For Kim Kyung Hee and her husband Leo Chen, who met at Michigan State University in 2001 and later married in 2009, life together has meant defying expectations, enduring hardships and supporting each other when their dreams take unexpected turns.
Chen and Kim’s relationship has inspired their personal and collaborative creative endeavors. Chen initially pursued a career as a physician assistant, but culinary classes helped her relieve stress. One Christmas, Kim asked Chen if she’d ever thought about pursuing a career in cooking or opening her own restaurant one day.
Encouraged, he changed his career plans to pursue his passion for cooking, which connected him to the culinary memories of his Taiwanese father and grandmother. He gained experience in the culinary industry, working as a line cook at Zingerman’s Roadhouse and interviewing at Chef Thomas Keller’s California restaurant, Bouchon Bistro, before accepting the role of executive chef at the local Ann Arbor cafe in 2014. In 2016, he changed industries and joined the financial services industry.
However, his passion for food remained, and he developed a new dream of opening a food pop-up store showcasing Korean and Taiwanese cuisine. During the pandemic, he decided to make it a reality. “Meogjia” launched in 2021 — It means “let’s eat” in Korean. Since then, Chen has hosted pop-ups with fellow chefs around the Detroit metropolitan area, with menus that reflect his culinary influences, like Korean Bolognese lasagna, Taiwanese three-cup chicken meatball Italian sub, and gnocchi tteokbokki.
RELATED: Visit our AAPI News & Stories page to learn more about our AAPI Stories series.
For Kim, the transition from educator to author was a surprise. While dealing with the challenges of growing her family, Kim turned to journaling, which inspired her to consider writing as another career path. Her first book, a children’s poetry collection, “See Us Bloom,” was published in 2023. Chen and Kim continue to inspire and support each other’s creative endeavors, which now include producing a podcast together about topics that are important to them, like family and food.
As part of One Detroit’s AAPI Stories series, One Detroit’s Zozette Gua and Bill Kubota accompanied Kim and Chen to their Ypsilanti home where they discussed the perseverance they needed to pursue new career paths and the mutual support they received from each other, as well as reflecting on their immigration experiences and evolving identities as Asian Americans.
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Part 1: How we met
Kim and Cheng share memories of when they first met and the challenges that generational expectations posed during their relationship.
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Part 2: Coming to America
Kim and Cheng talk about how different their experiences were when they came to America.
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Part 3: Life in America
Kim talks about how she and her family moved from South Korea to Michigan when she was eight years old and how she navigated life in the U.S. Chen reflects on growing up surrounded by diverse family members when her family was originally from Taiwan and lived in Oklahoma, and the two also reflect on their memories of food and their relationship with their native language.
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Part 4: Passion for food
Chen recalled the first time he and his wife, Kim Kyung-hee, met her parents, which inspired the name of their pop-up store in Korea and Taiwan, “Meogjia,” a phrase that means “let’s eat” in Korean.
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Part 5: From Educator to Writer
Kim She shares how working through her loss eventually led her to take up writing as a full-time career, how she penned her first book, a children’s poetry collection called “See Us Bloom,” and her mother’s unexpected reaction when she showed it to her for the first time.
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Part 6: Defining the home
Paul talks about a memorable night in Detroit that inspired him to move there from New York in 2020. Jack talks about a seminal trip to Nepal that answered his questions about what home is and how much it depends on us. Paul offers a complementary perspective.
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Part 6: Defining the home
Paul talks about a memorable night in Detroit that inspired him to move there from New York in 2020. Jack talks about a seminal trip to Nepal that answered his questions about what home is and how much it depends on us. Paul offers a complementary perspective.
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