The final Becoming American community conversation will take place Wednesday, May 1 at The Gables. The Search for General Tso will be shown at 6:00 p.m. This unique documentary will spur a conversation about immigration and pop culture.
The Search for General Tso asks: “If Chinese Americans comprise only 1 percent of the U.S. population, why are there Chinese restaurants in almost every city across America?” Using research from Jennifer 8. Lee’s 2008 book, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, director Ian Cheney shows his audience how “Chinese food is all American.” Copies of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles are on sale all month in our Museum Store.
Jennifer 8. Lee is the cofounder of a literary studio called Plympton, which focuses on innovation and publishing. Through partnerships, Plympton is behind numerous projects including Recovering the Classics, the Subway Library in New York City, the CODEX Hackathon, and it helped to launch the Twitter Fiction Festival.
In 2016, Jennifer became an emoji activist. Following her work on both The Fortune Cookie Chronicles and The Search for General Tso, she launched the “Dumpling Emoji Project” – a successful campaign to bring dumpling representation to Unicode. From those efforts sprung Emojination, a grassroots group whose motto is “Emoji For the People, By The People.” Emojination’s efforts have drawn worldwide media attention throughout the successful campaigns for the hijab emoji and the dumpling emoji. 92% of people online use emoji, proving the cultural significance of emoji.
On May 28, we will welcome Jennifer 8. Lee to The Gables for How I Became an Emoji Activist (And You Can, Too!). She will discuss how her literary career path has led her to be the vice-chair of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee and what the future of this communication tool might be.