♪ [ Whirring ] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ -So this tattoo that I'm drawing is an homage to my family heritage from both my mom and my father.

I hope to get it on my chest.

It's a little exaggerated, but I have this massive mackerel that these three people have just caught.

It's symbolic of my family's relationship with the ocean.

When I first got my tattoos, my mom cried.

They hated it.

She thought I was going to be a failure.

[ Chuckles ] ♪ The first one who taught me how to cook I would have to say is my mom.

I always hung around the kitchen, so she would let me taste things.

It's how I developed my palate.

I learned how carrots taste, how onions taste.

♪ I have a special relationship with her garden.

When I had a stomach ache, my mom would pick the leaves off of the male pomegranate tree, bushes of lemongrass, the kaffir lime tree.

My mom and my dad would always tell me to go outside and pick so they could cook for dinner.

[ Conversing in Vietnamese ] -[ Speaking Vietnamese ] ♪ -My mom's very poetic in a lot of ways.

She cherishes things from her island.

On all of our trips, my mom would bring something back.

This is literally our land.

This is our heritage.

She has this theory that you mix these shells into the soil in our backyard garden, it will help things grow.

My family is from Phú Quoc Island.

Phú Quoc Island, I could paint a visual for you guys.

South China Sea, this whole region of China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and I exist in a small, little island right down here off the shores of Cambodia, away from Vietnam.

♪ Everyone in my family fished in the ocean.

Ocean is a big part of our culture, a big part of our heritage, a big part of our bloodline.

I remember hanging out with my uncles in Vietnam where they would tell me that they wouldn't feel well if they didn't see the ocean that day.

[ Chatter ] I still try to stay connected to the island, bringing back ingredients from our family farms -- peppercorns, cashews, but most importantly, fish sauce.

We've been making fish sauce ever since 1895.

-[ Speaking Vietnamese ] -When you walk through my parents' garden, there's definitely a feel of being in Vietnam.

[ Chatter ] The perilla, the fish wart, the Thai Bird Chilis, the sugarcane that we have back there.

The list goes on and on.

♪ My parents were forced out of their homeland.

If they didn't leave, they tell me all the time, they would've starved.

My dad experienced two wars.

He was drafted by the Democratic Vietnam Army as a very, very young man to engage in war with the Khmer Rouge, which is a Nazi-like regime that existed in Cambodia.

My dad had to go through a second war with my mom not as a soldier, but as a civilian, where they were able to navigate and escape Vietnam on a boat to make it over to Thailand in a refugee camp.

I think my dad was in his like late teens by then, early 20s, something like that.

I can't imagine doing that as a young man.

♪ -[ Speaking Vietnamese ] -It wasn't until these most recent years where I started to cook.

My mom was able to open up to me about a few stories of how life was like during the war.

If you ask her about food, she taught herself how to cook in a refugee camp.

So her basics are rooted in using whatever she could find.

Aside from that, we don't actually talk about the war.

♪ ♪ The earliest memory of my dad -- my dad and I used to fish underneath the Bay Bridge.

We used to catch everything from, like, shark, which people wouldn't eat.

[ Chuckles ] We would -- stingrays.

Fairfield River and Sacramento River, we'd fish for bass, catfish.

We would go super late at night, like 11:00, 12:00 at night, and we would camp out.

And we would buy certain food items to get us through the night.

Sometimes corn, sometimes crayfish if that was in season, rice, obviously, like, minimal, simple things, but usually, we would bet on the hopes of catching fish to cook and eat it in that moment.

In my pre-teen years, I noticed that most of my uncles, my dad's friends included, had a bunch of restaurants, mainly Pho restaurants.

That kind of turned me on to restaurants and serving food, is that I had this great relationship with food already from my upbringing.

That was my insight into success.

Manual labor -- my parents never wanted me to work with my hands.

My dad used to tell me, "I want you one day to sit in a chair.

Make phone calls, you know, manage from a desk."

I think manual labor is just a nice way of us Westerners saying that we don't feel like your skill set is a highly skilled craft.

It's been raining all week, and it's the first break of sun that we got.

So why not go outside and barbecue, right?

A rare opportunity to hang out with my pops and my mom.

Decided to go out and get some fish and cook.

So we brought in chili pepper cod and we bought lingcod today.

My mom, with all the bones and the scraps, she's gonna be making Cháo, which is a rice porridge.

She's going to make a broth or fumet with the fish bones and all the fish scraps that my dad and I aren't using.

She's gonna make this beautiful rice porridge soup out of it.

My dad saved all the bloodline for me, so I'm going to make a dish with it.

Bloodline on the fish exists in between the skin and the flesh itself, and the reason why it's red is because it's so dark and that's where all the blood is.

You know, you have this deep, dark, bold flavor that you usually don't see in fish.

That's literally the essence of the fish.

Restaurants would throw this beautiful chain away.

People always complain that essence of fish is usually a fishy thing.

[ Chuckles ] Ironic, right?

I mean, if you want the flavor of fish, you should embrace it.

In the US, it's about prime cuts, what looks pretty on a plate.

So much is thrown away, which creates a bias of what's good.

On Phú Quoc, we eat everything -- bones, bloodline, but I actually learned how to eat this in Oakland.

As a kid, Dad would bring home all the scraps.

We didn't have much money.

Taught me to see value in things that people wasted or threw away.

My parents were able to make it into, like, a beautiful dish that nourish both myself and my sister.

They never told us, "You have to eat this because we're refugees."

It was, "Eat this because it tastes good."

♪ Funny story about my parents.

My parents met each other in their teens, and the only thing he knew how to do was fish and dive.

So he would go out to the market, dive for fish, and try to sell whatever fish he caught for that day to provide for his family.

My dad had a family of 12 to feed -- brothers and sisters and his mother included, so my dad didn't have time for dates.

[ Chuckles ] But at his small little stand at the fish market, my mom started to notice this handsome, handsome man.

♪ He would save the best catch of the day that he had for my mom, and as things progressed, it was my mom that asked my dad out.

As the war started escalating, the presence of communism started increasing, my parents' relationship grew into an intimate one to the point they eloped together.

[ Conversing in Vietnamese ] ♪ You know, they've been committed to each other for close to 40 years, and funnily enough, because my mom was rich and my dad was poor, they never got a blessing to get married.

♪ [ Conversing in Vietnamese ] There was a brief period in time where I wanted to, like, MMA fight and, like, do, like, martial arts and do all the cool things.

I grew up in Oakland in one of the roughest neighborhoods in the nation in the '90s.

I was always involved in some sort of fight, so the kids would, you know, do the common thing and try to, like, either take my shoes, ask for a dollar, you know, the classic bully tactics, right?

I'd say no because I'm hard-headed.

We'd get in a fight.

Whether I win or they win, didn't matter because they'll always come back with their 10 friends.

[ Chuckles ] And I would get my ass kicked.

I wasn't able to connect with my parents about that because they literally lived in a war zone, and they were dodging bullets.

And they found a way to escape that, and they would always challenge me.

If they were able to dodge and escape bullets and, you know, genocide and all those things, [Chuckles] why wasn't I able to dodge bullies and fights?

And it gave me a lot of perspective, you know?

It taught me that if they could use things in that extreme situation, there's opportunity for me to figure out things in my situation.

I think that contributed a lot to my success and being a chef.

♪ The a-ha moment came in my high-school years as I started to cook more and I started to -- you know, my parents allowed me to actually use the stove and I would actually cook dinner and -- you know, mainly with barbecue and, you know, fried rice and, you know, simple, you know, amateur-level stuff, home-cook stuff.

And then people started to like my food.

I was connecting with people.

I was able to trigger an emotion in somebody and make them happy through something I did.

to have that type of acknowledgment felt great.

-Cheers.

Boop, boop, boop, boop!

-My mom cooked out of necessity to feed her family.

I mean, of course, there is joy in that, but I wanted to translate my emotion of joy and cooking into a career.

And my mom thought that was absurd because my dad used to be a kitchen manager, you know, in a Chinese restaurant and just very exploitive, you know, lots of hours, lots of stress, lots of hard work.

So I told my mom I want to go to cooking school.

She freaked out.

Asian parents are hard, man.

It's very opposite of what you see nowadays and what the Western world encourages you to teach your kids.

I see on TV, I think it was like some special, like, parenting program, and it was saying, like, "You need to encourage your kids.

You need to validate them and let them know they did a good job."

And I'm not questioning that.

I'm pretty sure it works.

But I didn't get that, you know?

For me, my parents were very hard, just like they were very critical.

"Hey, Mom, I got a B-minus."

"Why didn't you get an A-plus?"

[ Chuckles ] Or, "Hey, Mom, I cooked this."

"Close, but not right.

You can't call this that dish if it's not right."

I mentioned to my parents I was going to be on "Top Chef."

My mom was like, "What is that?"

My dad was like, "Are you getting paid?"

[ Chuckles ] -Really spoke to potluck.

There was a lot of freshness, a lot of veraciousness.

The winner of the first challenge is Tu.

[ Applause ] ♪ -When my dad asked me if I'm getting paid, that tells you everything about what he went through, what he thinks, but it's not something we really talked about.

We come from two different cultures.

My dad's Vietnamese that's mixed with Khmer and Chinese, as well, and I am this 6'2" oversized Vietnamese American growing up in Oakland.

Different cultures, growing up in different places, so we really couldn't connect.

-[ Speaking Vietnamese ] [ Dog whines ] -Earlier today, we went out to the Asian market to pick fish.

You know, we were going to scan over things to see what we're going to cook for the day, and I swear to you, like, it must have been over 10 years since I did that with my dad.

I rift with my dad.

I'm like, "Dad, you're the fish expert.

What do you think we should get?"

We both agreed that we should get something alive.

[ Chuckles ] [ Register beeps ] And we ended up picking lingcod -- local fish, super delicious, great flesh, nice bite to it, good fish fat, then we broke it down.

I tend to forget how precious moments like that are.

♪ I remember meeting this guy.

I was introduced to him by a client, so he introduces me.

He was like, "Hey, come over here, Tu.

I want you to meet my colleague, want you to meet my friend."

Shake hands with him.

"This is my chef.

We're doing work together.

He's helping me developing some stuff."

The guy immediately looks at me and tells me to my face, "Man, you look like a mechanic."

You know, the interesting thing is in that moment, I started to understand even more so why my dad didn't want me to cook.

Dad has this image in his head of how people treat people, especially in food.

That's this thing about using my hands, but as a kid, your parents have this idea of what they want and really, you just want to be just like them.

My parents are from an island called Phú Quoc, and that's where most of the blood flows.

That's where... ♪ -[ Speaking Vietnamese ] -The sauce that I'm making is very simple in terms of the amount of ingredients, but it's the way you put it together.

And it's seasoned vinegar, usually coconut vinegar with lots of alliums, lots of aromatics, lemongrass, ginger.

We can go to the yard and get kaffir leaves, beautiful lemongrass that my mom has, and we're gonna spike it with the -- we call it crazy chili that my mom has.

It works really well with bloodline and I'm just going to slice it thin as I can.

I'm no sushi chef, but I want to try my best.

My dad's the expert.

I want to make him proud, right?

And you slice your fish, dip it in the vinegar.

Not that it will mask the fish essence.

It will be very complementary to it.

You have fat, you have vinegar and all these spices and the right ratios of everything.

You take it out and you wrap it in your spring roll.

♪ The bloodline, I serve it, and the techniques I use are basically the same as what my mom and dad would use -- a combination of Phú Quoc, the camps, Oakland.

♪ -That's delicious.

-An interesting thing, though -- I remember there was a moment in time where, you know, I brought a fish back to my parents' house.

It was a yellowtail.

I told my mom that I was going to cook it up.

I butchered it up, filleted it up, and I proceeded to throw the bloodline away.

And she stops and grabbed my hand and said, "Why are you throwing away the bloodline?

Don't remember.

We eat bloodline all the time?"

I was like, "But, Mom, that's what I've been trained to not eat bloodline."

And she brought up these reminders that my dad used to cook with bloodline, and I remembered that it was delicious.

So it changed -- completely changed my perspective on what my culinary, professional culinary training suggests, and I started to open my ear even more so to listen to how my mom perceives and interacts with food.

And it was pretty simple.

I just had to shut up and listen.

-[ Speaking Vietnamese ] -I'm proud of my parents and their instinct to survive.

The food industry's obsessed with innovation, but real revolutions in food come from people like my parents.

You give them any ingredient, put them in any situation, and they'll make something delicious.

It happens every day all over the world, and I passed that on.

Inform yourselves.

Know what's in season and purchase according to the recommendations.

Dream and you tell everyone around you, "This is where I'm trying to get you."

There's passion for that, too.

There's people who are fashion designers.

-Yeah, fashion is cool.

I like fashion.

-Yeah, yeah.

I got all these accolades, and they always seem to be amazed that I learned from an informal cook, which is my mom.

And they consider these dining institutions that I've worked for as "formal training."

What they don't understand is that the techniques and skills and palate that my mom cooks with, that sort of training predates any fine-dining menu or any fine-dining restaurant by a few hundred years.

So at the end of the day, if you're talking about formal training, it's my mom's cuisine that's the formal training, not the other way around.

But I also know from my parents the image they have of all this is different because the food they cooked, it's ultimately war food.

Everything right now is the generational result of war, so maybe my working in food reminds them of something they'd like to forget.

But I don't know how you forget things that are so much a part of what you are.

♪ That's something I learned from my parents.

If you have a fish, you take out the bloodline just so you can forget it's a fish.

What are you really eating?

It's like when people write about our food, they say, "Infused with generations of wisdom," but they don't say that I learned how to make beautiful things from the seamstress.

-[ Speaking Vietnamese ] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪