Fighting Anti-Asian Hate
By: Kelley Freund | Categories: Alumni Interest
"I think there was an unstoppable propensity that led me to end up with a restaurant,” Ma says. “It was in my blood. So I left the older generation’s American dream to pursue my American dream."
Ending a 12-year career in the defense industry as a hardware engineer, Ma moved to New York City to attend the French Culinary Institute (now the International Culinary Center). Since then, Ma has opened a variety of award-winning restaurant ventures, from Maple Ave, which was ranked No. 1 in Northern Virginia in 2013, to his first Washington, D.C., restaurant, Kyirisan, which won awards such as Michelin Guide’s Bib Gourmand and an annual recurring spot in the Washington Post’s Best Restaurants Dining Guide. In November of 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, Ma founded Lucky Danger, his take on American Chinese takeout. Ma also serves as culinary director for Laoban Dumplings and is in the process of opening a sports bar.
“The projects I worked on in engineering would take years to complete, and sometimes they were never completed,” says Ma. “But the interesting thing about food is that you see the results of this thing you created immediately, in the reaction of your guests. There’s something about that pace of cooking that makes it much more interesting to me than engineering was.”
Since becoming a chef in the Washington, D.C., area, Ma has consistently aligned himself with a few nonprofits. But when incidents of AAPI hate began occurring earlier this past year, the need to do something became more urgent and more personal.
“I sat down with a good friend and fellow chef and thought about what we could do,” Ma says. “It felt like we had a responsibility to do something because we have this platform that’s public. We decided to use that for a cause that was close to us. Because when I watched videos of Asian-Americans being attacked, those people looked just like my mom and dad,” Ma says.
So the two chefs used their cooking talents to help. They formed Chefs Stopping AAPI Hate, hosting a takeout series to raise awareness and funds for AAPI organizations combating anti-Asian violence. The series quickly sold out and received interest from chefs around the country who wanted to contribute to the initiative, spreading the project from D.C. to New York, Detroit, and San Francisco. Each week in May, to coincide with AAPI Heritage Month, a rotating roster of chefs each cooked a dish for a five-course takeout experience, inspired by the importance of food and family style meals within the AAPI community. The money raised went to national AAPI organizations, as well as local organizations in those four cities. While some participating chefs were Asian-American like Ma, those who were not provided their own interpretation of Asian food in America.
“Food is typically a person’s first introduction into another person’s culture,” Ma says. “And that’s what has been great about the nonprofit: We are introducing people to many different Asian cultures, through food."
