The Adventures Of A Chinese Brit Growing Up In Post-War Liberal Britain
Political analysis, cultural critique and original thought with a dash of wit from Anna Chen, the UK's longest-standing dissenting writer of Chinese heritage
“Charming, witty and sophisticated. ” – SUNDAY TIMES
“… extraordinary … independence and spirit. A very distinct voice, very funny …” – Jean Seaton, Director, ORWELL PRIZE
“Assured, funny, angry, exhilarating … A triumph.” – Alan Moore
Sui Generis
Okay. In brief, here’s a bit about me before I throw myself into the world of Substack for your amusement and delectation.
I am the UK’s first Chinese punk, the first Chinese Brit to take a show to the world-famous Edinburgh Fringe Festival, a published poet at 14, Orwell Prize shortlisted and longlisted, a TED speaker, a BBC writer and presenter of groundbreaking programmes back when there was an inch of space to do such things, a dissenting journalist (formerly Guardian, New Internationalist, Asia Times), critical thinker and political analyst.
And, yes, contrary to the template, I am capable of original thought.
I was born and raised in Hackney, east London, the child of a Chinese father and an English mother. Growing up in the heart of two major civilisations at a historic crossroads, it was hardly surprising that I would end up as a cultural outrider.
Born into the belly of the imperial beast, it was difficult to miss how no Chinese were positively reflected in the culture. Realising young it was only supposed to be vampires, not humans, who cast no reflection, I kicked up.
My disquiet went far beyond the ghetto of identity politics, the safe zone into which minorities are usually shovelled. I grew to recognise this erasure as a manifestation of a larger class conflict that required women and labour, as well as empire minorities, to submit to a grinding world order. I may have found myself on the immediate frontline of sinophobia but it was one battlefield in a wider class war.
One of my objectives — to demystify and humanise the Chinese as a counterweight to the Yellow Peril stereotypes embedded in western culture – was never an effort to empower the bourgeoisie of one ethnic group to which I happened to belong. It was a matter of survival and solidarity with everyone else who fell on the wrong side of the divide.
It was also good training in discerning truth from illusion.
The pressure was always to be submissive and why should I submit? I was sensitive but I wasn’t a delicate lotus blossom. I didn’t giggle. I didn’t have a bell-like, tinkling laugh, more a throaty guffaw like Fenella Fielding had just been told a rude joke. I was never tiny and doll-like. My glutes were built for running 100 metre hurdles and I was likely to squish you if I landed on you.
I won my chess matches, I argued my case. A classic autodidact, I was into dinosaurs, astronomy and science. I read The Little Red Book by six. By twelve, I could tear a telephone directory in half. (Technique, baybee!) I’ve survived being mauled by a puma and swum with sharks (the fishy kind). I was never going to defer to pasty-faced Masters of the Universe.
So …
Undeterred by the absence of role models and fed up with deeply embedded stereotypes that were taken for granted, I defied the degrading western narratives and carved out new ground in my activities, my writing and my commentary on British politics and culture.
“Whatever current western propaganda demands that you believe, we are capable of altruism, fellow feeling, critical thinking and original thought. Of course we are. We’re human.”
Thirty years of writing inside the belly of the empire beast
There was a lot to learn from a lifetime of watching geopolitics unfold while living through the West’s cycle of capitalism. From post-war austerity, through its sparkling zenith of The Beatles and the arts to an ignominious end in crushing austerity redux (which we’re entering right now), I realised that we were in danger of completing the circle and ending up in another world war if we didn’t pull a rabbit out of the hat.
Looking around me now, I’m shocked by how much that we took for granted we’ve lost. I’m a direct conduit back to a kinder time when the British working class were at peak confidence. Having the oldest working class in the world, the country had the greatest potential for social change for the benefit of the majority: AKA revolution. Karl Marx came to London and wrote about it. A century later, I lived it and saw the hope wax and wane.
In the expanding post-war economy we’d had it good compared to our cousins in the remnants of the British Empire. We were granted a National Health Service, housing, jobs and education which turned the majority into a society of high-functioning, apex proletarians with upward class mobility.
Don’t knock it; it gave us the space to raise the collective consciousness and for a while we soared.
However, it came with a dark perk: you, too, could join the ruling class should your moral compass fail. This perpetually dangling carrot kept profits high and seduced many of us away from the temptations of communism, a prospect that terrified our elites.
The 1960s were marvellous unless you were living in China or Northern Ireland or South Africa or the Gorbals or the USA’s deep south or any number of nations struggling to be reborn, but I digress.
We went on strike, we protested. We created marvellous cultural artefacts. The media had relative bandwidth, the press was benign up to a point. With access to the world’s art, literature, philosophy and politics, our souls and spirits were enriched, our empathy finely developed to embrace fellow humanity.
All these things we could do before the jaws of the State snapped shut. Because we understood too late that the State isn’t a charity. It isn’t our parents unless you count Wicked Stepmothers and brutish fathers. It does enough to keep itself in power and no more.
With the collapse of the Soviet communist bloc in 1991, our ruling elites no longer had to pretend to care. They started to claw back all our gains on turbo-charge.
As the elites of the declining empire cut us adrift like gangrenous limbs, preserving the core organs, I’m addressing a new generation I see cheated out of what was possible: dreams made concrete reality through cooperation rather than the fetish of “competition” — for which, read dog-eat-dog and devil take the hindmost.
Oh, but here comes an upstart: a Cinderella story of the world’s factory transformed into a fabulous Golden Goose. Our global lifeboat and growth engine bringing peace, stability and affordable stuff.
I bet the Wicked Stepmother and the Ugly Sisters are going to have something to say about that. “Load the cannon, fire the torpedoes and break out the bubbly. We have a class war to win!”
A detailed biography and blog archive can be found at Anna’s website
2. Renew the spirit, free the mind, change the world. In the meantime, maintain.
In the tiny sliver of time that is my life, I managed to carve out a space in the culture from being the first Chinese Brit to take a show to the prestigious Edinburgh Fringe Festival 30 years ago, the satirical trailblazer Suzy Wrong, Human Cannon, to making groundbreaking programmes for the BBC. But the Obama Pivot to Asia and Trump’s Captain Ahab schtick with the white whale of China means that’s all closed down. In order for the West’s Viking raiding party to turn the Golden Goose into a dead duck, it requires a dehumanised, cartoon China on whom to unleash their worst impulses. And that means no Chinese with whom to empathise. Blank canvases only.
The same goes for the working and middle classes everywhere. The Empire wants to do to the whole world what they did to the Native Americans, to India, Africa and China.
I’m here for kindred spirits who say, hell no!
I want to talk to those interested in critical thinking, who look around and says wtf!? To Brits, Americans and Europeans who wonder where their lives, livelihoods and hopes went in some of the richest economies on the planet. To people of Chinese heritage who wonder what the hell’s happened in the West. And to the Chinese emerging into their day in the sun, breaking out of their centuries-long cocoon as beautiful butterflies only to find the predators lining up — don’t be seduced into our bad habits.
Anyone interested in clarity, a different perspective rooted in 400 years of the Age of Enlightenment, is welcome.
I feel a special kinship with the young women being buried by a Gamergate generation bringing back the old oppressions dressed up in new clothes. Bright young women who decline to submit to the hierarchy of delusional ass-hattery and plonkerdom.
Let this be your spiritual home.
3. Waddya get?
I’m going to start curating my key articles on Substack for paid subscribers, selected from a vast cache of writing, blogs and history at my labour-of-love website, annachen.co.uk, most of which will remain free for the foreseeable future.
Free subscribers will get access to all public posts.
Paid subscribers get access to all public posts and some subscriber-only posts plus the full archive as it builds on Substack. You also get to comment and receive my attention. I hope to have some lively enlightening chats here.
Free and paid members get discounts off Anna’s poetry books and Shakedown Timeline: America’s 21st century war on China (soon) plus others to come. Paid subs get signed copies.
Founder members receive the same plus, should they so choose, their names in lights on the Roll of Honour, whose glitzy design is to come. If I ever did T-shirts, you’d get one.
I’m aiming to publish at least weekly. It may be more, it might be less depending on my video output. Talking of which, paid subs get first access to my video talks, when I can work out how it works on Substack, before I upload to TikTok and YouTube.
What I’m really keen on is some sort of podcast where we can debate, inform and share eyeball to eyeball.
I’m still working out how to make this all work. I hope you’ll come on that journey with me. To the stars and beyond!
4. The author and her links
5. Previously …
Anna Chen has written for New Internationalist magazine, the South China Morning Post, Tribune, Morning Star and the Guardian. She wrote a column for Asia Times.
Her two poetry collections are published by Aaaargh! Press.
She was a freelance writer and presenter for BBC Radio 4 and Resonance FM and appeared as a commentator on BBC World Service and Sky News. She sat on the ITN Diversity Panel, was both short- and long-listed for the Orwell Prize and is a TED speaker. She was one of the few east Asian women of colour visible in the media before the roof fell in.
Welcome to the one true original thinker left in the interverse.