Anh Nguyen Austen

Oh, I cook this, actually, Tex-Mex Vietnamese menu, which is kind of a flair of all the places that I kind of grew up.

No, it's actually the fresh herbs and the cilantro.

So I think of them both as very fertile and fruit-oriented vegetable cuisines, very fresh.

Well, we grew up in, I grew up in Binh Hoa, and it's a very Catholic town.

It's about 20-some minutes outside of Saigon, which is Ho Chi Minh City now.

And it's so Catholic that I took my son back there, and we discovered that people have been visiting the Statue of Mary where she's bleeding tears out of her eyes.

So we're like, how does it work?

How does it work?

Yeah.

It's actually a lumber-based town and my grandfather had inherited that business.

So you see a lot of furniture making and then you see a lot of nuns and priests and, you know, I live at the house around the corner from the church, really.

Yes, because my grandfather, he had the luck of inheriting this business and town kind of industry.

He was a young man in his 20s at the time, after the 50s, after the French War.

And there was a man who was a very wealthy landowner who basically wanted to get rid of all the assets that was in his land.

Well, it gave my father certainly a lot of protection, and he was still kind of drafted to do military service, but his father was able to have him only stay in the office and take an office position, so he never had to go to the front line.

So my father had the opportunity to do his baccalaureate, French baccalaureate, for instance, by post, and one of the last to do that.

Oh, my parents, they met in 1970.

As I understand it, see, my mother went to boarding school and everyone went to some kind of Catholic school.

My father went to seminary and there was a nun visiting her town.

She lives in the country near the coast.