Uplifting, intimate portraits of young British Chinese men

When pho­tog­ra­ph­er Nao­mi Wong was a child, her fam­i­ly moved from Hong Kong to a small mar­ket town called New Rom­ney, set just off the south­east coast of Kent. There, while her moth­er worked in her uncle’s Chi­nese take­away, she and her cousins would play around the counter and hang out by the woks. ​“My mum and my oth­er aun­tie also worked with my uncle,” Wong recalls. ​“And she had loads of boys, so I was raised along­side my boy cousins. We would always spend so much time togeth­er and they would always look after me.”

When she was a teenag­er Wong moved to Scun­thor­pe with her moth­er, los­ing that close­ness to her extend­ed fam­i­ly. As she grew more aware of the world around her and her place in it, she realised that as a Chi­nese per­son, there wasn’t a lot of space for peo­ple who looked like her or her cousins in the wider cul­ture, nor was there much representation.

“It’s iso­lat­ing – it was just me and one oth­er Chi­nese kid in our school and I didn’t have any friends that were Chi­nese until I was 13,” she says. ​“I remem­ber being with my mum, and we would rent VHS tapes and watch TV togeth­er, and every time there was a minor East Asian char­ac­ter in the back­ground my mum would get real­ly excit­ed by that.”

Wong’s soon-to-be print­ed pho­to­book, 後生仔, trans­lat­ed to mean ​‘young man’, is her way of fill­ing that cul­tur­al gap she found her­self in. Build­ing on the mem­o­ry of those years spent with her male cousins and spurred on by an old pho­to­graph she found in a skip of her father in Brighton in the 80s, she decid­ed to cre­ate a project that spot­lights and uplifts Chi­nese male youth liv­ing in the UK.

“Chi­nese men don’t real­ly get rep­re­sent­ed in British cul­ture,” she explains. ​“I can’t think of a film or a TV show where there’s a Chi­nese char­ac­ter and I can’t think of many pub­lic fig­ures – there are maybe some actors now but it was not the case when I was grow­ing up. But when they were rep­re­sent­ed it was a bit prob­lem­at­ic – they were not [por­trayed] as very mas­cu­line or it was a bit of a joke.”

Through­out the process of cre­at­ing the book, Wong pho­tographed and inter­viewed a dozen young British Chi­nese men, often with­in the sanc­tu­ar­ies of their own homes. The book, cap­tured with warmth and inti­ma­cy, dives into their sto­ries and high­lights the diver­si­ty of their expe­ri­ences. There’s Tai from Bed­ford­shire, whose father also ran a Chi­nese take­away, who now uses food to con­nect with his her­itage and cul­ture, along­side foot­ball fanat­ic Jun Chan from Bar­ry, South Wales, who is a mem­ber of East and South East Asian (ESEA) foot­ball com­mu­ni­ty Rise Unit­ed.

“I real­ly want­ed to pho­to­graph some­one who’s into foot­ball, because of the con­nec­tion to my dad,” Wong says. ​“He used to play foot­ball and real­ly loved it, but there’s actu­al­ly loads of Chi­nese foot­ball fans in Eng­land that are not rep­re­sent­ed in the foot­ball cul­ture – I remem­ber my uncle would be obses­sive­ly watch­ing foot­ball all the time in the takeaway.”

Her work also high­lights some of the dai­ly con­flicts that many British Chi­nese men face while nav­i­gat­ing life in the UK. From feel­ings of dis­place­ment to nav­i­gat­ing com­plex famil­ial sit­u­a­tions. ​“Some of my friends who I pho­to­graph are gay and can’t come out,” she says. ​“They’ve had dis­cus­sions with their par­ents and hint­ed things like: ​‘I have a friend who I’ve been spend­ing a lot of time with,’ but they can’t say that they’re their part­ner – there are a lot of very tra­di­tion­al pressures.”

But her book ulti­mate­ly gives her sit­ters space to just be and express them­selves com­fort­ably. ​“Things are def­i­nite­ly a lot more pos­i­tive com­pared to what I saw and wit­nessed as a kid –there’s a long way to go, British Chi­nese men are still under­rep­re­sent­ed, but things are chang­ing,” she con­tin­ues. ​“後生仔, is a love let­ter and it’s a trib­ute to all the British Chi­nese men, all the peo­ple I grew up with and my dad as well. It’s real­ly nice to be shin­ing a light on their sto­ries and to be able to pho­to­graph them all look­ing very beautiful.”

後生仔 is avail­able to pre-order at Nao­mi Wong’s offi­cial web­site

Buy your copy of Huck 81 here

Enjoyed this arti­cle? Fol­low Huck on Insta­gram

Sup­port sto­ries like this by becom­ing a mem­ber of Club Huck