DOH'MO!
Paperback, a potluck invitation and private dinners
I fell off Substack last year and didn’t feel bad about it. I got book promotion burnout, embraced brain rot, and also got the Substack ick. There is so much self-indulgent Substack writing out there - what Anna Sulan Masing and I sometimes gripe ‘should have been a caption’. Basically… ‘that was a shower thought’. Note: editors exist for a reason.
So. This is a no-frills newsletter to tell you about some things that happened, are happening, or may happen to you. Let’s go!
An A-Z of Chinese Food (Recipes Not Included)
The paperback is out. She weighs 300g and costs £12.99. She’s ditched the hot pink and got a new royal blue cover to attract, maybe, a Tory-voting male readership1 and anyone mistaking it for the similarly sapphiric Hamnet. (Buy her here)
My book tour, titled You Meet Me At A Very Chinese Time In My Life, kicks off with a Lau2Lau chinwag on Friday 13th March at Bard Books. Susie Lau of stylebubble fashion fame (of no relation) and I will be ‘blowing water’ / 吹水 about community, creativity and being British Chinese. (Get your £5 ticket)
The book tour pretty much ends there because, as any writer knows, there is absolutely zero publisher budget for me to travel around the country <insert smiling poo emoji>. This is where I would like your help! Do you have the desire and resources to bring me to your city to 1) talk about my book 2) run a workshop 3) organise a diaspora meet-up 4) host a dinner 5) etc.? Get in touch!
Here was my strategic attempt at book promotion, via an ode to #hotdudesreading:
Community events
Social media algorithms have cursed us with something I’m coining DOH’MO. Where FOMO means ‘Fear Of Missing Out’, DOH’MO is ‘Disappointment Of Having Missed Out’. Every time I share photos from one of my potlucks or community events, I get a DM barrage of ‘I wish I had known about this!’ Well, I’ve got news for you… I’d been promoting it pretty damn hard. It’s not just me. Everyone I know who’s an event organiser is struggling right now to shift tickets, right to the very last minute. I refuse to believe that it’s because London is over-saturated with events. This is not hubris speaking; I/we have organised enough events to know that there is an appetite for our offering.
The problem of relying on Instagram for promotion - based on a finger-in-air hunch - is that you’ll always be served images of the spectacle, but not the speculative. A well-designed flyer just doesn’t get eyeballs.
Anyway: this is your invitation to the next potluck on Sunday 1st March. It’s the inaugural CookbookCon, a cookbook club x community concept! You get to cook a dish from the featured cookbooks by Rangoon Sisters and Su Scott, meet their writers, eat a heaving buffet of Korean and Burmese food and take home all the leftovers.
Why is it ticketed? ESEA Community Centre, where I have volunteered for eight years and now cook as part of the kitchen team, is in need of funds to survive. This event is part of my calendar of fundraising events to help it reach its goal. Everything you need to know is in this Eventbrite link and if you have more questions… you know where to find me.
2026 news so far
I collaborated with Phil Khoury on Khoury’s Hong Kong chocolate, had a chat with him for his A Talk In The Park series, was interviewed for the very moving Made In China BBC podcast, An A-Z was named one of January’s best paperbacks by The Times, and I participated in Anna Sulan Masing’s closing event of her sparkling literary salon series.
Back to my old tricks with the songwriting too - it’s been eighteen months of pure snark-joy at the piano.
Can I cook for you?
Starting to offer private dinners for anyone looking to experience multi-course Chinese food with a heavy Cantonese accent, inflected with whimsy and poeticism. Some recent feasts below; DM me for more info!
From the feedback I’ve received, it’s clear that most of my readers have been Chinese diaspora, of whom most have been women.
Doh'mo's a good one! I get a lot of "oh, I wish I knew! Please tell me when the next one is", and so I tell them to subscribe to the newsletter, and... *crickets*
Hello from Los Angeles! I’ve been been patiently waiting for my local bookstore to sell your book, but it doesn’t look promising. Now I gotta order the hardcover from Amazon before it goes away lol.