Blind MasterChef winner Christine Hà talks learning how to cook and dealing with vision loss
After losing her mother to cancer when she was 14, the winner of the third season of the US series starting experimenting with cooking in college in a bid to recreate the food she had grown up eating
I was born in Los Angeles to Vietnamese parents and raised in Houston, Texas. My parents left Vietnam for the US in 1975, where I was born four years later. I grew up straddling two different cultures, which was difficult for me. I would go to school wishing I could eat bolognese cheese sandwiches, but my mom would pack me really smelly lunches. It wasn’t hip then to eat fish sauce and pork belly, like it is now.
How blind chef Christine Hà defied expectations to win more than Gordon Ramsay’s heart
I was an only child growing up. I lost my mom to cancer when I was 14. That was a tough year. But I feel like it has made me into a stronger person, and helped prepare me for even more hardships later in life.
I first started losing vision, in one of my eyes, at the age of 20, when I was in undergraduate college. I have a disease called neuromyelitis optica, but it wasn’t correctly diagnosed for three years. It is a disease that’s similar to multiple sclerosis where your immune system attacks your neurological system and it primarily affects the optic nerves - which is how I lost my vision - and the spinal cord.
I was relieved when I was correctly diagnosed because I would rather know what it is that I have. It takes a while to adapt.
I would burn things a lot in the beginning or the food would end up all over the floor and counter. But I just kept at it.
It took time to process the grief because I was losing my vision and my independence. Every time I would get used to it, something else would happen. For example, I would have long periods of time where I had trouble walking because it affected my spinal cord. Fortunately, my health has been stable for 10 years now.
My actual undergraduate degree is in business. However, my parents wanted me to be a doctor, so I already failed them in that way. I worked in the corporate world for a while, but when I started experiencing vision loss and other health issues, I had to leave work.