FEELING OF A DUMPLING

Let’s grow together as a community in Vienna, get to know each other in small groups, write down our stories, and read them to each other.

We, Susanne Songi Griem, Maiko Sakurai, Pete Prison IV, Weina Zhao, and Noo Poravee, invite all of you who feel part
of the Asian diaspora in Austria to four writing sessions. In the setting of the ‘Asia Garten’ in Vienna Währing, we want to free ourselves from stereotypes, share stories, listen to our own voices, write and read about what concerns and represents us.

At the end, we will present our texts, essays, poems, songs or thoughts to the audience of the WIENWOCHE and the passers-by in order to make ourselves heard and to take up the social space that every person of every origin in Austria is entitled to.

“The dough is made of rice flour, inside
are dubu and glass noodles, she usually puts mushrooms in it too. Spring onions, sesame oil and a little soy sauce. She filled whole trays with them and took them, like a hundred other mothers of my schoolmates,to the middle school auditorium, where
the annual graduation ceremony of the Korean school was taking place. In addition to the cringeworthy performances by the individual school classes on stage, the highlight of the evening was the at least seven meters long buffet table, shaped like a horseshoe.” (Susanne Songi Griem, 2022)

“Last week, the financial police arrested six Chinese who had mass-produced dumplings in a Viennese apartment. Now the market office is taking action and carrying out checks in Asian restaurants.” (Die Presse, 01.08.2019)

Three years after the media uproar surrounding illegal dumpling productions in private apartments in Vienna, anti-Asian racism has increased massively, due to Covid-19, in the media and in public space. The local community, which opposes a uniform image of “the one” Asian person, is forming and defending itself accordingly, with associations such as Perilla, with their zine, they advocate polyphony in the Asian diaspora.