Book Signing

Book Launch: Our Laundry, Our Town

Friday, May 20, 2022
7 – 9PM

Please join us for the Book Launch for longtime Citylorist Alvin Eng’s memoir, Our Laundry, Our Town: My Chinese American Life from Flushing to the Downtown Stage and Beyond (Fordham University Press/Empire State Editions). Eng will give a brief reading from the memoir, followed by a conversation with City Lore co-directors Molly Garfinkel and Steve Zeitlin. Books will be available for purchase and signing by the author. Wine, cheese and snacks will be available for celebrating!

Advance praise for the book:

“Powerful, funny at times, and consistently inspiring, Our Laundry, Our Town turns one artist’s journey into the story of AAPI communities and emergence of a movement over the past half-century. Alvin Eng’s engaging memoir looks back on the past to envision a better future.” -David Henry Hwang, Screenwriter and Tony Award–winning playwright of M. Butterfly

“If you wept while reading the memoir Crying in H Mart, ached at the injustice in Minor Feelings, and laughed during graphic novel Messy Roots, then Our Laundry, Our Town is the sweet spot between these three.” - From Goodreads book review by @the_pundlit

Finally, City Lore’s own Steve Zeitlin wrote:
“Alvin Eng’s masterful, sweeping memoir about growing up with his five siblings in a dysfunctional family in the back of the Foo J. Chin Chinese Hand Laundry in Flushing, Queens is laced with his marvelous humor, family anecdotes and metaphors that bring a century of the Chinese American Experience to life.”

About Alvin Eng

Alvin Eng is a native NYC playwright, performer and educator. His plays and performances have been seen Off-Broadway, throughout the U.S., as well as in Paris, Hong Kong and Guangzhou, China. His memoir, Our Laundry, Our Town: My Chinese American Life from Flushing to the Downtown Stage and Beyond, was published in May 2022 by Fordham University Press. Eng is the author and editor of the oral history/play anthology, Tokens? The NYC Asian American Experience on Stage. No Passport Press recently published Three Trees, the first of his Portrait Plays series of historical dramas about artists. He was awarded a 2022 LMCC Creative Engagement grant for a “Hong Kong Handover: 25 Years Later” symposium in conjunction with his acoustic punk raconteur solo show, Here Comes Johnny Yen Again (or How I Kicked Punk).

For more information about the author, visit www.alvineng.com.
For more information about the book, visit Fordham’s Our Laundry, Our Town page.