For Jenny Lau, a London-based musician, writer and creator of Celestial Peach – a platform dedicated to stories about Chinese identity, food and culture – community is the driving force behind her literary debut.
“I’ve never subscribed to a very traditional lifestyle and that’s when I realised how much community has fallen by the wayside in modern society,” she says.
“We have our friends, partners, family and colleagues, but true community is rare. When I started volunteering at the East and South East Asian Community Centre [formerly Hackney Chinese Community Centre, in East London] six years ago, I had no idea how important it would become.”
In An A to Z of Chinese Food (Recipes Not Included) Lau picks apart assumptions, clichés and our relationship to Chinese food.
The launch event for Lau’s first book fittingly featured an A to Z of canapés created by members of London’s food community. Photo: Ming Tang-Evans
From colonisation, to cultural appropriation and racism, to otherness in food, the book features 26 essays – each with a theme beginning with a different letter of the alphabet – that explore Chinese diaspora identity, language and culture.
In each chapter Lau plays deftly with prose, style and format as effortlessly as she moves between the piano and violin.
Denial of responsibility! Pioneer Newz is an automatic aggregator of the all world’s media. In each content, the hyperlink to the primary source is specified. All trademarks belong to their rightful owners, all materials to their authors. If you are the owner of the content and do not want us to publish your materials, please contact us by email – [email protected]. The content will be deleted within 24 hours.
