In Minnesota, An Ambassador For Hmong Culture And Culinary Traditions
After his family fled Laos for America, Yia Vang was at first embarrassed by his family's home cooking. Then he learned to embrace it, and found that many others were willing to do the same.
Yia Vang grew up in a family of storytellers.
When he was a child, his father used to regale him and his six siblings with war stories from his native Laos. His mother would read verses from the Bible and oblige her kids to recount them from memory.
Vang, now 33, says food is his story-telling medium. As the co-founder of Union Kitchen, a Minnesota-based Hmong pop-up restaurant, Vang says he wants to make the food he grew up with more accessible to non-Hmongs, while also passing traditions down to the next generation of Hmong Americans.
"Our history is intrinsically woven into the food we eat,"
