguistically blessed, what about the non-verbal languages that still allow us to express our culture? Here are a few others you could explore: music, photography, movement, textiles, cooking…

Out: memes about toxic intergenerational traits
In: address the trait before it’s too late

Enough with the deflection.

My first feeling the moment my father died was not one of grief, but one of regret that we had never talked more. If I could trade all the countless internet jokes about silent, stoic Asian dads for one more conversation with him, I would. There’s only so much we can mine our immigrant parents’ shortcomings for social media clout. For this reason I admire what Parents Are Human is doing.

Out: food = identity
In: food = technology

I have written a whole book about diaspora food identity so I won’t try and fit it all in here, but for me food has first and foremost been a tool to explore identity. My spidey sense is that we start to enter dangerous territory when we associate food outright with identity. I was inspired by how writer Ted Gioia talks about music as technology; ‘a kind of cloud storage for societies… that don’t have semiconductors or spaceships.’

Chew on it.

Out: assume community = friends
In: build community, maybe make friends

Another observation from the past few years of building community is that community necessarily fulfils a different role to friendship. It’s a common mistake to want everyone in your community to be your friend, perhaps because you all share the same skin colour or play mahjong together. Tread with caution.

Out: shared identity in marginalisation
In: shared identity in joy and common ground

This is just my personal opinion and many may disagree.

Out: translate myself
In: own my voice

For every voice who’s been encouraged (by agents, publishers, mainstream media) to make themselves more intelligible, ask yourself: for whom? I wrote a Substack post in July about the challenges of constantly being In Translation. I refuse to translate myself anymore. It’s such a relief.

Out: commoditise my heritage
In: non-transactional cultural exchange

Wrote about this dichotomy in Festive Landgrab Paradox. I’m about to do the delicate dance again for Lunar New Year 2024…

Out: authenticity
In: authority

Once again, this is for anyone with a public voice who questions whether they are constantly ticking someone’s diversity box. Thinking about your authority, as opposed to your authenticity, is a handy way to bypass the loaded import of the latter. I don’t want you to hire me because I’m authentic [read: ethnic!], I want you to hire me because I have experience and authority.

Side note, after five years of continuous cooking and studying, I am finally offering food workshops. If you’re interested in a hands-on deep dive into the plant based Chinese kitchen, email me to hear more! Trust my authority, not my authenticity ;-)

Out: groupthink
In: groupwork

Groupthink is top-down decision making or opinion forming where individuals feel they cannot express an alternative to the general consensus. This was me, re: Everything Everywhere All at Once. I… didn’t love it.

Groupwork is collaborative, non-hierarchical and action-oriented.

Out: nostalgia
In: speculative future

Always circling back to our favourite topic, nostalgia. Also see above: creating your own traditions. One of the most rewarding challenges of being part of the Hackney Chinese volunteer team is that we are currently transitioning to a new community centre for the East and Southeast Asian community, and the total re-brand has allowed us to speculate on the future of a ‘community’ that until recently did not exist per se.

Whether you call it speculation, imagination, fantasy or projection, remembering that we are in this moment writing the future is a welcome antidote to the stagnation of nostalgia.

Out: borders
In: boundaries

It’s a cute slogan, I could see it on a T-shirt. #BoundariesNotBorders? Limite Sans Frontières?

1. What my friend Andrew called ang moh new year. Some of you know I don’t do end of year round ups until the change of zodiac ;-)