The talented Lillian Li joined the us for our LHSP All Community Meeting, Wednesday, March 12, 2019. The author shared excerpts from her debut, critically acclaimed novel Number One Chinese Restaurant and spoke on her life as a young writer. The novel focuses on the lives of the workers and owners of the Beijing Duck House, a restaurant in Rockville, Maryland.

The New York Times describes the book as  "[e]vocative. . . . Li's novel revolves around the tangled inner workings of the family-owned Beijing Duck House . . . Chinese-born family members and workers [for whom] the Beijing Duck House has displaced Beijing itself as 'the heart-center of the universe.'"  The novel has been named a must-read by Time, Buzzfeed, The Wall Street Journal, O (the Oprah Magazine), and many others.