Asian + American

When Yia Vang was in elementary school, his mom packed him his lunches. Right away, the storage containers in the paper bag distinguished him from wealthier kids who could afford the school menu. But it was the food his mother packed him that truly set him apart. By any culinary or health measure, his mother’s traditional Hmong dishes with grilled meat, hot sauce, rice and greens were better than what the school had to offer. The problem was that the meal looked and smelled so different from what his schoolmates would eat: the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, baby carrots and bags of chips.

“I remember opening my lunch one day. It was a simple grilled chicken dish with vegetables. Other kids started looking at me weird and saying, ‘Why are you eating that?’” says Vang. “It still haunts me — it hurts my soul — to admit that I threw out her food so kids wouldn’t tease me. I brought home the empty containers, and I lied to my mother.”

That memory is always close to Vang’s thoughts as he runs Union Hmong Kitchen in Minneapolis. “In many ways, my career as a chef has been a redemption story. I’ve been trying to make up for the fact that when I was a kid, I was sometimes ashamed of my parents and the culture they came from. Each time I serve a Hmong dish, it demonstrates love for what I once rejected.”

A Lunchbox Moment

Chef Christina Nguyen, chef and owner of Hai Hai restaurant in Minneapolis, has her own painful memories of elementary school lunchrooms. Her parents were evacuated from Vietnam as the Communist Party took over in 1975. Nguyen also went to a school where few other kids looked like her, and she struggled to fit in.

“I think a lot of children of immigrant parents have a lunchbox moment. I definitely had mine,” says Nguyen. She remembers opening the containers from home and the smell of fish sauce and shrimp paste attracting unwanted attention. She also remembers sometimes throwing out her mother’s food to avoid embarrassment.

For both Nguyen and Vang, it took years to fully embrace their family traditions as a source for culinary inspiration. They began their cooking careers exploring other cultures. Nguyen opened a food truck with her husband serving arepas, a traditionally South American food made of maize dough stuffed with filling. Vang’s career took him even farther afield, working in Italian, French and TexMex restaurants.

Differences Become Assets As We Grow Up

What makes us different when we are young can sometimes be painful. Children want to fit in with the group. But those same differences are often where we find inspiration and meaning later in life. Eventually, both Nguyen and Vang turned back toward the tastes and textures of home.

Nguyen now proudly describes her restaurant as a “love letter to all things Southeast Asia.” She was a finalist for a James Beard Award for Best Chef Midwest and has been featured in Food & Wine, Bon Appetit and more. Vang, for his part, has become one of the most famous Hmong chefs outside of Asia, an ambassador to both the food and the people. He is now the host of TPT’s Relish series and has been featured on National Geographic and CNN’s United Shades of America.

“When you’re young you sometimes run away from who you are, from where you come from,” says Vang. “But you eventually come full circle to find who you were meant to be. That’s been one of the greatest lessons I’ve learned in the last few years.”

A New Culture Means A New Love of Tradition

Food entrepreneur Tiffany Alexandria moved from Taiwan to the States when she was 26, so she doesn’t have the lunch box moment. But it took moving to a new culture for her to find her passion for Taiwanese food. “When I lived in Taiwan, I often liked to cook Western food like pies, roasted turkey and pasta,” she remembers. “It wasn’t until I moved to the Midwest that I began a deep dive into my own culture and its cooking traditions. Up untiI then, I think I took it for granted.”

Shortly after moving to her new home in Rochester, Minn., five years ago, she realized most people had little knowledge of Taiwanese cuisine. More times than she can count she’s had to correct people who confused Taiwanese food with Thai food. Working as a recipe creator, photographer and storyteller, Alexandria became a one-woman marketing team for Taiwanese culture. She’s hosted cooking classes and pop-up dining experiences, partnered with local farmers markets and restaurants, and helped develop products and food brands. In her business, CHOOCHOO-ca-CHEW, she tells visual stories via food photography, words and short videos.

“There’s a memory and feeling behind each dish I share,” she says. “Sometimes I think I cook for nostalgia. I want to recreate a memory and a story behind each dish.”

For all three of these chefs, cooking is a way to have a conversation about culture. Sharing food becomes a tangible way to discuss issues of identity and belonging that are often frustratingly hard to articulate. Stereotypes and misconceptions can exist like ghosts in a room. But food is its own language, and these chefs cook as a way of telling their own personal stories. The dishes they offer say: This is who I am. This is where I’m from.

Every Dish Has a Narrative

Two words can frustrate the life of immigrant chefs. One of those words is “fusion,” as in “Asian fusion,” and the other is “authentic.” Neither word describes how these three chefs approach their culinary traditions. They neither want to create something entirely new nor do they feel honor-bound to follow a recipe that someone has declared “authentic.”

“Trying to be completely authentic in a new environment is impossible,” says Alexandria. “Because of the local ecosystem, you are forced to use different ingredients while trying to remain true to the flavors and textures you are after. The puzzle of creating that nostalgic taste with local ingredients is part of the fun.”

Preparing 台式肉粽 Taiwanese Style ZongZi

The truth is the very idea of a dish being authentic is an illusion. Nguyen discovered this when she traveled across East Asia as a young adult. “In Vietnam, you’ll have thousands of variations on the same dish. So which one is authentic?” she says. “Cuisine is always evolving and mixing different cultural influences. I don’t think I should be expected to try to stop that evolution. The food I create might not be authentic to someone else, but when I get it right, it is authentic to me because it embodies my experiences with food. It’s my history that I’m bringing to the table.”

Vang’s motto at his restaurant, “Every dish has a narrative,” reminds patrons that the stories of people, their struggles, sacrifices and love are at the heart of cuisine. For Vang, cooking Hmong food in America is akin to translating stories from his parents’ native language. You can communicate the central meaning, but something will always be lost or changed when told in the new language.

“There are traditionalists, the hardliners, who think that you need to cook certain dishes in the same way as your ancestors,” says Vang. “I think there is always a fear that you will lose something important as you change a dish. But when you move across the world, change is inevitable. Living here in the States, we have different products, technology and equipment. Immigrant communities have to change and move forward, and that is good.”

While Vang is happy to embrace an evolution of Hmong cuisine, he has one exception. All of the chefs who work with him know to take extra care with the simple grilled chicken dish that he has on the menu. “If one of my cooks messes up that dish, my soul is enraged,” he admits. “That dish represents my mother’s legacy. That is the dish I threw in the trash as a child.”

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