Approximately 30 people participated in a vigorous discussion and delightful brunch with author Monique Truong on Saturday, June 29th held in partnership with Yale LGBTQ and Working Women’s Network. We warmly welcomed Bình and all his complexity, Truong’s fictional character who was written as the Vietnamese cook employed by Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. The author opened the event with a call-to-action to be inclusive and to bring light to unsung voices. We spanned topics including emigration, language barriers, servitude and labor, cultural identity, sexuality, modernism, politics of food, colonialism, and also Truong’s writing process.
For more reading on this topic, check out Truong’s “Points of Entry: Writers on the Border” https://pen.org/literary-activists-immigration/. Her next novel “The Sweetest Fruits” will be available September 2019! http://monique-truong.com/books/the-sweetest-fruits/.
Our appreciation to the author for her candidness and generosity! Thank you to the Office of LGBTQ Resources at Yale for sharing your kitchen. Also thank you to the Office of Diversity & Inclusion for the extra support for this event and providing copies of the book.
More event photos can be found at:
https://www.facebook.com/pg/YaleAsianNetwork/photos/?tab=album&album_id=2376718519089869.