In “One Good Meal,” we ask cooking-inclined creative people to share the story behind a favorite dish they actually make and eat at home on a regular basis — and not just when they’re trying to impress.

When the fashion designer Jason Wu emigrated with his family from Taiwan to Canada at age 9, he spoke no English — and that wasn’t the only issue. He also had to suffer through lunch. While the other kids in his Vancouver school were digging into pizza Lunchables, Wu would show up with fried rice or steamed vegetables. “There weren’t a lot of Asian kids in my class, so we would get teased,” he says today. “Like ‘Oh, hey, enjoy your cabbage.’ It wasn’t very sexy, let’s put it that way.”

But a funny thing happened when Wu turned 18 and moved to New York to attend design school at Parsons: Living on his own and cooking for the first time, he began to make his mother’s fried rice. Then he kept remaking it. The dish was cheap, easy and undeniably delicious. “Growing up in the West, I was always wanting to be very westernized to fit in,” he says. “And in my 20s, I really started re-embracing my roots.”