Nite Yun has no memories of the Khao-I-Dang refugee camp in Thailand where she was born in 1982.

The chef and owner of Nyum Bai in Oakland, Calif., a restaurant that has attracted national attention, was just 2 when her parents, Cambodians who had fled the Khmer Rouge in the previous decade, scooped up her and her older brother and headed to America, sponsored by a family affiliated with a church group. They eventually settled in Stockton, drawn there because a family friend said the hot weather and farmland would remind them of Cambodia.

The family spoke Khmer at home, but Ms. Yun’s parents didn’t talk much about their days in Cambodia under the violence of the Khmer Rouge regime. “It was a very uncomfortable, sensitive topic,” Ms. Yun said. “To this day, I still don’t know how my parents met.”

Her main point of access to her family’s history was what she had for dinner in that one-bedroom apartment in Stockton: catfish, dried out until it shriveled to the texture of jerky, that she ate with her hands, along with scoops of green mango salad. Soups of pumpkins, squash, bitter gourds, bay leaves and toasted rice powder, all floating in broth given some funk from prahok, a fermented fish paste elemental to Cambodian cooking. Bowls of jasmine rice. Always rice.