“A Gap between Military Life and Civilian Life”
Profile of Vichy Zhoo, store manager at Shanghai Dumpling, 143 E. Franklin St. Chapel Hill, NC
By Elisabeth Molnar
I sat down to interview Vichy Zhoo at 4 o’clock on a Thursday after she finished her shift at Shanghai Dumpling. My first impression of Vichy was that she is young and very friendly. She took a special interest in this project and was eager to share her story. Shanghai Dumpling is located close to the UNC Chapel Hill campus on Franklin street between CVS and Insomnia Cookies. The interior is small, narrow, sparsely decorated and filled with college students and professors. Dishes on the menu range from soup dumplings, to noodle soups, General Tso’s chicken, and chicken feet.
I started out by asking Vichy about how she came to work at Shanghai Dumpling. Her story was as follows… Vichy grew up in the city Shenyang of LiaoNing province in Northeast China which she described as being very cold and snowy. They speak Mandarin, but with an accent that she said gets made fun of a lot. In China, Vichy learned British English, which confused the host family that she lived with upon first moving to the United States. In 2012, she came to the United States to get her MBA at Johnston & Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island. After graduation, she worked for a time as a project coordinator at a shipyard, and then moved to Hawaii and joined the U.S. military as a logistics specialist. After Hawaii, Vichy came to Chapel Hill to work for Shanghai Dumpling, having already known the owner of the restaurant. She has been working at Shanghai Dumpling for the last month while she figures out the next step in her career. At 30, she is young and excited about what comes next, currently applying to a variety of jobs in customer service. Her parents are still in China and visit her in the U.S. occasionally.
In this clip, Vichy describes her journey from China to Shanghai Dumpling:
Being from the northeast of China, Vichy said that the food at home was relatively similar to the food at Shanghai Dumpling. Her family ate a lot of foods made from flour, like noodles and dumplings, and not very much rice which is more common in the south. Her favorite dish at Shanghai Dumpling is the pork soup dumplings which are not too spicy. She is not a fan of spiciness, coming from the north of China where the food is not as spicy as in the south.
In this clip, Vichy describes the food she makes for herself at home:
In this clip, Vichy describes the food her family ate growing up in China:
When I asked about the chefs at the restaurant, Vichy knew a lot about their work. There are four professional chefs in the restaurant: three from China and one from Mexico. One of the chefs has the job of making the dumplings. Her family is in California, and they want her to retire, but she really enjoys her job and wants to stay at Shanghai Dumpling. However, her daughter has a child so she will probably leave soon to help out. The Chinese chefs make the Chinese dishes like the noodles, while the Mexican chef makes the American Chinese food. The Chinese chefs keep the Chinese recipes because they still have Chinese students coming into the restaurant, but make the dishes a little less spicy to adapt to American tastes as well. All of the chefs are very passionate about their cooking, asking Vichy to see how the customers like the dishes. She says they get very excited when people say the food was really good. The Chinese chefs speak Mandarin and know only a little English, but they do not really need to communicate a lot because they are cooking different things.
In this clip, Vichy describes the food at Shanghai Dumpling:
On a typical day, Vichy usually arrives at Shanghai Dumpling around 10:30 am, since it opens at 11 am. She opens up the restaurant, mops, cleans the table, and fills the sauces. Then the customers start to come in and she serves them. While she was nervous at first about how to serve customers, she quickly adjusted, realizing she just had to take care of them and see what they wanted. In her free time, Vichy likes to go to the gym, and since she is new to Chapel Hill, she plans to check out some of the local hiking trails.
Takeaway: In most of the examples we learned about in class, a lot of the Chinese working in restaurants in America seemed to have started working in Chinese restaurants making a lifelong career of it soon after moving from China. For Vichy, it was a very different story: she was just working in a restaurant while she figured out what to do after her career in the military. I was impressed by how many jobs she had taken since moving to the United States, all of which she described as revolving around customer service, where she helped those who came to her with questions and took care of their needs. She definitely has a unique background, having moved from China and worked all over the U.S., including for the U.S. military.
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