Change Makers: A Podcast from APH

Cast Member Spotlight: Christine Ha

• American Printing House • Episode 149

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In this episode, we spotlight acclaimed chef, author, and restaurateur Christine Hà, whose remarkable journey from losing her vision to becoming the first blind winner of MasterChef has inspired millions. We'll explore how her passion for cooking began and how she redefined what is possible in the culinary world. Christine also shares what it means to be a Cast Member of The Dot Experience, helping bring stories of blindness, resilience, and innovation to life for future visitors. Then, in our monthly Tech Takeaway, we'll preview the August Monarch update and highlight two exciting new programs that will soon be available to users.

On this episode

  • Narrator
  • Sara Brown, APH Public Relations Manager
  • Christine Ha, Cast Member for The Dot Experience, Owner of The Blind Goat and Stuffed Belly
  • Michael Dennis, APH Technology Products Specialist
  • Jennifer Wenzel, APH Technology Product Specialist

Additional Links

Narrator

Welcome to Change makers, a podcast from APH. We're talking to people from around the world who are creating positive change in the lives of people who are blind or have low vision. Here's your host.

Sara Brown

Hello and welcome to Changemakers. I'm APH's public relations manager, Sarah Brown, and on this episode, we're continuing our spotlight series on our cast members for The Dot Experience. On this episode, hear Christine Ha's story. She shares her stories about her childhood, how she became interested in cooking, and what she's got next on the horizon. After that, we'll have our monthly tech takeaway that details what you can expect when the next Monarch update is released. Up first, I have Christine Ha, chef and owner of The Blind Goat and Stuff Belly, a cookbook author, and she's also a cast member for The Dot Experience. Hello, Christine, and welcome to Change Makers. Hi, I'm glad to be here.

Christine Ha

Thanks for having me.

Sara Brown

And before we get rolling with this interview, would you like to introduce yourself and let our audience know just a little bit more about you? Sure.

Christine Ha

I'm Christine Ha. I'm probably best known for being the blind cook that won MasterChef Season 3, uh, the television show on Fox with Gordon Ramsey as one of the judges. And this is for home amateur cooks. This was back in 2012, and then since then, uh I've written a cookbook, my first one called Recipes from My Home Kitchen, which I'm happy to say was a New York Times best-selling cookbook. I'm working on my second cookbook right now, which will publish uh in April 2027. I have two restaurants in Houston right now: the Blind Goat, which is a modern Vietnamese eatery, and Stuffed Belly, which is a fast casual drive-thru uh Smash Burger and Fun American Sandwich Concept, uh, both located in Houston. And that is me in a nutshell.

Sara Brown

Talk a bit about your childhood, you know, where you grew up, your favorite activities, and were there any experiences who shaped you into the person you are today.

Christine Ha

Yeah, I was born in Los Angeles. My parents were both Vietnamese refugees who had come from Vietnam. They escaped from Saigon the day before it fell to the Communist Party. And I was born some years later in LA. I mostly grew up though in Texas. My parents moved here when I was very young for my dad's work and uh grew up in Houston. I went to my undergraduate degree, uh, got my undergraduate degree at the University of Texas at Austin in business, which serves well as a restaurant owner. And it was around this same time in my early 20s during college that I started experiencing vision loss. It started in one of my eyes, and uh initially I thought it was my contact lens. And of course, it wasn't that. I went to an optometrist and they told me it was actually something neurological. So I was referred to a neuroophthalmologist. And long story short, I was initially incorrectly diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, uh, and then correctly diagnosed four years after that with something called neuromyelitis optica or NMO for short. And it is similar to MS, where if you understand that disease, it is an autoimmune disease that affects the nervous system. So over time, my optic nerves, which is the um the nerve tissue that connects the eye to the brain, uh had a lot of inflammation and they atrophied over time. So that's how I lost my vision gradually in my 20s. I describe it, my vision as though if you're a sighted person and you can imagine coming out of a very hot shower and looking into that very steamy, foggy mirror. That's kind of my line of sight. I see some color, some shape, but everything is super, super blurry. Uh, and it was around the same time I uh I had my first job in the corporate world coming out of, you know, with a business degree, and then I had to leave that to really focus on my health and a lot of um a lot of rehabilitation because the NMO also affected my spinal cord. So there was a point in time in my early 20s when it uh caused a lot of spinal inflammation and I became paralyzed from the neck down for many months. And so that took a lot of physical therapy, occupational therapy. And so I left my corporate job at the time and I was thinking, what should I do with my life? I wasn't sure if I wanted to go back into the job I was doing before that. And that's when I found creative writing as really a way for me to express myself. I'd always loved reading and writing as a child, but I never took it seriously as something I could do for a career or a vocation. And this is when I started going to uh back to thinking about going back to school. I had to get the training to do it as someone who is now visually impaired. So I learned Braille, learned how to use a screen reader, learned orientation mobility, and how to get around with the white cane and how to navigate the public transportation in Houston to try to get to the University of Houston campus and got that um down and uh was accepted into the Masters of Fine Arts program for creative writing at University of Houston and uh ended up getting a graduate degree in creative writing. But it was during this time that I also uh auditioned for Master Chef, really thinking that it was just a way for me to find some material to come home and do creative writing, uh, either a short story or a humor essay or something about not expecting to win, but just kind of wanting to go through that experience to have some material for my creative writing workshops and ended up winning that season, and then the rest is kind of history.

Sara Brown

Wow, that's always so interesting to hear those stories. So, where did the food and the cooking aspect come into play?

Christine Ha

Yeah, that's a good question. So I grew up eating wonderful Vietnamese home cooking from my mom, and my mom passed away when I was 14, and she didn't had never taught me how to cook, didn't leave a single recipe behind. At that point, I uh went to go live with my grandparents and uncle and aunts and a lot of extended family from my father's side in California. So I did spend some of my high school years back in Southern California, and I ate a lot of great Vietnamese home cooking there from my grandma and my aunts. And so I've always had this love for the Vietnamese um comfort food, but it wasn't until I went off to college when I came back to Texas and went off to college in Austin after moving out of the freshman dorms. I realized I had to learn how to cook and feed myself. I didn't know a single thing about cooking. So it was all really just starting from scratch and self-taught. And at first it was uh a survival mechanism, but then I, as I learned to cook a little bit more and more, I realized I really enjoyed it. I enjoyed being able to feed my friends and my roommates uh really, you know. Of course, I cook, I cooked a lot of bad dishes back then. So there was a lot, maybe out of every three or four dishes, I would get something that was edible. But when it was good, I enjoyed knowing that I could feed my friends and my family and my roommates something that they enjoyed. So that's what initially sparked the interest of uh in cooking for me. So I just voraciously read cookbooks. I had vision at the time, or I was beginning to kind of lose my vision in one of my eyes at the time. But I would read cookbooks, I would uh learn recipes, kind of play around with different ingredients and techniques and just got better and better. And it was really just a hobby for me. And then I wanted to uh recreate a lot of the dishes I grew up eating because of course I missed my mom and I never learned to cook from her. And I missed the dishes that brought me back to childhood. So I started trying to reverse engineer a lot of her recipes and her dishes by memory, just thinking like, oh, what did something smell like in this uh point of the cooking process? Or I remember, you know, she would buy these ingredients. So I kind of just experimented a lot of trial and error and then just got better and better at it and had to teach myself how to cook over and over again, though, as I gradually lost my vision in my 20s. So it was almost like starting over every single time that my vision would decrease to a new baseline.

Sara Brown

And as your vision started to decrease, you had to keep starting over and over again. I'm gonna assume that was frustrating, but was it?

Christine Ha

Oh, most definitely. It was very frustrating because I can remember, I remember, you know, before I lost any vision, I was able to get to a point where I was cooking uh quite elaborate meals, and then I started losing vision in one of my eyes, and I was able to adapt. So it was okay because I could still see out of the other eye very well, and then one eye was blurry, but your vision adapts and your brain adapts. So I could still drive, I could still go to school and read the board and in front of the classroom in the lecture hall at college. Um, so that was okay, but then I started losing vision in the other eye that was good, and then it felt like going from being able to cook an entire Thanksgiving spread to barely being able to fry an egg or scramble an egg or even make a cold cut sandwich. And so that was frustrating, but you know, I learned to do that slowly, and then as I got better, I would lose more vision, and then it would be harder again because I would have to relearn how to do some of these things with less and less sight and depending more and more on my remaining senses. So it was a lot of frustration in my 20s, and a lot of times I thought I would have to give up or that I would never be able to be independent or cook again myself.

Sara Brown

So, do you use any adaptive or assistive devices to help you cook?

Christine Ha

Yeah, I do. Luckily, technology is getting better and better, of course, with things like AI and smartphones and stuff, and so I do use my my smartphone quite a bit to use certain apps on my phone to read me labels or expiration dates on things um in my pantry. Uh, and then other than that, I use like just my remaining senses, like a lot of times this sense of touch, sense of smell. Uh, my kitchen is very organized, and I've always been an organized person all of my life. So fortunately, that wasn't a huge transition for me. So all of my spices, for example, are uh kept in alphabetical order. And I use an app on my phone. Um, I actually use the paprika app, which is nice for keeping recipes and making grocery lists and and figuring out what is left in the pantry to meal plan at home. So I use that and refer to that using a screen reader on my phone to figure out okay, what do I have in my pantry and what order, you know, are the spices. There's allspice and cinnamon, and of course, in alphabetical order. So I'll kind of scroll through and then count how many spice jars down the line. And that's kind of how I find the spices, and of course I verify by smell. Do you have a favorite meal to prepare? Oh, favorite meal to prepare. You know, that is a loaded question, but I love to prepare different foods, and I think fortunately, being someone who lives in Houston, that's the most diverse city in America, we're able to get all sorts of ingredients. So, you know, one day I'll feel like something Vietnamese, another day something Korean, another day something American, another day something Italian or Mexican. But I would say something that I kind of tend to always come back to is uh fried rice. And I like fried rice because, first of all, I always have either a pot of rice that's um it's sitting in my rice cooker warm, or there's cold leftover rice in the fridge, which is the rice that you want to use for fried rice. And the great thing about fried rice is you can use up all the leftovers. So whether you have some random proteins like meat or tofu or shrimp, uh you have some onions, garlic, some random vegetables, kimchi that my mother-in-law made us that's starting to ripen, eggs in the fridge. All of these things uh made with a simple sauce can uh turn into a big uh wok or pan of fried rice. And I love fried rice because it's comforting. It's like a one bowl, one spoon meal. So it's super easy to eat, not a lot of cleanup afterwards.

Sara Brown

I love fried rice too, and it's it's like not one bowl for me, it's one trough for me. I love fried rice. Love it. Now talk about your life today. What does it look like and what are you passionate about?

Christine Ha

Oh well, my life is quite busy, um, which is a good thing. I'm still feel like I'm doing great things and cool things, so I'm really fortunate in that way. I am working on my second cookbook, so that's taking up a lot of my time during the day, and it's allowing me to now still think about food, but kind of coming away from the actual physical aspect of cooking and sitting back down to my uh first love of creative writing and thinking about what I went to school for and you know my initial um adoration for literature and creative writing. So I'm working on that, um, putting together all those recipes, writing the head notes, which are the stories behind each recipe, that's been really fulfilling. Uh, and of course, I still have the restaurants and I am pretty hands-on as an operator. Fortunately, I don't have to cook in the kitchen because I have a great team. You know, we've been established for a few years. So I have great managers, a great team, um, line cooks, front of house, everybody um there is part of my team. It helps me operate uh and run the daily operations of the restaurant day in and day out. So, but I do go in quite a bit. We do menu development. Um, so my husband is also very well versed in food. We develop the menu together with, say, our uh chef de cuisine at the blind goat or our manager at Stuff Belly. We come up with new dishes together, we brainstorm a lot together. We do a lot of research and development or uh testing different recipes or different ways to make certain dishes. Uh, also help like develop the cocktail menu and the bar menu at the blind goat. Um, just go in, have meetings, greet guests, meet other guests, talk to my team. So uh, you know, we live close to our restaurant, so that's nice. Um, so I still am very hands-on with that. And anytime we have special events or special promos or dishes that are rolling out for a limited time, I'm very hands-on with that. Like from the marketing to um the curating of it and uh running all of it at from a high level. So that takes up a lot of my time as well. And then I still get to do a lot of advocacy work in public speaking, which is nice because it makes me it reminds me of the true purpose of why I've, you know, am alive and what I've been able to do with my life is I always say that, you know, winning MasterChef was amazing. And of course, the the prizes that came with it were great, but I didn't realize or see it coming that the biggest gift of all from winning MasterChef is being launched into the public limelight and thus having a public platform to be able to advocate for people in the society who are underrepresented, whether it be women or people of color or uh people with liz uh with disabilities or living with um vision impairments. So for me, I get to do a lot of that and inspire and encourage people with a lot of the uh the motivational and keynote speaking that I do. So that's been super fulfilling and great as well. So that's my life.

Sara Brown

And it's very full, and honestly, it completely answers why you know you were asked to be a cast member because these are except you're just a super cool person doing super cool things, just living your life, living your absolute best life. Now, turning to The Dot Experience, you're going to have your story shared alongside all of our other cast members. How did it feel to be asked to be a part of that really cool group?

Christine Ha

Well, first it was an honor. Uh, I've been to the museum before. I've actually been to the facilities and toured it and thought it was super cool how it honors uh people in the past and present with vision impairment. And then to be asked to be part of the project. Uh, like I said, it's just been an honor. And for me, it's um, I feel like it's a great way to give back to our community and show other people who are interested or who might be um, you know, either caretakers or involved or allies or people with vision impairment themselves, like show them this is the way one visually impaired person lives. But this is also, you know, perhaps uh gives you ideas on how you can do things or or gives you the um encouragement or the inspiration and the motivation to try to achieve your dreams. Like my dream is where kind of where I'm at is to be able to do the advocacy work and to be around food and to be around books and writing. But that may not be someone else's dream, but maybe it's a hobby for them. And I think just to be part of this, this greater conversation about what it means to be someone who lives with a vision impairment, but also someone who wants to achieve dreams no matter what they are. I think that's really uh empowering and a powerful message. So I'm happy to be a part of The Dot Experience.

Sara Brown

And what are you hoping visitors take away from The Dot Experience?

Christine Ha

Uh I'm hoping that they walk away with the idea that vision impairment doesn't have to limit dreams and goals and vision, um, and that they get kind of a splice of life into other visually impaired people's lives and how they live their life or what um crafts they're into or what their areas of expertise are. And uh I hope that everyone who comes through uh The Dot Experience walks away with um just the idea to dream bigger.

Sara Brown

And before we conclude this interview, is there anything else you would like to share or discuss?

Christine Ha

Um no, I mean I would just I would love to just ask people to keep following me on social media. Uh I'm the blind cook on many of the social media platforms to see what I'm up to next. Uh, you know, I'm excited about the second cookbook. I've been um working on as a subject of a a documentary film um as well about the my life story. And so there's a lot of exciting things down the pipeline, and I hope people just follow me and see what I'm up to next.

Sara Brown

All right, Christine. Thank you so much for taking time out of your day to come on and talk to me. Yeah, thanks, Sarah. Thanks for having me. And I've put links in the show notes to Christine's social media accounts, as well as various other articles and noteworthy things I think you would enjoy. So be sure to take a look at our show notes for all of those really cool stories. Now it's time for our monthly tech takeaway. We've got Jennifer Winsel back this month. She joins Michael Dennis to talk about the features that will be available on the next Monarch update that's set for August.

Michael Dennis

Hello everyone, and welcome to our July episode of the Tech Takeaways. My name is Michael Dennis, and today, in relation to June, I'm not alone anymore. Welcome back, Jennifer!

Jennifer Wenzel

Yay! I have come back with Return from the Great Beyond. This is Jennifer Wenzel.

Michael Dennis

It's good, it's great to have you back, Jennifer, because uh I do want to share this with all listeners when we record together. It is so much easier than when you sit there alone and have to record the podcast just by yourself. It makes a huge difference. So I'm glad to have you back. And uh let's right away dive into our topic today. And actually, we are going to talk some of the features which will come out with the next Monarch update, which will be released on August 17th. And Jennifer will talk to you guys directly about the first cool uh intervention and upgrade, I would even say, on the Tactile Graphics Image Library. Jennifer, the floor is yours.

Jennifer Wenzel

Yes, and it's actually an upgrade to the whole tactical viewer. Um there's some really exciting things that will be going on with that. So one exciting thing is that there will be multiple levels of zoom. So when you get an image now from the Tactile Graphic Image Library, it's a PDF. Um and if you create your own graphic as a PDF, you'll notice that you can only zoom from the overview into like one level of zooming in. But with the new feature, there will be multiple levels. So it'll be a few levels where you will not see Braille, but you will see a larger view. So say you have like the US map. You'll first see the overview of the map, just like usual. And when you first zoom in, you'll see a slightly bigger version of that map with no braille. And then you zoom again and you'll see an even bigger version with no braille. And when you get to the level where there is braille, you will get some haptic feedback and a little sound to show that that's the level where Braille starts appearing. But then you can even zoom in more, and the braille will stay the same size and in the same place. And you can continue to zoom in to closer and closer views of images. So it's really exciting because you get a lot better views, and you can there's a shortcut to zoom in and zoom. Back out more quickly, and so you'll be able to do all of that and experiencing it. The other cool thing about graphic images is there will also be an AI description feature where you can use a shortcut key command to get a description of the image. So it will give you sort of an overview in speech and and with Braille of what the graphic contains and where key features might be found so that you can navigate to those features on the graphic. And there is also a way to turn that descriptive feature off if you're in an environment where AI is not okay to use. And so you will be able to turn that off and on. So this is an exciting upgrade to the tactile viewer. I think everyone will really enjoy it. And now Michael will talk to you about another great new feature: the exam mode.

Michael Dennis

That is something all of the teachers will be super excited about. And I do want to say not only teachers, but I had already great conversations with uh testing agencies who are looking exactly for an exam mode. So if you look at your Monarch currently, if you would write an exam on it or use it for an exam, you would always have access to basically all the data which is stored on the Monarch, or you also would have the access still directly to the internet. The exam mode is a tool where the teacher can choose which applications the student is allowed to use during an exam. The teacher also can set then a time. So let's say the exam is set for 90 minutes, and the teacher basically uh tells the Monarch then to enable a decent amount of applications like the file management system, probably, um the internet browser, like all of these things so that students cannot log out their notes. But the cool thing also there is if a student is way faster done than the expected 90 minutes, let's say with that example, let's say the student is done after 60 minutes already and wants to just keep using the Monarch with its full capabilities, the teacher has a password where they can basically stop the exam mode, and with that way the Monarch is fully functioning and running again. And that is a really cool teacher, which in my eyes will bring also taking any kind of exams up to the next level that the students can just use the Monarch also in that particular sense, even if they want to like use it together with their with their laptop. Teacher probably can just enable everything besides terminal mode. And then it's more computer question, but that that opens up so many more opportunities, and I'm super excited to hear then also how it's actually being used in the classroom setting or in an exam setting overall. But that's not all. Jennifer has even more news, and they come down to math, probably the most loved subject in any school.

Jennifer Wenzel

Yes, that exam mode is going to be a great feature for security and for making exams more possible with the Monarch and it making it a lot less possible for students to look up extra information for their exams, which we know no student would ever do, right, Michael?

Speaker 1

No, I've never done something like that. No.

Jennifer Wenzel

Never, never, me neither. Anyway, so so math um is hitting a major upgrade in this new version. Both the translating math through the math mode and word processor, that is going to be much better. I think people will see a much better experience of math being translated, nemeth and UEB math. And um the bug where some people had where it would be blank when the math was actually it would show on the Monarch, but when the file was actually sent, it would not show up. That should be addressed and resolved. We hope very much. It's been worked on. So hopefully that will not be an experience people will have after this new update. The other thing that has gotten a huge overhaul, and I'm really excited about it, is the graphing calculator. The actual graph that is created when someone uses enter G to get the raised graph is very, very much improved in this new feature. So there will actually be hash marks along the axes so that students can actually plot their points much more easily and understand where their points fall on the graph. It is the closest experience to graph paper that I've ever seen on a braille display. There also are numbers along the axes. So if you have your steps set to one, you will see one, two, three along the x-axis and along the y-axis. The axes themselves are labeled X and Y. And you can customize how that all looks in the settings. You can also set your steps differently, and of course, continue to set your different top and bottom boundaries, things like that to make it a very excellent graphing experience for you and your student. And when the point is plotted, if you point and click on a point and get the coordinates, or if you um actually create a point plot, um you can actually see a little um like halo type symbol that will actually show you the point that has been plotted as well. So very exciting. Um, I think that people will really understand the graph much better this way and really be able to compare, contrast, see the points on a graph much more easily with this new and updated graphing experience. So look forward to a lot of great feedback after this, um, after this release. Remember that you can get the release notes for the update in Key Updater after you do the update. Wingit is actually going to have an update as well for stability and better connection experience. So I think people will love that as well. Especially if you're using a device that wouldn't connect to Wingit, you will find that the devices with the 16A chip or whatever A16 chip will now connect to Wingit. So that's exciting as well.

Michael Dennis

As you hear guys, we keep working as APH on the Monarch and future applications, and I'm very sure these are not the last ones coming. But with that said, that's it for today's episode of the Tech Takeaways. If you have any feedback, feel free to reach out to us at changemakers at aph.org. Ask questions, send us suggestions also for future episodes. And my name is Michael Dennis.

Jennifer Wenzel

And my name is Jennifer Wenzel.

Michael Dennis

And we're looking forward to having you back for our August episode and say bye-bye for today.

Sara Brown

Thanks so much. See you soon. Thank you, Jennifer and Michael. And that concludes this episode of Changemakers. I hope you have enjoyed it. Be sure to check the show notes for additional links for Christine Ha as well as links about the Monarch. And do you have a podcast topic, suggestion, or question? Send it my way at changemakers at aph.org. And as always, be sure to look for ways you can be a change maker this week.