EAGG meets Abbey Wong, Founder of Voice ESEA

·     You’re Director at Voice ESEA , what is it and why did you help found it?

Voice ESEA is a non-profit founded in 2021 by ESEA lawyers, in active response to the rise in hate crimes against the East and South East Asian (ESEA) community in the U.K. during the pandemic. We focus on 2 data-driven outputs:

- The ESEA data collective, in collaboration with King’s College London- to quantify hate crime hotspots and empower policy makers to enact educational change where ESEA communities are affected by normalised racism

- ⁠An annual ‘ESEA history in the U.K.’ exhibition to educate the British public on our hidden, intertwined history. In 2025, for example, we will be hosting a panel, exhibition and film screening about the six Chinese people on the Titanic, and the complex geopolitics they had to navigate, simply for being Asian.

Our team of 26 professionals bring their expertise across tech, data, marketing and law to their volunteering roles. We are similarly driven to achieve racial equity in the U.K., through data-driven, top-down education and bottom-up community support. We have been featured on ITV News, documentaries and in talks at corporates, who acknowledge the importance of numerical data in storytelling and changemaking around racism in the UK.

·     In your other life, you are a Full Stack Engineer – what is this?

A Full Stack Engineer works on both the front and back end of a website. The front end is what the website looks like and how users (you and I) will interact with it to complete different user journeys. Say for example, on Facebook, one user journey is to log in, click on the chat icon, and start a conversation. Another might be to log in, scroll down your feed, click on a post, comment on it, and then click into the affiliated link. For the backend, software engineers look to creating architecture to ensure all those posts get into the feed, and refresh whenever you need it to.

I work at Ki Insurance, a front runner in the Lloyd’s of London insure-tech world. We are innovating an industry reliant on brokers running up and down the Square Mile in Central London, and offering them tech solutions that tick off a huge chunk of their slips at the click of a button, thanks to our partnerships and algorithm.

The product I work on is our user platform- working closely with the UX designers to ensure we understand the psychology behind each user journey, and thus, ensuring our company’s success. I personally find it fascinating. I joined the industry through Code First Girls and am a huge advocate for women exploring tech, especially after being the first in my family to go to university, and navigating a deviation from my Data Science heavy Geography degree.

·     What is the ESEA Data Collective and why is it so important?

The ESEA Data Collective is made up of academics from King’s College London, and data specialists volunteering for Voice ESEA and End the Virus of Racism (EVR). We joined forces in 2022, and every year, collate, map and analyse Freedom of Information request data from all 48 police jurisdictions across the UK.

ITV News, documentaries, corporates and universities come to our research collective because we are one of a few groups providing regional quantitative data about racial hate crimes against the ESEA community. You can’t argue with numbers, so our data provides a helpful anchor point to their news coverage and discussions. This was especially necessary during the pandemic, when an overwhelming number of written accounts of racial hatred came out, but reactions around the rise in crimes were getting drowned out amidst a stream of bad news. More recently, as we’ve collaborated with The Information Lab (dashboard on our website) and started compiling a written report (to be published in Dec 2024), we’ve found that policy makers have been empowered to enact top-down change with our dataset because our data-driven approach provides a way to pinpoint actionable responses specific to geography.

I envision a future where research from our history exhibition can be implemented in the British education syllabus- to reshape how the next generation of British community views ESEA people as belonging and safe in the UK, not ‘the other’.

YPAD, London 2024

·     This year marked the inaugural ‘ESEA History in the UK’ exhibition (nee Yellow Peril Awareness Day (YPAD)) in both London and Manchester.  Tell us more.

‘ESEA history in the UK’ is hidden British history. This annual exhibition provides the opportunity for the British public to dive into one topic each year.

Our Head of Strategy, Choon Young Tan initially came up with the idea of exhibiting hidden ESEA history topics at a Voice ESEA event. He’d uncovered lists of British topics none of us had heard of before- the secret, governmental deportations of Chinese seafarers from Liverpool in 1945, the Chinese survivors of the Titanic in 1912. How ESEA people navigated the UK only last century prefaces the work we do now for the ESEA community.

The further we dug into it, the clearer it was that this wasn’t just ESEA history. We needed this British history to be taught beyond the ESEA echo chamber. In preparation for our inaugural event in both London and Manchester in May 2024, over 60 volunteers spanning UK, Malaysia and USA time zones turned up to research, write, edit, contribute to and curate a timeline of over 40 topics about ESEA history in the UK. With the support of museum directors from across London, we ensured the voices highlighted in each story were that of the ESEA group it belonged to, not the viewer.

The multi-city event will occur again in May 2025, focusing on deep diving into one specific topic each year. To engage people with differing learning styles, with children, with differing interests, each roving event includes written exhibitions with props for immersion, film screenings, a commissioned art piece to color in and reflect over, and panel discussions with specialists designed to open conversations about difficult topics in a safe environment.

 Abbey Wong, centre, at the Ogilvy panel talk

·     You recently took part in a panel talk at Ogilvy’s on evolving ESEA Representation in the UK media and social landscape. What were your biggest takeaways and where do you see ESEA representation going in the next few years?

Shoutout GG and Matt Foster for bringing me into the room, it was very cool to recognise how far Voice ESEA’s come. We’re a group of volunteers who do this in our free time because we know how important it is to enact change for the next generation of ESEA people in this country. 3 years later, we have entirely fully fledged projects to influence conversations like this with.

The panel spanned topics across sustainable fashion, media, our data project and the importance of breaking out of our ESEA echo chambers to empower real change. In addition to pushing my public speaking skills, it ultimately showed me that companies have a real power to enable safe discussions like these when they make space for these events and voices.

Ogilvy is a frontrunner in the world of marketing. Who knows what impact our discussion points will have on their marketing projects and the masses they’ll reach in the future. If all forward-thinking companies created the same safe spaces for top-down discussion and change, who knows what the world could look like in the future.

Tell me about growing up as a British born Chinese and what that experience was like (both positives and negatives)

I’m from the 2nd most ethnically diverse borough in the country. It’s situated in East London and all my friends growing up were 3rd generation South Asians. We all grew up very proud and comfortable with our unique heritages, and in going to each other’s homes, we learned to love each other’s. It blew my mind to get to university and suddenly see myself as an ethnic minority. This was also at the same time as the rise in the Black Lives Matter movement, which made a lot of people question identity politics and the idea of belonging in this country.

I’m privileged to have been able to grow up in the UK. I go back to Hong Kong and feel guilty for my privilege, thankful for my parents’ sacrifices and dedication to staying in an alien land, and hopeful for spaces where cross cultural exchanges are allowed to happen. I simultaneously feel shame around not knowing my heritage as much as I might have if I’d been raised in my homeland.

And yet, it’s prime time to be ESEA in (London) right now. We’re at the epicentre of globalised cultural exchanges. I’m able to feel safe and proud of my heritage, differences and perspectives. It’s a beautiful, complicated, intricate map of cultural insights I’m appreciative to have access to and I’m excited to see what the next generation of ESEA people in this country are able to tap into as they explore the concept of home!

·     What are your top three tips for exploring ESEA culture and heritage in the UK?

Great question… I think imported, ‘traditional’ ESEA culture is seeing a resurgence after our grandparents’ generation had to embrace diluted versions of it to survive. Think, the first ESEA supermarket in London’s Chinatown only opened in 1965.

Okan restaurant, London

Now, there’s pockets of ESEA businesspeople who have become emboldened to redefine home- think Maginhawa Group and Mama Kubo bringing Filipino flavours to the forefront of ESEA representation, and Okan offering homecooked Japanese food with distinct Osakan surroundings, as an alternative to the ramen and sushi even Western brands sell in supermarkets.

What is ESEA culture now in the UK though? I went to ESEA Sisters’ takeover at Somerset House a year back, and more recently, Eastern Margins x Rise United’s DJ sets- you couldn’t dream up these subcultures of ESEA people who want to be out in safe spaces, just purely out to enjoy electronic music by platformed ESEA talent. It’s so freeing for it to be so normal to find like-minded people, be it in terms of the Hackney Chinese Community Centres’ Mahjong club for all ages, EAGG and Steam room East’s artist community, or discussions on ESEA food at Asian Leadership Collective’s ESEA Eats events, or Little Yellow Rice Co’s Congee club in Manchester.

1.  If you want traditional ESEA culture, find people who bring it to the forefront with a story to tell. Learn about it through their first-hand, unique experience of home. Take, for example, the amount of research put into both our annual history exhibition and that at the Museum of the Home to ensure ESEA voices are being showcased, not that of the external viewer.

2.  Go out of your way to ask about more than just what diluted British ESEA culture allowed our grandparents’ generation to express. Come to Voice ESEA’s history exhibition and uncover hidden British ESEA stories. Ask On Your Side about Chinatown Exchange’s research into how translations shape immigrant understandings of what constitute a hate crime worth reporting, and let an interest in language expand your understanding of how hard immigrants have to work to adapt to British norms, and what they had to leave behind (including unbelievably affordable good food).

3.  I recently went to a community space and they were the most insufferable people I’d ever met. Find your people. It will differ depending on who you surround yourself with. Acknowledging culture is ever morphing and is defined by ever morphing community spaces. Find a version of community you feel comfortable exploring heritage with!