Asian Pirate Musical!!
Six years ago, a group of Asian composers, thespians and theatre kids asked me for some guidance on a musical featuring Sek Yeung, the Qing Dynasty pirate leader, and Admiral Zheng He, the Ming dynasty maritime explorer. I was delighted, as I’d been thinking about ‘Madam Ching’ for a while. When the BBC’s Doctor Who pitted the folk hero against the Sea Devils (With cringe-inducing outcomes) I took the opportunity to bring my research and thoughts together, and included an interview with Nemo Martin, about the newly solidified Asian Pirate Musical. Unable to catch the first round of performances, I was nevertheless, impressed by the soundtrack. I’d kept in touch with the team over the years, so it was with great excitement that now, six years later, I finally got to see the now polished version of the project.
Posted in Events and tagged Asian, music, musical, pirates, theatre
Sneaky Supper: Snack or Busted, Your Call!
I may not talk about my new found love for boardgames and TTRPGs enough, as I actively work on promoting Sinosphere created games, and help western creators produce culturally appropriate games content. It was with this hat on that I found myself at UK Games Expo this year, touching base with creators and generally looking around.
I stopped off at Capital Gains games, drawn in by their Zombie Life Insurance game (which I will be talking about soon), and found a lovely Singaporean company producing small box games with fun graphics, a wide range of subjects, quick playtimes, many of them capturing that Sinophone experience.
So many games of this type are food based. It’s a universal experience, but also carries the specificities of home. Apps and boardgames commonly draw on cooking, hot pot, buffet, dim sums, or ‘guess the dish’ mechanics, and I’ve found myself having to triple check which hotpot deck building dice game I’m playing. I get it. When there is SO MUCH content tied to culinary tradition, it’s hard to be original (says your girl as she edits another “Roll For Noodles” video). Sneaky Supper, however, is a subgenre I hadn’t seen before.
Posted in Articles, Events and tagged Asian, food, game, pop culture, review, Singapore, snacks, tabletop
Be Gay, For God’s Sake: Literary Consultancy
Even during the incredibly eventful and busy year of 2025, I found time to fit in some literary consultancy on the play Be Gay, For God’s Sake. I really wanted my fellow queer Asian creators to succeed and to amplify these intersectional voices that are so key to global queer dialogues. I’m delighted that after performing at Totnes Fringe, they gained a residency at the Voila Theatre Festival, and won Best New Play at the 2025 Fringe Theatre Awards.
Posted in Events and tagged Asian, award, consultancy, East Asian, ESEA, fringe, intersectionality, play, queer, theatre
Story Feast 2025: ESEA Futures
On the day of the Far Right rallies in central London on the 13th of September 2025, it felt momentous to be there to stand with my fellow East and Southeast Asian authors, and our diverse audiences at SOAS. It was a day packed with fantastic panels. On the ESEA Futures panel, we discussed how we first got into genre fiction, Western definitions of sci-fi imposed on ESEA literature and how legend and lore sit at an intersection between speculative genres. It was the first time I had spoken about Wuxia storytelling to an Anglophone audience in person, specifically discussing the differences and similarities in its speculative elements with similar fiction in the West.
Posted in Events and tagged Asian, authors, books, diversity, ESEA, festival, fiction, inclusivity, literature, london, POC, representation, SFF, speculative, Wuxia
How SFF Is Changing
I have always maintained that diverse writers must be included in the main discourse of subject matters, rather than seconded into special interest groups, thus making them feel like oddities, rather than fully part of the community. It was with this in mind that I was so pleased to be invited to FanfiAddict’s author livestream on How SFF is Changing, which put me on a panel with a wonderful selection of authors from very different backgrounds, all writing about and working in different styles, content and traditions. There were a few points in the discussion I did not get to address at the time, or may not have been concise on, and thought I would take the opportunity to expand on them here.
Posted in Events and tagged Asian, china, commentary, diversity, fantasy, fiction, literature, livestream, mythology, representation, SFF