Mai Donohue and Julia Califano first met at the Barrington, Rhode Island YMCA in 1976 and discovered that they shared an interest in food, family and cultural traditions. A few weeks after meeting, Mai invited Julia to her home for a traditional Vietnamese meal, and overwhelmed by the fresh flavors, Julia asked Mai for a copy of her recipes. Mai, however, cooked from memory and had nothing written down, so Julia suggested that they cook together for a few weeks, and she would write down the instructions. Whenever she cooked, Mai recounted the stories and fables from her childhood in Vietnam during the 1950’s and 1960’s, and Julia eventually decided to include those stories with the recipes. When Mai first arrived in the United States in 1970, she was determined to become an American, and while raising six children, she cooked hamburgers, coached soccer and drove a station wagon. When four Vietnamese boys joined the family after the fall of Saigon in 1975, however, Mai welcomed them with some of the traditional foods of Vietnam, and her own children began to request those Vietnamese treats for their birthdays and special occasions. When her youngest child left home for college, Mai decided to go back to school to finish her own, interrupted education, and when she graduated from the University of Rhode Island with a degree in communications, Mai invited her friends and family to a memorable Vietnamese banquet in her Barrington backyard. Julia Califano grew up outside of Chicago, studied English literature at Cornell University and traveled extensively in Europe and Southeast Asia before returning home to earn a masters degree in creative writing at The Johns Hopkins University. After getting married in 1969, Julia went back to Italy to work as a translator for a pharmaceutical company while her husband completed medical school. The Califanos returned to the United States in 1971 and moved to Barrington in 1976. While Mai and Julia worked on their cookbook together, the three Califano children enjoyed coming home to a house filled with the tastes and smells of Vietnam and began to request Vietnamese food for their own special occasions.