Sean Wai Keung participated in the Heathrow Airport Residency in September 2018. We met up with him in Glasgow’s Chinatown mall, where we spoke to him about identity, food, poetry and editing.

Identity. Food. These things crop up a lot in your work. Do you feel as though there’s a connection there, and if so what is it?

Definitely. Food is an extension of identity. The reverse is true as well. Who you are is made up of the food you’ve eaten in the past, the food that your ancestors would have eaten, your grandparents, great grandparents… The food that they made comes down to you, and so in a way it helps make you the person you are.

A lot of my work focusses on the relationship between identity and food and how that affects not just individual identity but the identity of groups in society and attitudes towards those groups. For example, a lot of my work at the moment is based around Chinese takeaways and how it is that Chinese takeaway food has informed the identity of multi-generational immigrant families in the UK.

One of the interesting things about takeaway food is that it’s specific to different areas. Different areas have their own dishes and styles of takeaway. I’m really interested in the contact points between local people, immigrant people and descendants from immigrant populations. Food is a big part of that, because it’s how people come together when there’s no language. When immigrants come from a different country and they don’t have the language, they can still make a business for themselves, still communicate through providing food.

What’s your personal history with food?

My grandfather, when he came over from Hong Kong in the forties, originally worked in the shipyards and then started, as many did, in the catering industry after the Chinese Deportation Act. It was 1946, I think, when the UK government started trying to deport Chinese shipworkers. There was a memo called The Liverpool Problem that the government at the time sent to local police saying they wanted the Chinese out. Every person who worked on the ships had a payslip card that had their home town on it. This was where, if they lost their job, they were legally allowed to live. All the Chinese had changed it to Liverpool. Why wouldn’t you, if you were escaping from war? So the UK government told shipping businesses to change Liverpool to Shanghai so that police could then deport people to Shanghai, even though many of them didn’t even come from there.

That’s why lots of Chinese stopped working the ships and started working in catering. This was combined with a growing number of Chinese restaurants being opened just by people who were escaping communism. A lot of former ambassadors started working in catering in London – more fine dining restaurants. At first they catered to local populations, and then they realised that a lot of people liked fish and chips, so they started serving that as well. People kept coming back for fish and chips and would sometimes say, what’s this noodle dish you’re selling? I’ll give that a shot. They’d taste it. They’d think, wow that’s actually pretty good. And it would spread and spread and spread.

So, inadvertently by trying to deport Chinese shipworkers, the UK government actually caused a rise in the number of takeaways. It’s well-established that the Chinese population in Liverpool at the time was well-liked by other Liverpudlians, but in other parts of the country there was still a lot of mistrust. Even today I’ve done interviews about takeaway food and a lot of people say to me, I really like it, and my parents really liked it, but my grandparents would never touch anything foreign. It’s happened slowly, over time, as the people surrounding them go and try it, especially where people running takeaways had the foresight to slightly adapt their recipes to suit local tastes, which many did.

On the subject of identity, when did you start identifying as a poet?

My first days doing the MA in Poetry at UEA, I remember someone saying they felt awkward when calling themselves a poet. I remember saying, we are, surely. We write poems. That’s the definition. But some people feel that by labelling yourself there comes some weight with that. There’s some expectation or commitment or history attached that you have to live up to. I’ve always been quite good at not feeling any of that stuff. So I guess I don’t know when I first started calling myself a poet.

I try not to in general conversation. If someone asks I’ll say I write poems rather than I’m a poet. I do it because in a social setting there is that weight still, especially talking to people who don’t write. If I was just talking to someone in the pub, for example. There’s a difference between what you label yourself within your very being and what you tell people out loud… and it varies depending on the situation too. In a place where there are poets everywhere and writers everywhere like Norwich, like in class, or in workshops or theatres I think it’s fine. I’d say I write poems, I’m a poet I guess.

Because I like performing so much, I feel like “poet” doesn’t always best describe that love. That’s something I haven’t thought too deeply about. At the Fringe recently I thought, I haven’t actually done many poetry gigs, but I’ve done a lot of performance gigs. If someone asked me what I do, would I say I make poems and performances? Or that I’m a poet and I also perform? There are all sorts of ways to say it and I don’t know what best suits me. For ease of use I just say I write poems.

If there’s a difference between performance and poetry, where do you think you and your work fall on that spectrum?

It’s all pretty much one to me. When I call something poetry or performance I’m talking mostly about the marketing around it or the other people who are there. A poetry gig will have lots of people who self-identify as poets, and performance gigs will have lots of people who self-identify as performance artists. When I ran events I made an effort to be diverse, booking people who were published poets and had written stuff, and booking performers who would use the stage in interesting ways. I’ve always preferred events that were mixed, where who knows what’s going to happen next. In my own head there’s not a distinction. It’s all a stage. A page is just a 2D platform on which a performance happens. One of my big essays at Norwich was about how there’s no difference between poetry and performance.

[In the background, a small child starts crying plaintively.]

I’m sorry kid. You can be just a poet if you want.

When it comes to location – you’ve performed in many different places – what does a space do to a poem, and a poem do to a space?

I feel like the space changes the poem more than the poem changes the space, because I think poems come from the surroundings. I think it provides some depth that, as an artist, you can’t necessarily give to it yourself. I did a livestreamed reading halfway up Arthur’s Seat. And just being out in nature in this place by a ruin provided a very different context to my poems than they would have elsewhere. If I’d performed them in a pub people would have been paying attention to just the poems, but because it was in the middle of this ruin it was informed by the heat, by tourists who would stumble past really abruptly, by people who would stop and take pictures. It changed the poem, but I’m not quite sure how.

Those things are very hard to tell from a performer’s perspective. I know I got different audience reactions than I would in other places. I think that also applies in different cities. Glasgow is one of the most up for it audiences I’ve ever performed to. You get certain audiences in certain places who seem scared to join in. They’re scared to clap loudly or cheer or contribute. They want to just be an audience and enjoy what’s happening. In Glasgow it’s not like that. There have been several times when the audience will just join in spontaneously on repetitive bits. That’s never happened in any other city.

You recently published a pamphlet titled you are mistaken with The Rialto. How was that experience? Did the manuscript change much during editing?

Certain poems more so than other poems. The order changed a lot. I really enjoyed the editing sessions over Skype because I’d never done it before. It was my first big thing to be published. I’d had editing meetings over single poems or poems for anthologies, but this was going to have just my name and the publisher’s name on it.

There were definite parts where I said, you know this better than I do so I’ll let you make the decision. There was an order I preferred at first, thinking that it made more thematic sense for this poem to be here and that poem to be there, but then my editor said to me, actually as people come to read it’s going to be more effective if they read this one first and this one next. The whole thing was one of the most positive processes I’ve ever experienced in my writing career.

What’s the editing process for a performance like? Do you have sets? A certain order to the poems you read?

When I first started I was incredibly organised about it. Especially when I first started getting booked for feature slots, when people started paying me (it would be about £5 to go from South London to North London for gig). But anyway, if I’d been booked to do something for ten minutes I would perfectly time every part of that set. As time went on I stopped doing that and I started being more in the moment. There are so many factors that come into play with performance, especially if you’re on with other performers. If I have a plan in my head to do a few poems that deal with harsh topics, but then the two poets before me cover quite depressing subjects, I’m not going to want to go up there and do the same thing. I’m going to want to go up and do something funny or light hearted.

As I do more and more of it I feel the need to be more and more adaptive in my performance. Now it’s gotten to the stage where I like going in with a couple of pamphlets and some new stuff and seeing what I feel like doing at the time. There are other times where, even though I don’t necessarily have a set order in mind, there are certain poems that I want to perform just to have that experience. It might be my first time performing a particular poem and I want to see how the audience will react. It’s often in the moment of reading something for the first time that I’ll think, oh I don’t need this line here, or, I don’t need to say this at all. That’s why I still like to go to open mics, even when I’m not booked for anything, just to get that editing experience in there.

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Sean Wai Keung has been making poems and performances for over five years. His research interests include “mixed” identity, food, retail, and the internet. He lives in Glasgow. His debut poetry pamphlet you are mistaken won the inaugural Rialto Open Pamphlet Competition 2016, and in 2018 he worked with Speculative Books to publish how to cook, a foodpoem pamphlet.