"Goodbye, Vitamin:" Asian American Literature and the Art of CaregivingSalonIn-Person
Tuesday, Dec 08, 2026
5:00 - 7:30 p.m.
How do we remember and care for each other as time progresses and our opportunities to connect slip away? Rachel Khong’s first novel, Goodbye, Vitamin, takes place over the course of a single year; Ruth has returned home to help her mother care for her father, who has Alzheimer’s. The novel is structured as a collection of notes and memories, as Ruth’s account of the everyday experience of caregiving is entwined with her father’s own memories of her childhood. What results is a book that is devastating, vulnerable, wryly funny, and beautiful in its representation of our relationships to those we love. But more broadly, the book is also a meditation on reading, writing, and memory. We’ll discuss Khong’s novel through the lenses of caregiving and what she has called “imperfect care”; Asian American literature and the novel’s manipulation of form and time; and the role of humor and writing and its connection to what makes us human.
2 credits for member schools
Limited to 20 teachers
Denise Cruz is professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University and director of strategic initiatives in the Arts and Sciences. Her work covers a range of subjects, from connections between the rise of English literature and women’s suffrage in Manila, to the vibrant world of Filipino high fashion, to the strategies Asian American authors use to represent regional, national, and transnational communities. She is the author of Transpacific Femininities: The Making of the Modern Filipina (Duke University Press, 2012), and her articles and essays have appeared in American Quarterly, PMLA, Modern Fiction Studies, American Literature, American Literary History, and the Journal of Asian American Studies. She has received teaching awards from the University of Toronto, Indiana University, and Columbia University, where she received the Mark Van Doren and Presidential Teaching Awards in 2021 and the Society of Columbia Graduates’ Great Teacher Award in 2024. She has spent over a decade developing the humanities classroom as a space of dynamic learning and critical engagement.