Juniper by the Sea

Juniper by the Sea UK's first East and South East Asian Online Bookshop

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Last call for our event tomorrow “At a Very Chinese Time in My Life” at Manchester Museum! The creative writing workshop...
04/07/2026

Last call for our event tomorrow “At a Very Chinese Time in My Life” at Manchester Museum! The creative writing workshop is sold out but there are a very small number of free tickets left for both our panel events in the afternoon. Whether you want to join us in thinking about food, art, writing, creativity, and being Chinese, the opportunity to hear from writer Jenny Lau Celestial Peach 🍑 Jenny Lau, poet Jennifer Wong and artists Jasmine Gardner and Stanley Chow Stanley Chow will be unmissable.

All are welcome! Registration link is in bio. Looking forward to seeing you all tomorrow!

Booking is now OPEN for our final panel event in our all day programme at Manchester Museum! We will be in conversation ...
11/06/2026

Booking is now OPEN for our final panel event in our all day programme at Manchester Museum! We will be in conversation with Jenny Lau, Jasmine Gardner, Stanley Chow, and Jennifer Wong on the art of creativity, and the intersections with their Chinese heritage. We are so incredibly excited to be joined by this talented panel from such a wide range of creative disciplines. The event is free to attend, and there will be an opportunity for book signings at the end. Check out the rest of the programme, which includes a creative writing workshop and another panel conversation. Booking links are in bio.

Jenny Lau Celestial Peach 🍑 Jenny Lau is a writer, community organiser, and creative. Her debut nonfiction An A-Z of Chinese Food (Recipes Not Included) is a witty, unputdownable and deliciously enriching anthology that uses food to explore who we are and how we relate to the world.

Jasmine Su Juanyan Gardner is a Manchester-based artist who binds traditional Chinese art forms such as painting and paper cutting with contemporary social issues surrounding her lived experience as an adoptee from the age of 8 months old.

Stanley Chow Stanley Chow is a Manchester-based artist and illustrator renowned for minimal geometric portraits. He gained global recognition for his work with The White Stripes, earning a Grammy nomination in 2008. Clients include Manchester United, Adidas, Nike, Netflix, McDonald’s, The New Yorker and The New York Times.

JENNIFER WONG is a HK-born writer in the UK. Publications include her recent poetry book, Light Year (Nine Arches Press), which received the PBS recommendation and a monograph entitled Identity, Home and Writing Elsewhere (Bloomsbury, 2023).

We are absolutely delighted to be collaborating on an all day event in Manchester this Sunday 5 July with writer, creati...
04/06/2026

We are absolutely delighted to be collaborating on an all day event in Manchester this Sunday 5 July with writer, creative, and community champion Jenny Lau . Her non-fiction debut An A-Z of Chinese Food (Recipes Not Included) is a witty, unputdownable and deliciously enriching anthology that uses food to explore who we are and how we relate to the world. She will be delivering a creative writing workshop on stories inspired by favourite kitchen objects, and two further panel conversations in the afternoon. “You meet me at a very Chinese time in my life” is the theme of Jenny’s book tour, and we will be exploring what it means to be Chinese, as well as reflecting on food, community and creativity. Stay tuned for an announcement of our second panel of guest speakers who come from a range of creative disciplines from Manchester and beyond.

Register now via the booking link in bio. The panel events are free and the writing workshop is £2 excluding booking fee.

Instead of a pop-up bookshop for LNY this month, I spent my free time on a different but very meaningful ESEA project - ...
23/02/2026

Instead of a pop-up bookshop for LNY this month, I spent my free time on a different but very meaningful ESEA project - we made a magazine-anthology called Golden, and you’re all invited to its launch in London this Sat Feb 28th 3-5pm!
 
Last year told me her vision of making an annual to celebrate and document the ESEA community in the UK. I was really excited when I heard this because I think we have so much to discover and celebrate about each other. For a long time I consumed content coming from our Asian American counterparts, which was eye-opening and comforting - the shared culture and experiences of being Asian, and of being Asian in a Western country. A small part of me always wondered, what did that look like for those of us based here? How similar (or not) are we as Brits/in Britain in relation to our Asian American cousins across the pond?
 
Our ESEA community here is so precious, and I mean community in the broadest sense, including those who don’t have access to all the ESEA groups and activities seen on social media. This commitment to platform British ESEA drove me to join from and from on this ambitious project to make something for the community, from the community. So together with over 50 ESEA contributors from around the UK, we present to you our first volume of Golden!
 
Golden is a hardback magazine spanning over 200 pages (!!) of original and commissioned pieces in fiction, poetry, interviews, essays, feature articles, photography and art. Subjects range from the 50th anniversary of the end of the war in Vietnam, to the invisibility of brown-ness in ESEA; on the rise of ube and kape culture, to reflection (and a recipe) on the Koryo Saram dish morkovcha; from ESEA solidarity with Palestine, to the role of artists in fascism. This is a breathtaking volume of work, straight from the community, and it’s a non-profit production.
 
I’m truly proud of the work we’ve done. So come support us by attending our launch party this Saturday. For the price of a copy (£30) you can pick up Golden AND enjoy some drinks with us to celebrate this momentous occasion. Booking link in bio!

Happy lunar new year to all who celebrate it. I used to approach this time of year with mild apprehension, because I did...
18/02/2026

Happy lunar new year to all who celebrate it. I used to approach this time of year with mild apprehension, because I didn’t come from a household with a tradition of doing anything special. I’d get nervous when ESEA folks shared their experiences with me expecting me to relate, or non-ESEA folks asking me what I was going to do. There was a self-imposed fear of disappointing all of them if they knew the truth - that I didn’t do much and only superficially knew about what it involved. I mean, what kind of Chinese am I if I don’t know how to do Chinese New Year?!

There are so many wide-ranging experiences, including the act of not-celebrating. Some of us might centre heritage and tradition as a big part of our identity - particularly when it still feels joyously radical to openly celebrate the very practices that historically (and sometimes presently) ‘other’ us. But where family and community may not be a positive or even neutral thing, it can be painful and confusing, a ripe opportunity for imposter syndrome to rear its head.

Since the emergence of the ESEA community as a collective, I like to use this occasion to acknowledge the richness of the diaspora, like the range of feelings around new year. I personally enjoy using the term lunar new year rather than Chinese new year when in the bookshop, as it gives me room to acknowledge that more than one ESEA culture celebrates lunar new year (I’m aware that technically it’s based on a lunisolar calendar, but I’m happy to keep using ‘lunar’). My own British Chinese experiences are after all intricately woven with my existence within a broader ESEA diaspora.

At a time when being Chinese is currently trending, I want to share these brilliant non-fiction ESEA reads published in the UK in 2025. I’ve been offline and on reduced activity for over a year now due to illness (I sincerely apologise to all the people whose messages I haven’t replied to) but my enthusiasm for this space has not diminished. Go celebrate the new year by picking up one or all of these excellent books. 🧧

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