Bricolage: Journeys of Recovery with Pauline Chen, Don Lee & Aimee Phan

Spanning 1980s Midwest to imperial court China, our second installment of Bricolage—a salon-style multimedia show-n-tell—takes us into the brilliant minds of novelists on journeys of recovery. American Book Award-winner Don Lee’s The Collective is a gripping tale of friendship, loss, and the “melancholy burden of unfulfilled dreams” (Publishers’ Weekly). After a tragic suicide, the novel retraces the struggles of three aspiring artists from nascent college years to their travails as working artists of color in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Aimee Phan’s multigenerational novel The Reeducation of Cherry Truong skips across three continents of the Vietnamese diaspora, following a young woman’s mission to uncover family secrets blurred by war, betrayal, and fickle human memory. Described by Library Journal as an irresistible “blend of the highbrow literary and guilty summer pulp,” Pauline Chen’s The Red Chamber re-imagines the Chinese classic in a retelling of opulence and excess in aristocratic women’s quarters of 18th century Beijing. Join us for a night of inquiry in examining memory that lapses time and straddles continents.