Community Salon focused on ESEA Women's History

The latest collaboration for Chinatown Collective is a community salon for Women's History Month, at West End Arts Library developed in partnership with Dr Anna Sulan Masing, Dr Xiao Ma of Chinatown Collective, and Dr Anushka Tay at Westminster City Council Libraries.

It is part of Looking Back to Look Forward: 40 Years of Chinatown in Central London, a year-long festival (October 2025 – September 2026) led by Chinatown Collective CIC that invites everyone to reflect on Chinatown’s layered past and imagine its future.

The community salon invites people to join a day of free events to explore East and South East Asian women's stories, with three different activities on Saturday 28 March 2026. Choose which events you would like to take part in at the ticket selection, you can select up to two. The options are:

• 10.45am - 12.30pm: either - Women’s History Walking Tour of Chinatown or Memoir Writing Workshop

• 1.15pm - 3pm: Community Literary Salon and panel discussion with three authors

Suitable for ages 16+

EVENT DETAILS

MORNING PARALLEL SESSIONS 10.45am - 12.30pm

Please select EITHER

Women’s History Walking Tour of Chinatown

Meet at Charing Cross Library (4-6 Charing Cross Rd, London WC2H 0HF)

This special edition of Chinatown Collective's award-winning Chinatown Stories Walking Tour will take you on a journey through the area’s complex, nuanced, and fascinating evolution. Led by our trained volunteer History Champions, the tour will highlight under-represented women’s stories and bring their voices to life.

The experience will begin with a short introduction to the Chinese Community collection at Charing Cross Library (10 minutes), after which we will walk to Chinatown together. The tour is primarily an outdoor activity and will take place whatever the weather. We will send you detailed joining instructions closer to the time.

We will finish at West End Arts Library, where you are welcome to have tea/coffee refreshments on the 1st floor at the Music Library.

If you wish to join the afternoon session, ensure that you have booked a ticket.

OR

Memoir Writing Workshop

Westminster Music Library, 1st floor, West End Arts Library (35 St Martin's Street, London WC2H 7DE)

Enjoy a fun interactive workshop tapping into ways to tell your own story, led by Dr Anna Sulan Masing. As a journalist and academic, so much of Anna Sulan’s work is finding the right questions so that people she interviews feel confident to tell their stories. These same questions helped her write her story within her debut book, ‘Chinese and Any Other Asians: Exploring East and South East Asian Identity in Britain’.

This workshop will explore some of Anna Sulan’s techniques.

You will be provided with all materials, but feel free to bring your own notebook if you’d prefer.

Tea/coffee refreshments will be provided.

If you wish to join the afternoon session, ensure that you have booked a ticket.

AFTERNOON SESSION 1.15 - 3.45pm

Community Literary Salon: ESEA Women’s History

West End Arts Library, Ground Floor (35 St Martin's Street, London WC2H 7DE)

This salon invites a non-fiction author and a novelist to read from their books and discuss how ESEA women’s stories are crucial to their writing, how they tell those stories and explore the idea of ESEA women in history. This will be hosted by Dr Anna Sulan Masing.

All three books will be available for sale on the day, and authors available for signing!

Following the talks, enjoy tea/coffee refreshments and browse our Library collection highlights of art books, novels, poetry and history writing centring East and South East Asian women.

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Tickets for these events are being administrated by West End Arts Library and are available for free here.