WEBVTT 00:00.562 --> 00:04.960 JOHN YANG: Vietnamese American chef Tu David Phu traces his culinary 00:04.960 --> 00:08.880 influences back to his family's unspoken history of war. 00:08.880 --> 00:13.880 He says food preferences often mirror people's perceptions of other cultures and prejudices. 00:14.240 --> 00:18.480 Tonight, he gives us his Brief But Spectacular take on the memory of 00:18.480 --> 00:23.440 food, part of our arts and culture series, Canvas. 00:23.440 --> 00:26.960 TU DAVID PHU, Chef: The physical sensation of eating something when it's delicious, 00:26.960 --> 00:31.440 it gives you like a physical, great emotional feeling. 00:31.440 --> 00:35.360 And I think I held onto that for most of my youth because I think I would say I had 00:35.360 --> 00:40.360 a difficult youth. And I kept on coming back to the kitchen during that feeling. 00:40.800 --> 00:43.840 The kitchen space for me is a safe space. 00:48.080 --> 00:53.080 My parents are refugees from Vietnam. They came over to the United States in 1975. And I was born 00:55.120 --> 00:59.920 in St. Paul, Minnesota, and moved to Oakland when I was about 2 years old. And in the community that 00:59.920 --> 01:04.920 we landed in, I found myself in a food-insecure community in a food-insecure household. 01:08.080 --> 01:13.080 Given that my parents were immigrants, income was hard to come by. A meal on our tables in 01:14.160 --> 01:19.160 my youth was seldom seen. When I think of family meals that my mom cooked at home, 01:20.080 --> 01:25.080 I think of the bear chicken bone carcass that she got from the butcher shop because it was free. 01:26.560 --> 01:31.560 Credits to a lot of our mothers in their effort to innovate dishes, to create recipes to nourish 01:33.120 --> 01:38.120 their family, to make things delicious, because that's what love is. There's so many different 01:38.560 --> 01:43.560 cultures where people like my mom, they're able to innovate in their own kitchens, right? 01:43.680 --> 01:48.680 And there's no such thing as a authentic or a traditional stamp on any recipe. Authenticity 01:49.760 --> 01:54.760 is a feeling. Initially, I was cooking -- I was trying to cook traditional Vietnamese food. 01:55.760 --> 02:00.760 And then I ran into a wall, because you know why? Given that I'm a chef and I had all this training, 02:03.360 --> 02:08.360 I could never cook better than my mom or any other Vietnamese mothers. 02:08.480 --> 02:12.720 And I had to come to that realization, because you know why? They have been cooking that way 02:12.720 --> 02:17.200 all their lives. It's in those moments where I started to cook my mother's food, opposed to 02:17.200 --> 02:22.200 traditional Vietnamese food. And it's there when I think people started to really connect with me. 02:23.760 --> 02:26.000 In addition, because I was cooking my mother's food, 02:26.800 --> 02:31.200 I had to explain to people what I was cooking. And it was through those stories and explaining, 02:31.760 --> 02:36.760 this is what I had when I was a kid, and we had this neighbor who was Korean, or my father's a 02:37.760 --> 02:42.560 fishmonger, and he'd bring home lobster all the time, and this is an inspiration of that thought. 02:43.360 --> 02:47.600 People really resonated and connected with me, because now it's not just about Vietnamese 02:47.600 --> 02:52.400 food. It's not just Vietnamese diaspora. This food, these recipes are about family. And I 02:52.400 --> 02:56.960 think that just creates a bigger spectrum to kind of welcome people to the table. 02:56.960 --> 02:59.360 I'm not looking to connect with other people who look like me. 02:59.920 --> 03:04.880 Hopefully, by telling a narrative and story through food, people will see and connect 03:04.880 --> 03:08.800 with me through a human experience, not an Asian American experience. 03:09.520 --> 03:14.520 My name is Tu David Phu, and this is my Brief But Spectacular take on the memory of taste. 03:14.960 --> 03:19.960 JOHN YANG: You can watch all our Brief But Spectacular episodes at PBS.org/NewsHour/Brief.