When she is six, she starts to cook. It’s her duty, and she is sworn to it. When she is thirteen, she starts to love it. BBQ bamboo. Stew bamboo. Stir-fried bamboo. Bamboo Salad. Pickled bamboo. Dried bamboo. Each one is a different flavor and she tries making them all. Others start asking her to come cook for parties, weddings, big events. Singing together, dancing together, eating together. The laughter and joy vibrate all around her.

When she is eighteen, she dreams of a better life. A life beyond beyond the looming future of being wed off to a man. A life beyond Manhen, her village, and the monotonous cycle within its impoverished borders. Born. Survive. Die. Born. Survive. Die. Her mother is enraged at the idea of her young daughter wanting to venture out into the big city. Having only graduated from high school, the people in the village are certain that the only future awaiting her is a life of prostitution. Rather than being filled with fear, she dreams of proving them otherwise. What she didn’t know at the time was that after she goes, her mother would refuse to speak to her, to even breathe of her existence, for years to come.

She leaves her village for Kunming, Yunnan in the summer of 1997.

The first thing she notices when she arrives in Kunming is the smell. The stench of sewage overwhelms her nostrils. The only belongings she carries on her are a pillow, a blanket, and 100 yuan in her pocket. When the hunger takes over her body, she picks bean plants off the side of the road to eat. Her friend in the city lets her stay with her until she finds a job. After weeks of searching, she happens upon a sign in the window on the streets looking to hire servers. It’s a Japanese restaurant yet to open to the public.

It’s easy to feel like nothing in the city, to be seen as a simple minority villager. Rough skin, dirty clothes, short stature, and poor Mandarin--this must be what the tall, beautiful manager thinks when she refuses to hire her. “Why don’t you try me? If you try me, and you don’t like me, just let me know,” she pushes. The manager agrees to let her on, to let her try for three days. She’s granted room and board, for now.

That first night at her new job, she is taken to her room, a small room above the restaurant filled with bunk beds. The manager calls for someone, “Yoshiko, Yoshiko.” No one answers. They keep calling. She doesn’t know until someone comes in to inform her that the manager is calling for her. Her name is Yoshiko now, they tell her. The name leaves a bitter taste in her mouth.  

When she heads downstairs, she is given sanding paper and instructed to sand down wooden sushi trays. The only others working are three men she doesn’t recognize. As she tries to fall asleep that night, she is hounded by the unfamiliar noises of the city: the honking cars driving by the road, people yelling in the streets, construction trucks operating all night long. They feed her tasteless slop for every meal. After working three exhausting months without pay, she receives her first paycheck during the fourth month.

She decides to buy a liter of Coca Cola. Growing up in her rural village of one hundred, this is what she’s dreamt of for so long, trying these fancy foods like soda. Her taste buds tingle from the carbonation, and the air swelling in her stomach forces itself out her mouth as a burp. 

       The first thought that comes to her mind is how horrible the taste turns out to be.

In her nine years in the city, she learns how to be a server. She learns Japanese from her boss, then from community college, and after she learns how to be a translator. She puts her heart into learning. She feeds on the energy of it all. Meanwhile, in the back of her mind, she watches people as they cook. She thinks to herself what she would do differently, small tweaks here and there. She notices all the city folks lining up in droves to eat minority food. And so, she dreams. She dreams of owning her own restaurant someday. In between all of this, she meets her husband--a kind American man from St. Louis. They get married back in her village. 

Before they leave for America, she’s afraid.

         “You don’t know how to use a computer.”

         “You don’t know how to drive.”

         “You don’t know English.”

You don’t know. You don’t know. You don’t know. She cashes in these you-don’t-knows for opportunities; the one thing she’s always known is how to survive.

She leaves for America, arriving in St. Louis in 2006.

***

She opens Lona’s Lil Eats with her husband the spring of 2008.

It’s hard through the years. She needs to take care of many parts: the customer, the workers, the quality, every little detail. She’s not used to this, being stretched in every possible direction. But like before, she’s always learning. She’s learning new dishes, new ways to care for her workers, new strategies to run a business. She learns through her mistakes, thousands of them, but they define her.

This is a place of her creation, sprouted from her brain and built from the ground up.