Lamanara.

growing up in Los Angeles, these are the types of foods I would eat.

Tamales, Gorma Abzi, Larb, Motsabal soup, Adobo, along with your usual kid

fare of chicken nuggets and fries and burgers and pizza. And the types of

languages I would hear? Honestly more than you can imagine from Armenian to

Farsi, Korean, Spanish, Hebrew, Los Angeles, despite how segregated it sometimes felt, was full

of culture that you could see, feel, hear, and taste on a daily basis.

The multitude of Asian cultures was a huge part of that for me.

My weekends were spent in Little Tokyo, having ice teas in Titeown.

Sitting with my friend Christina Wong and her parents at a local Chinese restaurant.

I remember this so vividly and them teaching me, Chow Fun with dry noodles was so much better

than Chow Fun with wet noodles. Now obviously I had a real fixation with food. Not much

has changed there, But more than that, I had a real love of getting to

know other cultures. And part of that, my mom and I would often go to the Korean spa together.

Now, for those of you who haven't been to one before, it's a very humbling experience for a girl going through puberty because you enter a room with women from ages 9 to maybe 90,

all walking around naked and waiting to get a body scrub on one of these tables that are all lined up in a row.

All I wanted was a bathing suit,

but you're not allowed by the way.

And once I was over that adolescent embarrassment,

my mom and I, we would go upstairs, we would sit in a room and we would have a

steaming bowl of the most delicious noodles.

And we'd look around at all of these other women.

...