The Taste of Memory

Black shell, red, purple, white and green. The Laotian rice that thrives in the North Carolina foothills is a treasure to Hmong farmers – and a revelation to others.

Words by Sheri Castle | Photos by Angela Owens

“Can we walk down?” I asked my hosts, gazing at a steep, rutted road that disappeared into thick woods.

“We could,” replied Tue Lee, “but we shouldn’t. It’s a mile downhill, but 10 miles back up. Let’s take the truck.” The bumpy ride brought us to the edge of a flooded paddy full of heirloom Laotian rice ready to harvest. The grassy shoots were about waist high, brilliant glowing green, with loaded heads that bowed and bobbed in the breeze.

I followed Tue and his wife, Chue, out into the rice. About six steps in, my body moved forward, but my terribly cute and woefully inadequate gardening boots did not, and I tumbled into shin-deep water and muck. It felt alarming, like the quicksand I’d seen in the old Westerns and Saturday morning cartoons of my childhood. But Tue quickly righted me, reassuring me that this was far from the worst spill he had seen, not even the messiest in the past week. “If we ever drain this place,” Tue said with a chuckle, “we’ll find more lost sunglasses, phones, cameras, and shoes than rice and frogs.”

I never figured I’d be in a rice paddy at all, much less one in the Appalachian foothills of Western North Carolina. I was about an hour from where I’d grown up, but a world away. It was like finding a pearl in a potato.

This verdant rice field is one part of Lee’s One Fortune Farm, a Hmong family cooperative of large gardens and small farms that the Lees organized in 2008. Their extended family grows produce on plots scattered around Western North Carolina, and the name of the business honors the Hmong practice of communal farming, with each family member working their own plot of land but combining and sharing the harvest.

The Lees and their array of fresh produce are a familiar sight at farmers and tailgate markets around Asheville. They grow Southern staples, Appalachian favorites, and vegetables essential to Asian cuisine, including that of their own Hmong culture. Nothing, however, is so dear and highly sought as their fresh rice. 

Tue (right) and Chue Lee organized One Fortune Farm, a Hmong family garden and farm cooperative, in 2008. The Lees sell an array of fresh produce at farmers and tailgate markets around Asheville, but their fresh rice, grown in the foothills of Western North Carolina, is especially coveted and always sells out. “At first we couldn’t give it away, literally,” Tue says.

The day before I visited the rice paddy, I watched Tue and Chue Lee set up their booth at a busy farmers market in downtown Asheville. Long before the dim, damp dawn gave way to daylight, the Lees erected canopies, unloaded their vehicles, and set up displays of vegetables, fruits, and flowers. A line of customers queued outside, waiting to move single file through the booth, eager to take their pick. Long beans were piled high in a bushel basket next to the half-runners. Traditional mountain cabbage went head to head with varieties common only in Hmong culture. Tall, leafy stalks of fresh ginger stood upright in buckets like enormous flower arrangements. As I reached to pull out a few, I spied a box of Virginia Beauty, an obscure old mountain apple that I hadn’t tasted in ages. I was charmed and a bit overcome by the bounty. I wanted some of everything, and I hadn’t even made my way down to the rice. When customers asked for it, Chue lifted the creaking lids of the coolers stacked behind the display tables and placed baggies of rice into shopping bags the customers held open, like kids receiving their goodies on Halloween.

The Lees will sell every grain of rice they bring to their farmers and tailgate markets, plus what they sell to a handful of restaurants. “At first we couldn’t give it away, literally,” Tue said. “People kept saying they had rice at home. I kept saying that they didn’t have rice like this.” He was right, and once shoppers caught on to the difference, they came back for more. Fresh rice is nothing like the boxes and bags of rice found on grocery store shelves. Although some types of rice can be stored for years under the right conditions, fresh rice is more like produce: perishable and delicate.

When I asked the Lees how they came to grow Laotian rice in North Carolina, how they came to be in North Carolina in the first place, Chue asked, “How far back do you want us to go?” You tell me, I replied. So they did.

Chue Lee, nee Lor, was born into a Hmong family on a military base in Laos. Before the Vietnam War, the Hmong, a culturally distinct Laotian minority, lived in the mountain highlands, where their farming skills made them mostly self-sufficient. When the war spread into Laos in the late 1960s, the CIA and U.S. military recruited the Hmong to join the fight against communism, a movement the Hmong believed threatened their land and independence. More than 30,000 Hmong soldiers fought in the ground war, flew combat missions, directed air strikes, gathered intelligence, and died at a rate 10 times higher than American soldiers.

When the Americans pulled out of Laos and the communist regime took power, fewer than 3,000 Hmong, mostly high-ranking military officials and their families, were airlifted to nearby Thailand, but the rest of the Hmong veterans, and civilians who had taken no part in the conflict, faced swift and brutal retribution and persecution. Some were hunted down and assassinated, some were interned in concentration camps. Others fled to the lowland jungles to hide and, if able to survive, reached Thailand for a chance to take refuge. Thousands of Hmong died from disease, starvation, and exposure during their slog. Some made it all the way to the Mekong River, only 1.5 kilometers from the Thai border, only to drown while crossing. Although exact numbers are unknown, experts estimate the prewar population of Hmong at 100,000 to 300,000. As many as half died during the war and its aftermath.

Chue remembers roaming the jungle with her parents and six siblings, always wet and hungry. After making it across the river, they stayed in a crowded refugee camp in Thailand until a family sponsor made it possible for them to immigrate to San Diego, where they joined one of California’s Hmong communities.

During their 1985 Hmong New Year celebration, Chue met a boy named Tue Lee, whose father had worked for the U.S. military. A few members of his extended family had relocated to Western North Carolina, where they worked in textile mills until those businesses closed, but some of them had recently moved to California in search of jobs. “When Hmong move, they relocate as a clan, not as individuals,” Tue said. Chue and Tue married a year later.

Tue Lee was born in Long Tieng, a covert military base in Hmong territory. His father was killed working as a “back seater” for U.S. pilots, meaning that he helped spot communist military operations along the Ho Chi Minh Trail from the air. Tue was only 3 months old when his family entered the jungle. Fleeing in the middle of the night was common, moving to another spot that might be safer. He witnessed death daily, including close family members. Only Tue and his grandmother survived the six years it took for them to make it to Thailand, then they spent two more years in Ban Vinai, a teeming refugee camp with no electricity or running water. With the help of an uncle who had made it to the States, Tue and his grandmother finally secured sponsorship and joined a Hmong community in North Carolina.

Tue’s grandmother insisted he wear shoes on the plane, something he had never done before. He recalls how awkward it was to walk with something tied onto his feet. He compares how he looked and moved to the videos he’s seen of dogs flailing around in shoes. He avoided more footwear until his first North Carolina winter, when snow fell and his bare feet burned while waiting for the school bus.

"When Hmong move, they relocate as a clan, not as individuals," Tue Lee says.

Everything in North Carolina, from the landscape to the culture, was surprising to the 8-year-old, who didn’t speak a word of English when they landed in Charlotte. He remembers his first car ride to their new life in Marion, a rural, working-class farming community. He had been hauled in the back of military trucks and ridden crowded city buses, but he’d never been in the roomy backseat of a car where the driver could decide to go anywhere. He wondered why no one ever walked along the miles of mostly empty roads.

Tue and Chue lived in San Diego for the first two years of their marriage, then moved back to the North Carolina community where Tue had lived before. Chue struggled at first. For her, moving from Southern California to Western North Carolina was tougher than moving from the crowded refugee camp to bustling San Diego. This new place was too remote, too empty. “There was nothing to do, nowhere to go,” she says. “In San Diego I could walk everywhere, go to museums or our community center, or go look at the ocean. No one ever walked anywhere in North Carolina. There was nothing but trees I couldn’t see past.”

Over time, they redefined home, settled in, and built a life together. They worked hard at their jobs, raised their six kids, met the neighbors, made friends. They helped older relatives keep up with the robust gardens that put food on their tables. An aunt’s backyard plot included Hmong produce and rice grown from seed from Laos – the food they had all been missing.

At first the aunt grew only enough rice to supply the immediate family, then enough to share with other local Hmong, and eventually enough to sell a few pounds here and there to Hmong who would drive from as far away as Minnesota to get rice they’d not seen since their arrival in the States, a taste of a Laos they would never see again. Whether they come willingly or as a result of punishing circumstances, newcomers to a country often get their bearings by cooking and eating something they find familiar, something that tastes of home.

Hmong children were expected to work as soon as they were big enough to hold tools, so Chue learned to garden early in life. While raising her own children, she’d gotten her GED and worked in various office jobs before she resolved to turn her family’s garden excess into a business. It was a slow start. Chue and Tue drove to the markets before sunup, nestled the sleeping babies on blankets in the open car trunk, and did their best to connect with customers. They came to realize that they needed to offer both local and Asian produce. Bouquets of cut flowers and baskets of familiar vegetables lured some shoppers to their booth, while their unique products drew others. Some shoppers drove hours to buy items that they too had been missing, not only fellow expats from Southeast Asia, but from India and parts of Africa.

The rice, the Lees believed, had a lot of potential, so they became the first Hmong farmers in the area to sell it outside of their community. As their market business grew, Chue decided to focus on farming full time. (Tue still kept his day job as an engineer at a local manufacturer.) The couple leased a 90-some-acre parcel of farmland where they could grow more of everything, especially rice. Family members in Minnesota and California had little success growing their rice, but the terrain and elevation of the Appalachian foothills are not insurmountably different from the highlands of Laos.

Tue and Chue increased the size of their rice field to two acres last year, clearing land and digging irrigation ditches by hand to create a riparian zone between two creeks. In Laos, the Hmong cultivated rice on mountainsides, where it was irrigated by torrents of rainwater; here they used a flat paddy system to mitigate the risk of drought. Their rice doesn’t require standing water so much as it tolerates it. The water helps keep down the weeds and reduces the amount of work needed to tend the crop, which is plenty labor-intensive nonetheless.

There were no domestic sources for mechanized rice equipment, so harvesting meant cutting the rice with hand-held scythes or stripping the grains into buckets tied around their waists. But in 2019, Chue secured a grant that enabled them to import a small walk-behind combine from China. The assembly instructions were in Mandarin, so Tue pored over the illustrations and figured out how to put the machine together, disassembling and reassembling until there were no leftover parts and the thing worked. Now what once took 10 people a full week to harvest can be done by one person in five hours. They upgraded to rice-milling machines from Japan instead of beating the husks off the grain manually. But they still use a wok the size of an upturned golf umbrella to toast rice, although they now use propane gas burners instead of open fire. They are always looking for ways to increase mechanization and efficiency without compromising their Hmong traditions.

Harvesting the rice crop from the Lees' two acres was made vastly more efficient after they got a small walk-behind combine a few years ago.

Their rice fields are not the first or the only ones in North Carolina. Or the largest. But Tue and Chue are visionary and entrepreneurial. They hope to one day make equipment available for other Hmong who want to farm rice. For now, the mission of Lee’s One Fortune Farm is to make locally grown Asian ingredients, especially fresh rice, available not only to Hmong families but to anyone who appreciates delicious, locally grown specialty food.

They grow four kinds of rice. Black shell rice is an aromatic white rice that resembles basmati. It’s the Hmong staple Chue’s father missed the most and asked her to grow. The red sticky rice tastes a bit like fresh chestnuts. The chewy purple sticky rice is naturally sweet, with a touch of nutty flavor. The Hmong name for it translates to “blood rice” for its dark, inky hulls that stain everything it touches. The white sticky rice has the faint sweet aroma of honey or sugar cane. The Hmong name for it is “Sa Kwan,” which translates to “Suits”: It is so special that people ought to dress up and use their manners when they sit down to eat it. This isn’t workaday rice; it’s the one eaten on special occasions and given as a gift.

The last time I visited the farm, Chue, who is as skilled a cook as she is a farmer, prepared Suits for me to taste. That morning she’d mixed soaked rice with coconut milk and seasonings and packed it into hollow tubes cut from fresh bamboo grown on their farm. These tubes were about 8 inches long and the diameter of the cardboard core in a roll of paper towels. She covered the open ends with foil and cooked them in a steamer. Bamboo has natural antimicrobial properties and is a good insulator. When it was time for us to eat, steam rose from the bamboo when Chue placed them on the table, even though the temperature was barely above freezing. Tue used a knife to split each tube lengthwise, creating two tidy boats from which we could spoon the rice. Not having been told in advance that I would receive this gift, it was too late for me to dress suitably for Suits. But I did sit up straighter and tried to behave as I savored every warm, creamy, sweet, fragrant bite.

The Lees grow four kinds of rice, including the special-occasion "Sa Kwan," or "Suits."

While we ate, they told me more about green rice, their most treasured grain. Green rice is immature Suits, available only a few days each year at the very start of harvest season. Tue describes awaiting green rice as “361 days of anticipation for those three or four days of it. It’s a very special thing.” Hmong New Year, a major annual celebration that includes several days of feasting, comes at the end of harvest. When I asked the date of their New Year, Tue said, “It’s whenever we want, so we time our planting so that we can celebrate our New Year the same week as Thanksgiving. We invite everybody over.”

I’d been lucky enough to sample the rare green rice when we visited the paddy a few months earlier. Chue had shown me how to rake my gloved hand up a stalk and over the tassel to shake a few tender grains into my palm, which I popped into my mouth on the spot. Eating the raw green rice was not so much about its sweet flavor as its subtle aroma, like the first whiffs of rice as it begins to cook, a whispered preview of the coming harvest.

Some people confuse genuine green rice with jade rice, a type of dried sushi rice that’s infused with bamboo extract. The chlorophyll in the bamboo gives a light green tint to the grains.  Any Hmong who has ever known the taste of freshly harvested green Suits can immediately tell the difference. “That’s because you can’t fool the persistent power of taste memory,” I exclaimed, “no matter how long it’s been since the last time!”

Tue paused, and then told me this story, which I recorded on my phone:

“Oh, yes. Power of taste memory. Let me go back to the time when I was in the jungle. Um, my grandmother and I, we were at a little area where my older sister had just passed away. This is about three, four months after. We were so malnourished, starving. We didn’t have anything. So this lady was going through the whole area selling nothing but, um, lard and the little cracklings in the lard. She had it wrapped in a pumpkin leaf. We said we had no money to buy. After the lady sold the lard, she was going to casually throw the leaf away. But she saw my grandmother and she said, ‘I don’t have anything in here, but if you want it, you can have this leaf.’ It was just one pumpkin leaf smeared with grease. My grandmother took it. She then took one of our coins. They were little French coins, pure silver. I don’t remember exactly how much its value is. My grandfather used to work for the French military prior to the U.S. coming to Vietnam and they paid him in Franco coins. We still had a few left, to help us get to Thailand. But that one coin she gave to a man for one little bamboo tube of Suits. She cooked the rice in the leaf. Now mind you, we haven’t had meat, grease, salt, rice, anything like that for more than two years. So when she fixed that together and she put it on the table, it was just for her and I. That one time is the first time I actually see my grandmother cry. And uh, I can still, I can still taste it.”

Tue wiped tears from his eyes. Chue cleared our empty bamboo and wrapped up the unopened tubes for me to take home. We made plans to visit again soon – and to cook rice together.  ◊

Sheri Castle is host of The Key Ingredient, an Emmy-winning cooking show from PBS NC. She is also an award-winning food writer, recipe developer, cooking teacher, and storyteller.

Angela Owens is a photo editor at The Wall Street Journal, where she has been annoying her colleagues with animal trivia since 2017. She was previously a multimedia editor at STAT/Boston Globe Media, covering health and life sciences news, and performing dual roles in the photo and social media departments. She began her career as a staff photographer for The Daily Item, documenting communities on the North Shore of Massachusetts. She earned a B.S. in Business at North Carolina State University before beginning a Master’s in Photojournalism at Boston University. She also studied documentary photography at the Duke University Center for Documentary Studies.