Kitchens & Kinship

Jenny Lau in conversation with Vicky Truong We’re so excited to kick our packed November schedule off with a visit from the London based food legend, Jenny Lau. If you haven't heard about her new book, An A-Z of Chinese Food, you may have seen the buzz she’s been creating in the East Asian food and cultural scene in London under her project titled Celestial Peach. In An A-Z of Chinese Food, we join Jenny on her journey for connection as she delves into the Chinese cuisine of her heritage. Searching to define her mixed cultural identity, pulled between East and West, Jenny found herself turning towards a universal language of understanding: food. Our destination is not a recipe book of dishes or cooking techniques, but rather an anti-glossary which reveals how food is bound to our identity and history can provide a sense of empowerment and belonging, but also enforce tired tropes and clichés. From A is for ‘Authentic’, breaking down our assumptions of who ‘owns’ what cuisine, to R is for Rice Cooker, an epistolary from the point of view of a beloved family kitchen appliance, An A-Z of Chinese Food is a poetic, intellectually rousing anthology of essays fed by Jenny Lau’s ravenous hunger for empathy and invites readers to reconsider the way they relate to food as a language for identity. We’re so excited to connect East Asian community movements in London and Berlin, as Jenny will be joined on the stage by Berlin based food cultural practitioner Vicky Truong. A conversation that starts with the kitchen, and the dinner table, the two food experts will use this universal meeting point to widen out to a conversation about community, belonging, heritage, and our connection to our food and heritage holds our cultures. About Jenny Lau: Jenny Lau is the author of An A-Z of Chinese Food (Recipes Not Included), an exploration of food, language, identity and the Chinese diaspora, featured in Observer Food Monthly, The Sunday Times, AnOther and iPaper. She is the founder of Celestial Peach, a multidisciplinary platform established in 2018 to tell and connect stories of the Chinese diaspora through food, writing and community-led work. Through her events, writing and activism, Jenny has been featured by Gastro Obscura, It’s Nice That and Monocle. She has been listed three times as one of Code Hospitality’s 100 Most Influential Women in Hospitality. Her food and culture writing has been published by Vittles and the South China Morning Post, and her chapter ‘The Community Centre’ appears in London Feeds Itself, the food writing anthology edited by Jonathan Nunn, alongside contributors including Claudia Roden, Ruby Tandoh and Jeremy Corbyn. Jenny has spoken at the British Library Food Season and the Edinburgh International Book Festival, lectured at SOAS, and taken part in panels and collaborations with the BFI, Southbank Centre, MilkTeaFilms and the Horniman Museum. 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. She shares this practice through a range of mediums, organising festivals, community events, workshops and cooking classes that create space for collective healing and empowerment. Her biggest project yet? Motherhood.