The Blind Chef Searching For Her Mother’s Recipes
May 30, 2023
Ha's parents emigrated from Vietnam in the mid-1970s. She was born in Southern California in 1979, then moved to Houston for most of her childhood and adolescence.
"Growing up, I ate a lot of great Vietnamese food and I took it for granted," Ha, 42, said. "I was embarrassed by the traditional Vietnamese foods my parents made me eat—pork belly, catfish. I used to think, 'Why can't I eat normal things like bologna and cheese?'"
When Ha was 14, her mother succumbed to cancer, and those traditional Vietnamese recipes were lost. She began missing the meals her mother made, particularly as a 20-year-old freshman in college fending for herself. It was then that she resolved that she’d teach herself to cook.
Quickly, Ha began to revel in the joy that cooking brought her and other people. She set out to re-create her mother's dishes, using Vietnamese cookbooks, her father's memories, and her own exceptional sense of taste. Then her eyesight began to fail.
Lidia and Christine Ha Make Thit Kho (Braised Pork Belly)
When the symptoms began, Ha didn’t know what to think. "I thought it was my contact lens, so I changed it to another one," she said. She scheduled a visit to an optometrist, who ran tests and thought it might be a brain tumor — and she was later misdiagnosed with multiple sclerosis. "It was not something I expected to hear at 20 years old," she said. In 2003, around four years after her first symptom, doctors confirmed that she had NMOSD. Often misdiagnosed as multiple sclerosis, neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder, or NMOSD, most often affects the optic nerves and spinal cord and can lead to paralysis, sudden vision loss, or both. It was difficult, Ha said. Resources online about the disease were scarce, and Ha wasn’t aware of anyone else in Houston with NMOSD.
Despite it all, Ha kept cooking, but it wasn’t easy. Ha’s vision continued to gradually decrease over the years, meaning her experience with cooking kept changing. Each time she got used to a "new normal," like reading recipes in large fonts, she’d lose more vision, and then would have to start again, teaching herself the same skills again with less and less eyesight.
