Book Event I Tickets here
We're opening our November programme with a visit from London food writer and community builder Jenny Lau, whose work through Celestial Peach has been shaping the conversation around Chinese diasporic food and culture in London since 2018.
An A-Z of Chinese Food (Recipes Not Included) is not a cookbook. It's an anti-glossary, a set of essays in which Jenny follows food back towards her own heritage, looking for a language for a mixed identity pulled between East and West. Food, she shows us, can give us belonging and a sense of power, and it can also carry the tired tropes and clichés we inherit. From A is for "Authentic", which asks who gets to own a cuisine, to R is for Rice Cooker, told in the voice of a much-loved family appliance, this is a poetic and intellectually rousing book, driven by a real hunger for empathy, and it invites us all to think again about how we use food to say who we are.
Jenny will be joined on stage by Berlin-based food cultural practitioner Vicky Truong, and we're thrilled to bring together East Asian community movements in London and Berlin for an evening that begins at the kitchen table and opens out into community, heritage and the ways food holds our cultures together.
About Jenny Lau: Jenny Lau is the founder of Celestial Peach, a multidisciplinary platform telling and connecting stories of the Chinese diaspora through food, writing and community-led work. Her writing has appeared in Vittles and the South China Morning Post, and her chapter "The Community Centre" features in London Feeds Itself, edited by Jonathan Nunn. She has spoken at the British Library Food Season and the Edinburgh International Book Festival, lectured at SOAS, and collaborated with the BFI, Southbank Centre and the Horniman Museum. She has three times been named one of Code Hospitality's 100 Most Influential Women in Hospitality. She lives in London.
About Vicky Truong: Vicky Truong is a feeder at heart and a big eater, with an appetite for social change through community movements. Growing up Asian in a predominantly white society left rifts in her sense of identity, and she has been healing them through the foods of her mixed heritages, sharing that practice through festivals, community events, workshops and cooking classes that make space for collective healing and empowerment. Her biggest project yet is motherhood.