Good morning.

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Today’s introduction comes from Ligaya Mishan, a food writer for The Times.

As an Asian-American born in Los Angeles and raised in Honolulu, I’ve thought a lot about what it means to grow up in multiple cultures at once — my Filipino mother’s, my British father’s, and my America. For a recent piece on how Asian-American chefs are changing the American palate, I spoke with some two dozen chefs and restaurateurs of Asian descent from across the country — many in California — who came to the U.S. as children or were born here to parents who were immigrants or refugees.

The details of their biographies are different, but the sense of duality is shared. And for many, that sense was heightened, early on, by food. “When friends came over and it smelled like sour fishy things, it was weird,” said Chase Valencia, a Filipino-American who runs Lasa in Los Angeles with his brother Chad. Niki Nakayama, the Japanese-American chef of n/naka in Los Angeles, remembers lifting the lid of her bento box in the school cafeteria to find little neck clams staring up at her, “with eyes it felt like,” she said.

Some chefs resisted the claims of their heritage. Corey Lee, the Korean-American chef of Benu in San Francisco, once threw out his mother’s painstakingly made stores of kimchi when he was a teenager. Now he ferments his own kimchi at Benu — then transforms it into a membrane-thin, crispy glass to hold a single bite of pork belly and oyster.