11 minute read
What
what we’re
eating WORDS AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY HANNAH LEE
Take a Bao
Acouple with a palm-sized puppy sit at a picnic table outside of Sister Liu’s Kitchen. Using disposable chopsticks, they pick up their choice of morsel from two trays of dumplings, dipping each one into fragrant chili oil. There are immediate food-filled smiles. Sharing food is a central feature of how Chinese people, like many cultures in the world, convey affection. Sister Liu’s, a hole-inthe-wall dumpling dive, was built around this ideology. Cuiying “Sister” Liu recalls sitting around the table at 6 years old with her parents and grandparents, learning how to make the PHOTO COURTESY OF BITES OF BULL CITY pocket-sized delights and indulging in her mini masterpieces hours later. “It was like magic,” she ABOVE Cuiying Liu holds a customer favorite – the Chinese hamburger, or Rou Jia Mo – filled with delectable pork belly. says. The communal effort of enjoying a meal BELOW The steamed pork buns are not a featured menu item, with one another stuck with her to this day, but customers often call in to preorder them. reflected in her eternal gratitude for tradition and family – and more importantly, dumplings.
She brought that adoration with her to North Carolina when she moved here from Harbin, China, in March 2013. She admits she never thought she would open a restaurant, but her dumpling fan base among friends made her reconsider. “I enjoy making dumplings, Chinese burgers, noodles,” Cuiying says. “My friends love the dishes I made, and I was so happy about it, that’s the reason I opened my first kitchen.” She opened Sister Liu’s Kitchen, serving up homestyle handmade northeastern Chinese food, in October 2018 and landed on Bon Appetit’s list of the 50 Best New Restaurants in America within Morrisville in November 2020 and also acquired a food months. Now with a national reputation, the kitchen – truck. “It’s my favorite because it can ‘fly’ to any place,” small enough to fit just four employees – often gets more she says. She’s weathered the pandemic alongside fellow orders than it can handle. “We had the busiest dinner rush restaurant owners, but she misses the time-honored ritual today,” customers might find posted on the restaurant’s of gathering around the table with new and familiar faces. Instagram, announcing they are sold out. “The most difficult part is I cannot have the usual contact
Once again, Sister Liu adapted to meet the needs of her with my customers and chat with them,” she says. For now, growing customer base. She opened a second location in she lets the dumplings do the talking.
OUR 9TH ANNUAL WOMEN’S
ISSUE These 12 extraordinary women impact our city in ways big and small. We’re honored to share their stories. PHOTOGRAPHY BY JOHN MICHAEL SIMPSON ANABEL ROSA
he plane was tiny, Anabel T Rosa remembers, a blue puddle-jumper. As she and New York City mayor David Dinkins flew over Boston, he pointed down at the clear blue channel beneath them. “That’s where the Boston Tea Party happened,” he shouted over the noise. Anabel, an assistant press secretary at the time, drew a blank face. “I know that’s American history,” she said, “but I have to admit, I don’t know the full story.” Mayor Dinkins looked at her kindly, knowing what she meant. “I’ve been thinking about law school,” she continued. “And I want to study the Constitution. I’m excited about it every time I read it.”
When they landed, Dinkins pointed again, this time at her. “You’re going to law school,” he said. At this point, Anabel had worked for him for four years, a whirlwind experience that included meeting her idol, Nelson Mandela, who dedicated his life to equality. A year after that plane ride, Anabel was on her way to doing the same, starting with her acceptance to Brooklyn Law School.
It’s hard to believe how far Anabel has come in the three decades since. She left New York the year after 9/11 and moved to Puerto Rico to work as an attorney, notary and real estate agent for a few years before officially planting roots in Durham. Now she is one of the city’s upand-coming civil rights attorneys.
Her initial hesitations about moving back to the States were alleviated after an interview with the Law Offices of James Scott Farrin. They shared her same enthusiasm about working with clients
LEADING THE WAY
Anabel is also the leadership subcommittee chair on the Governor’s Advisory Council on Hispanic/Latino Affairs and a member of Durham Mayor’s Hispanic/Latino Committee, Partnership for a Healthy Durham’s subcommittee on special populations, Board of Governors of the North Carolina Advocates for Justice and its Diversity and Inclusion Committee, and Durham Academy’s PTA diversity committee.
who speak English as a second language – a topic that’s always hit home for her.
Anabel could barely speak English when she moved to the States from Puerto Rico in 1981 to start her undergraduate studies at Syracuse University. A college friend would walk her through simple phrases like, “How are you doing?” and, “Where are we going for lunch?” When Anabel moved to Durham in 2010, she spent every Saturday morning for five years teaching
ESL students at The Church of The Good Shepherd. Anabel likes to think that’s where her son, Andres, found his motivation to join the Peace Corps in 2019.
The pandemic cut Andres’ experience short, and necessitated that Anabel watch her daughter Gisela’s Durham Academy graduation on TV. Still, over the past year she’s sometimes worked 55-plus-hour weeks, at times overseeing some 300 cases. And that doesn’t include her pro bono work. “It’s what makes me feel so good about what I do,” she says. That drive earned her induction into the state’s Pro Bono Honor Society in 2019 and the Citizen Lawyer Award from the North Carolina Bar Association the following year.
Anabel finds ways to advocate for people beyond her role as an attorney. She’s a member of North Carolina Advocates for Justice and coordinates U.S. citizenship clinics. She recruited 21 attorneys from her office to volunteer at the last clinic three years ago. They processed nearly 50 applications that day.
You’ll find her at an occasional Durham City Council meeting, gauging how certain plans affect neighborhoods with large Latino populations. When Bill Bell was mayor, she’d walk up to him and relay her complaints without hesitation. Now she’s in Raleigh doing the same thing at a state level, often sitting in on four-hour meetings for the Governor’s Hispanic Advisory Council.
For all the awards and accolades she’s received for her work, her one hope is that it makes an impact for generations to come. “I’m really proud and honored to be a member of all these committees, but I feel for my children and their children,” she says. “Knowing that we [as a country] move so slowly sometimes. When my son was in Brogden Middle School, he was followed by a group of kids who called themselves ‘the border patrol.’
“I hope that with all this effort and all this work and all these committees, we will see improvement, see change.” – by Hannah Lee his time last year, Rachael Classi’s upstairs closet in her Duke Park home overflowed with toys. The T blocks and doodle boards once loved by daughters Donna, 4, and Lucia, 2, cluttered the space. Rachael saw what the overstuffed alcove was teaching her children. “Habits of overconsumption start really young,” Rachael says. “It kept hitting me that we don’t need to constantly be purchasing brand new things for our little ones.”
Rachael and her husband, Peter Classi, were without child care when the pandemic began, and struggled to manage their full-time jobs. Rachael left her position as vice president of strategy and marketing at Teamworks to look after her daughters. At home, she found herself “trying to find ways to bring new and novel things into the house [without] spending a fortune,” Rachael says. She began exchanging sanitized toys and books with neighbors.
This informal neighborhood trade-off reminded Rachael of that closet. She surveyed parents and discovered that they also wanted to find a systematic way to pass on toys their children had outgrown. So, she developed a concept for a startup that would offer subscription boxes of playthings intended for reuse. She teamed up with experts, including certified Montessori early childhood teacher Olynda Smith, in October 2020 to curate sustainable, age-appropriate toys.
Tiny Earth Toys launched a full line of products for newborns to toddlers in March. Each box option contains high-quality wooden toys and is intended for about four to six months of use before TET recommends sending it back and moving on to the next option. Returned kits are sanitized and then sent to their next home.
“She could very easily just be looking at the nuts and bolts of the toys, but she’s also looking at the bigger question of how to support families,” Olynda says, which is why boxes include guides that are centered on being environmentally conscious.
Rachael believes it was no coincidence that her inspiration struck last summer. “If the pandemic had not occurred,” she says, “I’m not sure I would have slowed down enough to realize what was going on in our house.”
The business continues to grow – it sold out of two of its flagship kits and doubled the number of parents subscribed in April – and Rachael is excited by the momentum. She hopes to share with others what she already knows: that they can “be really happy without needing to own that closet at the top of my stairs.” – by Renee Ambroso
RACHAEL CLASSI
FOUNDER AND CEO, TINY EARTH TOYS
ANGELICA STROUD GREENE
BATTALION CHIEF, DURHAM FIRE DEPARTMENT FOUNDER, TAKE BACK DURHAM SECURITY OFFICER, RESEARCH TRIANGLE INSTITUTE CERTIFIED INSTRUCTOR, AMERICAN RED CROSS AND AMERICAN HEART ASSOCIATION
female firefighter is a rarity in the Durham Fire “It was like, ‘You know what?’” Angelica recalls. “‘I’ve had all Department, which is mostly composed of white these occurrences with the fire department, and maybe I should just A men. There are only 18 total, or less than 1% of the force. Even more rare? A Black female battalion chief. Angelica Stroud Greene was given the title in August ➜ give it a try.’” Those first few years were often tough. She grew up with three sisters, so she wasn’t attuned to communicating with men on a daily basis. Working out with them was entirely foreign. 2020, a department first. There was no commemorative ceremony to mark the FUN FACT But she kept up. When she wasn’t getting the hands-on practice she needed at the department, momentous occasion, but Angelica’s infectious smile Firehouse Magazine recognized Angelica she spent hours at volunteer stations – throwing makes it clear how she feels about the promotion. in 2010 for a fire the ladder off and onto the truck, running
Her ascension comes at a time when the safety program she developed for seniors drills, whatever needed to be done. Through her department is struggling to hire more women and and the disabled. own training, she found modifications or new people of color. Minorities make up less than 25% As a result, Firehouse techniques that helped her perform just as well as of the department – many, like Angelica, never Subs featured her face on their cups her classmates, if not better. considered a career in firefighting. for a few years. “Early on in my career, it was a bit of a
“I wanted to be a teacher when I grew up,” challenge, because you look out and you don’t the North Carolina Central University graduate see anybody who looks like you,” she says. “As says. “I wanted to be a child psychologist. That was the dream.” Angelica, chock-full of perseverance, joined the force in March 1993 after several encouraging ➜ I’ve moved through the ranks, things have gotten a little bit easier. And I say easier [due to] the fact that now I’m used to not really seeing a lot of women, and I hate to even say that because I pushes from her landlord, Frank Delucia, who didn’t want to get used to it.” was a firefighter at the time. She gave him JOIN THE Today, Angelica works 24-hour shifts while a hard no for three years. But old memories of close encounters her family had with fire RANKS overseeing five stations, 35 firefighters and seven captains. As commander, her list of duties is long, continued to burn in her mind. Her nieces and Durham Fire Department is actively but she wouldn’t trade it for anything. nephews got trapped inside their fire-engulfed seeking female “If nothing else, I just hope my story reaches home and ended up with severe burns, and her firefighters to join. Visit durhamnc.gov/ one other African American female [who wants] uncle sustained burns in a smaller kitchen fire. 622/Become-a-Durham- to come and join this organization,” she says. “I Everyone thankfully survived, but Angelica can Firefighter for more really didn’t know what I was getting into 24 years still hear the screams over roaring flames and the information. ago, but I’m glad I did. I’m grateful that I’m here.” frantic calls thereafter. – by Hannah Lee
