On Topic: Yia Vang Episode Four

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Yia Vang is owner and chef of Union Hmong Kitchen and forthcoming restaurant Vinai in Northeast Minneapolis. Yia is a phenomenal presence in the Twin Cities food scene and celebrates Hmong culture throughout his work. Sanjit and Yia spoke at the beginning of May about how intrinsically important culture and community are to food production and how food is a vehicle for expressing philosophies and ideas.

"Our mantra with Union Hmong Kitchen or Vinai is every dish has a narrative and if you follow that narrative long enough and close enough you get to the people behind the food and once you're there it's not about food, it’s actually about people, but food is a catalyst into cultivating great relationships."

On Topic is platform exploring the complex and lucid cultural conversations that represent the DNA of MCAD. If you like this episode, you can explore events, writings, and more episodes.

Yia Vang was born in a Thai refugee camp, came to the United States at five years old, and eventually arrived in the Twin Cities as part of the largest urban Hmong population in the world. He cooked at Nighthawks, Borough, and Gavin Kaysen’s Spoon & Stable before starting Union Hmong Kitchen, and serves as a passionate, tireless, funny, and forgiving advocate for Hmong food as an expression of Hmong culture.

More from Yia:

• Union Hmong Kitchen
• White on Rice: Yia's podcast
• Bon Appétit Feature: April 2020

Full Transcript:

Sanjit: So Yia thanks so much for joining me for this podcast.

Yia: Sanjit, thank you so much for having me, appreciate this.

Sanjit: Great, well you know I wanted to, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about your remarkable biography. You were born in the Ban Vinai refugee camp--

Yia: Yeah, Ban Vinai or you know, just kind of known by us as Vinai refugee camp in '84.

Sanjit: In '84 and you start your first five years there. Is that right?

Yia: Yeah, we were there till '88-'89. That's when we were able to move out here to Saint Paul actually.

Sanjit: And what are some of the memories that you have, a lot of growing up in the camp?

Yia: Yeah man, it's really funny. Sometimes I just think about it and it felt like a dream, because it was so long ago, 30 years ago. And I just remember being a kid, running around. My grandma lived the next hut down so I would run back and forth. I was just kind of like a rowdy kid my mom would always say. Just doing kid stuff, growing up, like we just for us that was just life you know.

Sanjit: And your parents met in the camp right?

Yia: Yeah, it's '78 they met there. They were both there, that's 10 years.

Sanjit: Wow, so that's 10 years, that's a time where you build a, it's no longer a camp. It's certainly a community and it's an environment, it's a collection of relationships.

Yia: Yeah, Vinai was the largest refugee camp in that area or there's a few other ones but Vinai was the biggest one. From '75 to '92 it hosted over 55,000 people and out of those 55,000, 90% of them are Hmong people and out of those 90% a majority of them ended up here in the Midwest.

Sanjit: So in some ways there were a lot of relationships that transferred from Vinai over to the Twin Cities and this region.

Yia: Definitely the first big immigration, refugee resettlement groups that kind of took a lot of Hmong people in were here from the Twin Cities. Actually in Minneapolis a lot of the Lutheran and Methodist organizations helped resettle a lot of refugees here. And so that's why the Twin Cities has the largest, dense, most dense Hmong population in the United States, so there's about 65 to 70,000 in the metro area.

Sanjit: You know as a recent arrival to the Twin Cities and someone that grew up with immigrant parents, you know the immediate thing I did as I started exploring this area was to find these cultural pockets that I felt it mirrored a little bit of my own background, in my own experience. And so I really felt at home when I was walking through the two different Hmong markets in St Paul. I felt the kind of bustle and the crowd and the piles of dried barks and herbal medicines and for me there is really something kind of reminiscent. Do you, I mean how does that visceral connection work for you? If you're walking through some of those stalls in Hmong town or those areas, does it still kind of bring it back to when you were four or five years old and you were living in Thailand in the refugee camps?

Yia: Yeah definitely like I have bits and pieces of memories of living, being in the refugee camp. You know cause I was so young I would just remember the hustle and bustle of everything. Again like I said, just being a kid running around doing whatever a four five-year-old does. You know I love those markets, like you know I'll be very honest. Friends of mine who are, what's the nicest way of saying it, what's the best way of saying this? My friends who are kind of Midwestern, white Americans who have never been to anything like that, who come along with us. I'm very open with them, I'm like 'hey man like it's going to be a sensory overload when you go in'. Cause you know when you go into the small market areas you know the stalls, small stalls and there are all these toys are making noises, there are all these different smells of different food, different you know herbs, different spices. Like it's a sensory overload, that's what it is in Hmong Village anyways, in Hmong Village. So there is Hmong Town, and Hmong Village is the one I go to a lot. Hmong Village used to be a storage unit and so everything is very close in proximity and your rubbing shoulders with you know people you know. The walkways are real small, the food stalls are everywhere. So I tell people it's a sensory overload and if you're not used to it, it's going to be like okay I need to get out of here. But most people that have come with us in there or have asked and say you know can you like guide us through, they really enjoy it. So if you like having your space, you don't like being close to people when you're eating like this is not the spot for you. But if you want to try some new adventures and you know, I would say it's super fun to be a part of. What I love in there, man it's weird cause I feel at home in there, that's where I feel the most at home. Being able to walk around and not feel like you're the one that looks different but everyone looks like you and so it's just kind of really fun to have that atmosphere in there.

Sanjit: Yeah, you know I find that I'm at home when an elderly woman elbows me out of the way to grab the bitter melon that I was eyeing or there's the press of people around you as you're going ahead and vying for the right bunch of cilantro or something like that. And I think for me I definitely found that that sense of ease and that sense of 'oh okay there are pockets of culture here that I think I understand in a more intimate way'. And I'm thinking about that and I'm also thinking about how your most recent restaurant project that I think is still evolving is named after the refugee camp, is that right?

Yia: Yeah, definitely our new brick and mortar restaurant that we have coming up right now, well because of the pandemic and everything it's on pause, but it's called Vinai. And it is an homage to my Mom and Dad. For us growing up, when we talked about Vinai with any Hmong family, with any Hmong friends, everybody gets it. We get it, it's a word that is very ingrained into our culture, into our people. We know what that means you know Vinai was home after the war, after everything you know broke and you know all the Hmong people were escaping leaving the hills of Laos, and Thailand and Vietnam and they were just looking for refuge. Vinai was that sense of hope, it was a sense of refuge and just we decided to name it Vinai as an homage to my mom and dad growing up there, the home that they created. The table that we ate from, there was a sense of home. It was always this place where I can go and recenter myself at. Even in college I'd come home and I would eat food from my mom and dad's table and it revived my soul and so that's why we wanted to call it Vinai. And we wanted the place, I want the place to reflect, I mean you know what I said to the architect firm that's helping us, I said every square inch of this place, I want it to echo the legacy of my mom and dad. So from the plants to the kind of wood we use, to whatever you guys want to do. Like I want every piece of it to represent and echo their legacy and so if one day they pass on and move forward you know we still remember them through this restaurant.

Sanjit: So what was their reaction when you told them that you were gonna name the restaurant Vinai?

Yia: That's funny, my mom's like ;oh did you know that you were born and that was a camp that we stayed in'? Uh yeah mom, I know. So my mom was like that's kind of a coincidence that you would name in Vinai and I'm like yeah mom, that's why I wanted to name it. But you know my mom and dad they're really mellow people they're like 'oh that's nice'. I don't know, I think there's a part of me that believes that they are proud of it and they like it but then there's also a part where they're just really mellow and chill.

Sanjit: Well you know, what I like about and what I'm really drawn to is you naming it from this physical location as what you've just talked about right now. It's the embodiment of survival but also hope but it seems like it's also coming of trauma, right? I mean both your parents were widowers, is that right, before they met? And so I'm assuming there was a lot of that at the camp, people grieving and experiencing trauma from what had occurred to them and you know being part of a kind of military and social conflict that went well beyond them. If I'm not mistaken, your father was recruited by the CIA so it seems like it's poignant, not just the celebratory to go ahead and name it Vinai.

Yia: Yeah, my father has this incredible story of when he was 12 or 13 all his brothers, they all opted and joined. You know when the CIA and the US government came through and all the special forces guys that came through and said they were going to train these mountain people to help us navigate through this area and we're going to create paramilitary troops. My father and his brothers and his cousins and basically all men of fighting age, basically 12-13 and up, they joined up and my dad was one of those. And I mean that's what he did and that's what they did, was there a call to arms, their sense of duty to protecting their home. And fighting for a future that they weren't sure that they were going to be able to see. So I mean when we think of patriotism and we think of the eagle, we think it is a flying flag. We think of this is America, we protect our home, we protect our land, it is very patriotic. But I want to talk about this other sense of patriotism about there are people that are outside of America that are fighting for America's interests and some of them never being able to step on or see America. So it's like my grandpa who fought in the War and died, he never saw America, he never saw freedom, he never saw any of that. But he fought hoping that one day maybe his children's children will see it, will have that freedom. And so when I talk about food and I talk about cooking, all of that is a part of that you know. Where one of the things we always say with what we do, our mantra with Union Hmong Kitchen or Vinai is every dish has a narrative and if you follow that narrative long enough and close enough you get to the people behind the food and once you're there it's not about food, it's actually about people, but food is a catalyst into cultivating great relationships. And it's truly, we get people come in and they talk to us about 'oh man this food is awesome, this dish you're making is great' but that's merely just the tip of the iceberg. I want them to come in more and then hear about my parents' story, hear about the sacrifices that my father had to make, hear about this crazy stuff that my mom had to go through and all the things that they had to go through to get us here. So this is their story, these dishes belong to them, this idea of you know when people go 'oh this is your food, it's of your people' and I kind of laugh at that sometimes where really it's theirs. I'm just a curator, I'm just the guy that gets to brush away all the little stuff and make it look kind of pretty and fancy for people. But really this is their story and I get to tell their story and that's just what motivates me, nothing else really matters, as long as I get to tell the story everyday.

Sanjit: Yia, has that work gotten harder do you think? I am thinking about an arc of the past maybe three or four years where it feels like there's a greater degree of xenophobia that's been emerging, there's a greater degree of anti-immigrant sentiment that you're seeing being extolled by politicians. I'm just wondering from your perspective as a restauranteur as someone that is trying to engage in that intimate exchange of community building through food. Um has that created difficulties or made it a more of an uphill climb for you?

Yia: I don't know for others but for me personally, no. Because here's the deal, my father when he raised us, he made sure we had every opportunity. And that meant that he was willing to make himself nothing so we can be something. As a child you don't get that but as an adult when you realize that somebody has given up their life so that you can have life, it changes the way you do things. So for example the thing I tell people is my dad wanted all of his kids to go to college, he didn't want us to sit with an excuse 'oh we're immigrants and we're refugees and my parents couldn't provide enough for us so we couldn't go to school or go to college.' He wanted all of us to go to college so he worked his tail off to make sure that every single one of us had the opportunity for college. See his thing was that just because we're in this country and we are immigrants and we are refugees, that doesn't give us an excuse for like this is like our victim ticket you know. I've seen that illustration many times where it's okay like you have this person that starts like ten feet ahead, and this person that starts ten feet behind and they have to run the same distance. Like who's going to win, you know obviously the one who gets to be ahead and some people have asked me 'oh do you feel like since you're a refugee, you're an immigrant, you're a person of color, do you feel like you're behind?' One of the things that my father has taught me is, it doesn't matter where you're set up in life, like you run just as hard, you run just as fast, you don't use that excuse to slow down. So I don't see it that way, I know that the politicians will do their things you know because they're politicians, the bureaucrats will do their things, laws and whatever, stuff will happen. But that doesn't stop what I do because what I'm trying to do isn't trying to change policies, I'm not trying to change laws. I'm trying to tell their story in hopes that when people hear their stories it revives something in them, it rejuvenates something in them, it reminds something inside of them of their own people. So one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen is we were at the State Fair and we are making this play on hotdish, it was we call it the Minnesota Hmong hotdish. So we made this hotdish and we're at the State Fair. We demoed it, there's a whole bunch of people there watching it and there is this older gentleman who was probably in his 60's-70's who came up and started talking to me after. And he said to me 'I'm not sure of all the flavors that are in there but when I tasted that dish and I knew that's a hotdish'. So here's this older gentleman, white gentleman whose from, I think he was from Edina and he's lived there for the last 70 some years and he's like I never would have thought that this was like when you said all those flavors and all those things I never thought they would be hotdish but when I ate it to me it was a hot dish and it was so incredible that we could connect. Here I am from literally born all the way around the world and here's this gentleman here from Edina Minnesota and we're connecting over a hotdish dish.

Sanjit: Food has this way of sometimes overcoming cultural skepticism right?

Yia: Yeah and so when I talk about my father and his fight and what he's done in the war and how he fought for the Americans and how he fought for the interest of America in this war. It's interesting cause some of these you know middle-aged guys older gentleman that when they hear that story they go 'that reminds me of my dad and his fight in World War II' or 'that reminds me of my Grandpa', like my dad fought in Vietnam and I totally get it. And it's just these guys that I probably would never really connect with but because of them hearing about my father's story and my mother's it rejuvenates and it does something inside of them. And for me like that's what matters, when they look at someone like my mother and father and I've had many people come up to me and say man like your mom, her story is incredible. My mom's more popular than we are, everyone always asks about my mom. People come in and talk about her hot sauce and I think people love my mom more than they love me. But her story and what she's done to get us here in America, a lot of people that have talked to me say 'wow that reminds me of my mom' or 'reminds me of my grandmother who came from Eastern Europe' or 'this reminds me of the stories of my grandparents'. And there's that connection, I think there's that human connection when they hear that.

Sanjit: Yeah that generational component is huge and I think it does transcend so many cultures. When I was growing up as a sign of respect, anyone that was a generation before or that was older than you, whenever you'd see them for the first time in a long time you would reach down and touch their feet and then touch using the same hand and touch your heart as a sign of respect. And I think there is an incredible impetus for that type of intergenerational appreciation that's part of your intrinsic community. I think you definitely see that within, oftentimes Asian cultures or Eastern European cultures and elsewhere.

Yia: Yeah definitely I mean I'll be honest like this stuff never hit me as hard as it has in the last 5 years. Cause I think before in my early 20's I can say that now because I am 35. In my early 20's I was just like a silly college kid that was just like 'we're in America that's cool I just wanna live life, Facebook is awesome, MySpace is cool.' I was just a kid and again like I didn't want to accept who I was, where I came from. I've told this to many people, it's like when you're young you run so far from who you are that you run so far that you actually run in a circle and you run back to who you are. And that was the same way when it came through the food that I would enjoy cooking. When I was starting I was like 'I don't want to make Hmong food at all, it was embarrassing, Hmong food is peasant, it's not as cool and sexy as French food, as Spanish food, as Italian foods.' I hit up all those restaurants and learned all that technique but again like I said what revived my soul, what rejuvenated my soul, what brought me to the table was my mom's cooking and still today when I go visit them, when I see them she'll set out food and I'm like let's do it.

Sanjit: That's great. And you went to the University of Wisconsin La Crosse.

Yia: Yup, I went to UW La Crosse and majored in interpersonal communication and minored in PR and marketing and I never wanted to cook. I cooked in high school and college and it was a job I didn't really care about. I was like oh this is a job I get paid like 9-10 bucks an hour whatever. I never wanted to do this, I hated cooking in restaurants. Cause in college it would be you work when your friends play. So I just hated it and I told myself when I got done with college I'm gonna go find myself a nice job that puts me in a desk, work 9 to 5 and that's all I would do. But eventually it just kept calling me, I kept going back, after college the only jobs I could find were in a kitchen and I guess it wasn't till like 8 years ago where my heart was just really driven and said hey like I want to chase this, what does it look like.

Sanjit: What's interpersonal communication in terms of a field of study? I'm curious, what did you do, what did you learn there and was there anything that you learned that's helpful for you where you are now?

Yia: Definitely, yeah you learn how to talk to people but I think more importantly the one thing that I loved about my Comm Studies classes was it came from the view of a sociologist. So you're studying people, studying people's interaction, why they like something, why they don't like something. And that plays a big role in what we're doing but another thing too is I it's all about narrative right, it's all about storytelling. And that really helped me, by saying for example, I could be like 'hey this dish that we're making, this is what I want people to realize when they're eating it. But if they're eating it and they're not getting that, then there's something I'm doing wrong.' In communication we always talk about what's more important, the intention of the message or the interpretation of the message. Well studies have found out that 82% of people feel that the interpretation of the message is more important than the message. So if I'm trying to explain Hmong food to people and if they're just saying 'oh yeah it's just kind of like Thai food and Lao food right?' and I just go yeah I guess. Then that's all we get to say is that Hmong food is just a copy of another food. Hmong people we've always been kind of like Thai's or kind of like Lao's, they're kind of like Vietnamese. And that's why some of the first Hmong entrepreneurs here, especially restaurant entrepreneurs here open restaurants on University Avenue in Frogtown. A lot of them are Hmong owned but they're Thai restaurants, they're Vietnamese restaurants, they're Laotian restaurants, they're Chinese restaurants because that was what they were able to do to market it. So what we've really coined in the last, I wanna say four or five years, where we really took on this whole thing of what is Hmong food. We've coined this phrase that is Hmong food isn't a type of food, it's a philosophy of food, it's a way of thinking about food. Cause if you want to know the Hmong people, know their food. Historically we've always been a traveling group of people, going from different areas because we're agricultural, we will go wherever the land is the best so that we can work the land. And in doing that we rub shoulders with different cultures and different heritages and different ethnicities and we took a little bit from them and what we learned from them we kind of took that and forged it into our own culture. So I always say that our cultural DNA is intricately woven into the foods that we eat. Now all of this was six-seven years ago and it was just all pieces and in the last few last five-six years we've been able to piece this puzzle together and able to clearly communicate that to our own people, to people outside of our community. Saying that Hmong food isn't a type of food, it's not about produce, it's not about a product, it's actually about a group of people, Hmong food is actually an all-encompassing holistic idea. So once we understand that then for us, me as a Hmong cook, it's freeing. I'm not limited to certain things because I'm Hmong and whatever I touch, that becomes part of the Hmong food narrative. And so that means we were able to collab with everyone and that's why I love working with different farmers around here, Hmong farmers, white farmers, Hispanic farmers and whatever they grow we can say hey we'll take what you guys grow and we'll kind of use our flavor, our techniques but we're going to use that to make Hmong food out of it.

Sanjit: You know one thing that struck me was I think I read a quote of yours that said, 'my parents didn't have the luxury of thinking creatively, all their energy was focused on survival.' And I think you went on to kind of talk about the kind of love and care that they provided you and how it's something that you've tried to embody in your work. It made me think about this idea of creative survival because it also sounded like your father goes from woodworker, to welder, to kind of General Macgyver fix it person. That seems like it has a creative propensity to it and I'm just wondering if you'd given thoughts about times when it feels like creativity seems ancillary to survival but maybe creativity is survival in many ways.

Yia: Definitely, my father doesn't have a high school degree, he has like no degrees. I think when we first moved to America he did a couple of classes in night school just to get basic English down, his English isn't the best. But he's able to take an engine, break it down and put it back together. He fixes all our the car's, he'll be able to turn on the engine and just kind of listen to the car and say 'oh it's this it's that.' Like he's not an engineer, he's not a mechanic, but he's just a person, he's just a man who uses his hands and if he's able to touch something and break it down. I've seen him put together our lawn mowers, as kids our lawn mower broke, and I remember he took it apart and kind of cleaned everything out and put it back together and it worked. And I asked him like 'hey dad where'd you learn that' and he was like 'I don't know we just open it up and try to figure it out.' And it's always been his way of doing things, working with his hands. And I remember when he would come inside, his hand would have grease on it from working on the car, working on small engines, anything. My father, that's what he did and as a cook, I love working with my hands. For me, reading something doesn't really sit well with me. I'm like 'I don't know but if I could touch it with my hands and I can break it down.' The first time my dad gave me a boning knife, I was a kid and he said 'hey I'll break down this side of pork' and he showed me really quick how to do it, like it makes sense to me. And it made sense, butchering animals makes sense to me, finding the tendon, where to cut, how to make the cut, what are we looking for, how do we break this apart. As a kid I was more comfortable holding a boning knife, breaking down pigs then I was throwing a ball, throwing a baseball, catching a baseball. And so you growing up I just thought that that was something everybody did, or everybody knew. And in this whole idea of creativity, what I meant with what I was saying was, my mom and dad didn't have time to sit and say 'hey what could we dream today, how can we create art.' It was no, we need to survive, we need to survive, we need to make this makeshift ceiling work so that we can protect ourselves from the rain. In this refugee camp we need to be able to build this and so my dad has always done that and I think it hasn't been until I want to say the last like 10-15 years where they've had this. Where we're doing well, everything is going well. Because they're not always working anymore, and they're retired now so they just look bored. It's one of those things where I get to see how now they get to be creative. My mom especially with some of her food and some of the recipes she's doing, she gets more creative now with it. She's like 'hey I tried this or I tried using this.' My dad, the stuff he gets to build, it's not building for work, it's just building for fun. He builds our coffee tables, he's a carpenter, he's a woodworker so he knows how to do all that stuff. My mom you know loves her sewing, so she's sewing all these different projects and she does it not for work but for fun. So there is this leisure aspect now that for the last you know 60 some years it's always been survival, survival, survival, and for the last few years it's, there's a sense of leisure. And for me it's very satisfying to be able to see them do that, it's very satisfying for them even to be able to just go for a walk. It blew my mind that my mom was like 'hey, you know your dad would love a new pair of sneakers cause we can go on walks.' They've never been able, I've never really seen them do that, just to go on walks like around the neighborhood. Because it's like we don't have to cook for people, we don't have to provide, do a nine-to-five. We don't have to worry about you know, are we having money coming in, oh are we paying bills, like we've taken care of everything for them. And I think a lot of grandparents get to take care of grandkids and play with their grandkids all day you know.

Sanjit: Right and I'm wondering about that, you know you're mirroring your father a little bit, which is that you didn't go to Johnson Wales, you didn't go to The Culinary Institute. You took this kind of intuitive approach to understanding how to break down a protein or how to go ahead and feel like you can go put together your own mise en place. And it sounds like it mirrors a lot of your dad's kind of intuitive engineering and sensibilities too. Do you think that gives you an edge in some ways, do you think it gives you a unique perspective because you're not necessarily informed by a pedagogy or an institutional vantage point for what cooking or what a chef could be.

Yia: Yeah, I mean there's a plus and minus to it. You know there's some things where it took me longer to learn it than if I was in culinary school. It would have been explained to me pretty easily and I could just pick it up there. There are some aspects of it too where I love being able to think outside of the box. We ran a pop-up restaurant for the last three years. Man, like right now the big term is you the 'pivot', you know everyone's got to pivot. I'm like man, we've been pivoting for the last three years. Like every pop-up we've been doing we felt like we were pivoting. There was something that was broken, there was something that was wrong, we always had to, so we were always kind of just trying to figure out what our next step was, when our next step is. I mean, definitely that's kind of made me more creative. As a kid I always thought that my dad was kind of dorky so I was like whatever, Dad's weird. But now I realize that I am him, everything that's good about me, everything that's creative about me, everything that has strength inside of me, it's all a reflection of him, it's nothing of my own. I didn't get a work ethic because I thought 'I'm gonna be the hardest worker,' no, I was inspired by watching my father work his tail off to make sure that we were provided for. Like when I get tired and we're working 12-14 hour shifts and we're working and your arms deep into washing dishes and stuff. The thing I think about is, Dad wouldn't give up, he wouldn't give up and that's what I think about. Honestly, I'm not trying to be melodramatic about it but that's what I think about like 'nope I'm pumping through just the way that he would do it.' And I think that work ethic that he had rubbed off on me but it also inspired me. Again like I said, the kids that work with us that went through culinary school, some of them are amazing and some of them can't get over themselves. Cause it's like 'well no that's not like the book I read said we were supposed to do.' And I'll be like 'nah man like this is real life application you know you live in a bubble there sometimes, this is real life application.' Now I got no knock on that and some of the kids who grew up cooking and they grew up cooking in the restaurant world and there was boom, a sixteen-year-old and we're starting there. Some of them are incredible, some of them don't have the greatest technique because they didn't have instruction that taught them. There are pros and cons to it, there's no right or wrong way. At the end of the day some of the kids that work with us, we just really push on. It's hard and it's work ethic, and it's not about being some you know Food Network star, it's not about being on Top Chef or having your YouTube video, like none of that stuff really matters. It's about putting the work in. That's what I tell all the young cooks and chefs, it's putting the work in knowing that you have to create muscle memory, you have to have a rhythm, you have to put the work in once you're there. Like you get the next step and you know and then you go out and that's kind of how I did it. I put my head down when I was young and just worked in the kitchen, worked in the kitchen. The chefs I worked for believed in me and said we're going to give you more responsibility and then kind of just moved up, moved up. And yeah you figure out your own system, you figure out your own rhythm in it.

Sanjit: So I wanted to pivot to the idea around cultural leadership. And hearing a lot of what you've been talking about Yia, I think about the nature of what cultural leadership means to you, but also in the context of this global pandemic that we're under. I know that certainly you've been affected by it and you probably know plenty of family members and members of your community that have been affected by it, the restaurant industry has been devastated by the pandemic. But it seems to me that the idea of cultural leadership can take on a greater degree of meaning now maybe than ever before. And in particular I was thinking about it in relation to how, I think it was last week that you hosted the hungry to connect event, where you were able to start essentially open source demo having a virtual cooking class. So anyways I just wanted to get your take on the idea of cultural leadership and maybe an extension of that, what cultural leadership means in the time of a pandemic.

Yia: It's a big responsibility especially when it comes to things like cultural leadership. I think that there are times when people will call on you and say 'hey would you help us with this, would you lead us in this area' and I'm willing to and just saying I'll do my best. I've never really considered myself and been like 'hey I want to be a leader in our community.' But I think that in times of stuff like this, I think we've been approached as a whole unit as Union Hmong Kitchen, as Vinai, to help and I personally have been approached too. So I don't know, I just take it as it goes. I saw how my father especially in the Hmong culture, in the Hmong community I should say that there's always those leaders that are in there that you go to for help. And my father has never been the kind of guy who stepped up and said 'hey I am a leader in our Hmong community' but what's interesting is there have been many people in our community that have come to him for leadership, come to him for guidance when there's troubles or when there's certain hardships. So I've always looked at that as an example for me, knowing that there are times that people will come up and say 'can you help us through this, can you help us figure this out.' So yeah I don't consider myself a leader like I'm going to step up tell everyone, let everyone know that I'm a leader but if they need me, if they need us, I'm willing to help, willing to do my part. Especially when it comes to raising awareness of different groups like Open Arm, Urban Roots, The Good Acre, different farming hubs. The Hmong-American Farming association where we work with these different farmers, these different farming groups. Especially Hunger Task Force type groups, I love working with them.

Sanjit: One of the things I'm struck by when we're talking, is that in many ways it feels like much of what you're talking about is a very intimate and elaborate story around mentorship. Or whether it's mentorship that you've received from your parents, whether it's mentorship that's almost part of a necessity that you're able to provide to the broader community. You talked about younger chefs, and people that are wanting to cook at 15 and 16 and for me that undertone there is to talk about your responsibility as a mentor. And I guess for me I see that as being an essential part of the idea around cultural leadership. And I guess I maybe wanted to get your take on how your ideas around mentorship have maybe evolved over time. Maybe since college and to see yourself as someone that's really providing agency and voice for Hmong culinary vernacular.

Yia: Yeah so in high school I played team sports. I played football in high school and grades wise, I wasn't doing super well. And I guess like speaking English I do okay but like grammatically, writing and all that stuff when it comes to technicality of English, I don't really do that well. And so I remember I wasn't doing well in class, I think I was a sophomore or junior in in high school and I remember one of my football coaches, Mr. Miller, Tim Miller, who's still teaching. And I was just having a rough day in practice I remember and I was just really stressed cause I knew when my parents got my grades and they saw how I had kind of low C's in English, that my father and my mother were going to come down hard on me. And I remember I was having a really crappy day of practice and I wasn't doing well and I was just very emotional and I remember he pulled me aside and said 'hey man like what's going on like you're not like this, what's going on? You're usually happy, you're happy go lucky, you have fun in practice, what's going on?' And I remember I just told him 'man I'm not doing well in English and I don't know what to do, I don't think I'm cut out for a school' and blah blah blah. And I remember Coach Miller goes 'okay, here are my study hall periods in my class, these are when I have my breaks and I'm going to take the sports page out of the newspaper and I'm gonna leave the sports page in my room. You can get a hall pass from your study hall teacher or whatever. And you can come to my room and we don't even have to talk and all I'm going to do is give you the sports page and you're gonna just read, you just read. Because I think that once you start reading stories or reading things that you enjoy reading stuff like sports and once you start reading, sentence structures, tense, you know all these different technicalities of English writing it's going to make sense. It's going to, once you see it. And for a whole year, that's what I did with him. And you know, he gets one period a day, a 45-55 minute period for his break. And he would sit in class and he would just let me come in and read. He'd have the sports page out and I'd just read it and we just talked. And for a whole year that's what he did and I was able to pass, I did well and I was able to pass. Because of all that I was able to go to college and I mean he just took the time, he didn't look at me as some charity case. He just said 'I'm just doing this and you just come in.' And that affected me a lot, that really showed me what it meant to care for someone and to go the extra distance and say 'I want to see you do well and here's what I'm going to do, I'm going to sacrifice my one break I get a day and I'm going to make sure that you have the opportunity to go on from here.' And I remember he came up to the restaurant and visited us this past fall and I was able to tell him that and I haven't seen him in like 15-16 years. But I was able to tell him that it was because of that, it really helped me give that confidence so that I could do my college essay and get into college you know. And so the way that he did that really helped me and that's kind of what I want to do. Especially for younger cooks because there's all these young cooks. They always have all these great dreams and aspirations which is amazing, I love that but I want to teach them how to harness that. Because at that age, when I was that young I had the same thing but I was all over the place, I never committed to anything. It was always I did something for a few weeks and then went and did something else. And I really think that to talk to younger guys and say 'if you want to commit to this, you want to commit to give us six months to a year and we want to help mold you and then after that if you want to leave and go do something else, that's amazing but we want to be able to give you the tools to go.'

Sanjit: Yia, what do you think that you'd like to see us learn from this pandemic. What do you want us to aspire for? Whether it's specifically your field regarding production of food and it's cultural component or whether it's a broader community. What would you like to see us learn or or change, when we're on the other side of this pandemic?

Yia: Yeah I mean I've been thinking about this for the last few weeks and I think the one thing is, before the pandemic, a lot of us were on our devices and it was all about social media. It was kind of like this front door view of everyone's life. You know, you're not really seeing what's behind the social media account. But there's this distance where everyone kept this distance and they all had this facade. And what's very interesting is that this pandemic has really stripped all that down and now instead of seeing people's Instagram account or Facebook account we actually want to interact with people one-on-one. We want to see humans, we don't want to see a screen. We want to be in front of each other, we want to be able to hug each other, to give a handshake to each other, put our arms around each other, we want to emphasize with each other. And if the one thing that I've learned from this pandemic is, all those things that didn't really matter before Covid, now for the last two months where we are not allowed to do that, while we were sheltering in place, we want to do that. And so when we slowly come out of this pandemic and things are getting back to normal, I think that we're going to appreciate that more. A gathering of eating together, being around friends, being around family, being around the people you love. And having that time around the table talking, eating late into night and not saying these lines of 'I'm too busy for this, let's reschedule for that,' which is taking this time and to say 'remember the time where we weren't busy and we were all just stuck in our homes.' Now we're able to do this, and for me it's just that appreciation especially when it comes to like making food. It's like man one of the greatest joys that we get to do is we know that for people in the service industry we get to facilitate community. I believe that when people gather and eat together that the most important thing on that table is not the food, it's the community that's happening, it's the relationships that's building, it's the commonality that people will be finding that we have in each other. And I miss that, I miss being able to do that. We can, with the take out food that we do, sure. But to be able to have strangers sit around the table together, friends for the first time sitting around the table together. I miss doing that, I miss being a part of that. Even the guys that cook, we get excited about the new dishes that we have ideas for you know and so we want to be able to see that happen again. And I'm excited for that day to come back.

Sanjit: I'm not sure I could think of a better note for us to end our conversation on. It's been such an honor to spend this time with you.

Yia: Thank you so much, and thank you for having me.