Sundays are for Dim Sum. While the rest of America goes to church, Sunday School, or NFL games, you can find Chinese people eating Cantonese food.
I get so disenfranchised reading the news, because global borders and lines we've created are completely unnecessary. That's just another person on the other side, and it's his bad luck that he was born there and it's my good fortune that I was born here. It's all kind of illogical.
I don't like labels. I don't understand the need for them. When you define yourself a certain way, people have expectations.
There is a lot of food culture that goes on in the home and in the community in non-traditional ways. Food is a lot more than restaurants.
I don't want to get burned when I'm cooking. To avoid getting hit when pan-frying, I stand far away and use chopsticks that are almost two feet long. I learned it from my mom, who does the same thing.
I saw an opportunity to use a restaurant to identify a lot of my issues and concerns with being an immigrant in America, and Asian in America, and a young person in America.
I don't think people in America understand race, and how deep the hooks of whiteness there are in our consciousness.
I wanted to inspire people not to work under a bamboo ceiling. Whatever you are - yellow, black, white, brown - you don't have to allow your skin to define who you are or how you operate your business. There's not one face to anything.
I'll always be American in my world view and allegiance. American in the naive way I go to other countries and tell them how they should treat their poor or clean their water.
BaoHaus is idiosyncratic, creative, and artistic. My restaurant doesn't look like a Taiwanese restaurant.
For me, juicing isn't about binging and cleansing; I try to incorporate it into a balanced diet.
I'll always be Chinese first. It probably isn't politically correct to say or something that the majority understands; I can change my shoes, I can swap my passport, but, I'll always have this face.
I choose to be American, I choose to live in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, I choose to have Puerto Rican/Jewish neighbors, and I choose to maintain my Chinese identity.