I bought one of those as well, although it was a knockoff brand, it's great when travelling since it's about the same size as my MacBook. I wish I invested slightly more, the brightness on mine is terrible.
cat ~/bin/brightness
#!/bin/bash
#
echo "increasing brightness/contrast of external monitor"
/usr/local/bin/ddcutil --display 1 setvcp 10 40
/usr/local/bin/ddcutil --display 1 setvcp 12 10
Tie the above in with your init/resume scripts and you're good to go (assumes that your issue isn't limited by the hardware itself).