What is your comfort food? My go to comfort food is a big, hot bowl of ramen. I associate ramen with celebrations, overcoming sickness, and home. You can find an amazing variety of warm noodle bowls in Downtown Ann Arbor, but my favorite is from Tomukun Noodle Bar. But, what is comfort food? To me, comfort food makes you feel warm inside, reminds you of home, and is usually high in carbs (but we ignore that part). Home is more than just a physical building. It’s any place where you feel safe and can be yourself. It could be an actual house, a certain person, a pet, a type of food, ect. This is one thing that Phimmasone Kym Owen and her family struggled to find after their arrival in the United States.
Phimmasone Owens has lived in Ann Arbor since 2014. Before coming to Ann Arbor, she landed in Chicago in 1981. Even before that, she lived in Laos as a refugee. She and her family lived in multiple Thai refugee camps. During her time in the camps, ambassadors would select specific refugees to support and send over to the US. In Phimmasone’s case, an ambassador approached her father and asked him what his skills were and if he was willing to move to Chicago. “There was a huge increase of South East Asians who needed an ESL bilingual teacher and my dad fit the profile because in our home country he was a school teacher and he was fluent in French, English, and Laos.” It was interesting because Phimmasone shared that even though they were refugees, “they were actually privileged.” This kind of threw me off guard because she had just shared how she had lived in a number of different refugee camps.
“Some of the other refugees I knew had stayed in those camps a lot longer until they eventually got sponsored to move somewhere.”
Phimmasone Owen
Phimmasone and her family were fortunate in the sense that they didn’t have to stay in the refugee camps for years and years. They got sponsored not long after they had arrived and were then able to leave until and move to Chicago.
Phimmasone and her family were forced to transition from a jungle climate to the freezing winters of Chicago. The weather, land, people, culture and food were all foreign to them. All they longed for was comfort and a reminder of home. Food is typically a source of familiarity, but they couldn’t find any comfort in the food they were given. They didn’t have access to any of their ethnic foods and the government supplemental food was a completely different palette than what Phimmasone’s family and her were used to.”
Phimmasone didn’t even know she could be allergic to foods but the cafeteria food would always make her feel so sick that she would choose to just starve. None of the foods she would eat at home had any milk in it and she learned the hard way that she couldn’t digest dairy. She didn’t know what was killing her.
“Neighborhood grocery stores lacked the kind of food we were used to. Ethnic stores were far away, and transportation and funds were a challenge.”
Phimmasone Owen
If Phimmasone and her family wanted a taste of home, they would have to travel far away to one of the few ethnic stores in the area. However, this was very difficult for them to do because of expensive transportation costs and limited resources. Phimmasone lived in the Chicago suburbs for a little over 30 years, got married, and then moved to Ann Arbor with her (now ex) husband. After the move, “I decided that I was gonna go to school and I never really looked back.”
Phimmasone attended the University of Michigan in 2021 and was enrolled in a social work course. One of the assignments was what can you do to be an agent of change? It was about “who you are and I was like I’m a refugee and an avid gardener.” Little did she know that this class project was going to be the start of something big: The Refugee Garden.
The Refugee Garden is an area of U-M’s Campus Farm that is now a space where refugee clients can grow their own food through group gardening. Phimmasone was able to obtain this land and create the garden because she reached out to Jewish Family Services (JFS) to ask for their support.
Soon after their partnership, they began to write grants. However, in order to get money from grants to buy land, they had to have land in order to write grants. This seems ridiculous because how are people expected to have land already if that’s what they’re trying to get/buy.
As a student of Michigan, Phimmasone decided to reach out to the manager of the U-M Campus Farm to see if they could offer her land for this project. She at first got no email response so she decided to strategically go to an event at the Campus Farm and try to find the manager. She eventually found the manager and gave him a compelling ‘elevator pitch’ for the Refugee Garden. The following day his team responded to her email and agreed to give her land and partner up with her.
Eventually with the help from volunteers, they were able to put fences up around the plot of land and start to bring out clients. The garden became a place not only to grow produce, but also a place to be with family and establish a community. Coming to a new place as a refugee and not knowing anyone can be scary and hard. Phimmasone’s garden works to create a sense of belonging.
“Food is such a universal thing and food is such a basic necessity. Forcing people to assimilate into the US diet could be a form of acceptance. It’s just like doing away with one’s culture. By preserving our foods we can preserve our culture.”
Phimmasone Owen
The garden provides a space where everyone can speak their own language without anyone giving them dirty looks or telling them to speak English. Phimmasone says that she fiends for someone to speak her language with; she just wants to speak her language but has no one to speak it with.
The garden also works to bring together the old and the young.
“In the United States, they separate the old and the young. The elders here feel useless and in other countries elders have a respected role. They are praised and respected.”
Phimmasone Owen
This is a really interesting point because it does seem that the elders here aren’t worshiped quite the same as they are in other countries and cultures. In the United States, after you become a certain age you start to feel useless because people deem you too old to keep up with the growing and evolving world.
The knowledge of the elders isn’t being used in this country. But, in other places the word elder refers to a person who is “full of knowledge and intelligence and they deserve to have the respect of the younger generation.” Being older “is like your promotion,” but here it seems more like the end of the road.
Another benefit of the garden is that you get to be outside more. “Being outside is therapeutic.” A lot of refugees come with trauma or PTSD due to fleeing a war or running away from other horrific things that have happened to them that they can’t talk about. The garden aims to offer people a purpose, to encourage them to be outside, to make them feel safe, and to provide them with food.
Phimmasone shared that even to this day she is still in contact with most of the gardeners through WhatsApp. This just goes to show that the garden is much more than just a communal plot of land to grow food. It’s a community and a safe space to build connections and make friends.
The garden was an excuse to bring people together in order to talk about any issues or questions they had/were struggling with. Refugees would ask about things such as how to open a checking account or how to get a job, but they would also ask other questions like what kind of makeup do you use.
I was fascinated by learning about what the garden was and how it came to be, but I was equally interested in the motivation behind it. Phimmasone said that one of her biggest inspirations for the garden came from her experience as a refugee, seeking but not finding comfort through the food forced upon her. Another one of her inspirations was her desire to ensure other refugees had a better experience than her. She shared that
“When I grew up as a refugee, all of the community members in my culture would have a garden, maybe only 2ft x 4ft land, and we would grow things in there like mint, long beans, cilantro, and lettuce. We would grow anything fresh that we couldn’t get at the local grocery stores. People would smuggle in seeds and stuff from their home country because there’s nothing in the US that would substitute for it. Just the lengths that people would take to have a piece of home through food tells you how important it is and how it’s so ingrained in our culture. So that’s why I started the garden.”
Phimmasone Owen
Phimmasone saw and experienced first hand how important food is to people and their culture. Refugees already have enough to deal with – adjusting to a new physical environment, language, job, and community – the least they could be given is a way to make/eat the food from their hometown. Food is one of the only parts of home that these refugees can take with them. Their traditional dishes can help provide comfort, warmth, and a sense of belonging to people who feel like outsiders. This is similar to how ramen makes me feel. If I could never have ramen when I was sick or having a bad day, I would be extremely saddened and disappointed.
Through the process of creating the Refugee Garden, Phimmasone learned a lot about the community of refugees.
She learned that “more connections need to be made, refugee agencies such as JFS are way overworked, we need more grass root refugee organizations to help fill the gaps, and that institutions/agencies don’t listen to the voices of the refugees.”
Phimmasone Owen
She noted that a lot of the time, the organizations that get money from the government have guidelines/quotas they have to hit. When there are quotas to be met, it takes away from the meaning and how genuine their actions are. It’s like a bandaid solution because these institutions are just meeting quotas to meet a guideline, not actually taking care of the underlying issues.
The smaller community organizations are what help take care of these implicit problems.
Phimmasone is a big advocate for taking her privilege and resources and using them to help others. Because of this and everything she has learned, she started her non-profit organization known as the Refugee Garden Initiative.
Phimmasone’s mission statement for The Refugee Garden Initiative is “cultivating food and connections.”
The cultivating food part of the statement refers to the actual garden and the connections part refers to the policies.
Phimmasone’s vision statement for The Refugee Garden Initiative is to “create a space at a table where we can eat the food that we cultivated and sit down and talk about social issues and how we can connect.”
The non-profit started as the Refugee Garden. The garden allowed Phimmasone to fulfill her initial goal of bringing food to people. Then, she started focusing more on social aspects such as what we can do for better policies, for better transportation, and to help more women refugees. To do this she collabrated with SouthEast Michigan Group and other organizations in Michigan such as Red Cross.
During this process, Phimmasone ran into a few main obstacles which helped shape 3 main goals for her non-profit:
1. The first goal is to empower the word refugee.
There seems to be a stigma around the word ‘refugee’ which makes refugees not want to be called that. The official title of being a refugee guarantees that individual protection. So, if the word means protection, why degrade it? Phimmasone wants to “keep the word refugee and just make it powerful.” She wants people to be proud about who they are and where they come from
2. Her second goal is to advocate for more refugee voices to be included in the institutions that say they are here to help them.
Although these institutions are trying to help refugees, they never actually stop to ask them what it is they need. Refugee voices and opinions are not heard and not included in decision making. To Phimmasone, “when I sit in the other role as a refugee, it sounds like the institutions know more than I do about what’s best for me.” Similarly, a lot of people seem to think that free is always good and that since it’s free you can’t complain. But “as a refugee seeking asylum, we are asking for dignity, autonomy, and agency. We don’t want to be treated like babies.”
3. Phimmasone’s third goal is to increase the number of immigrants who can vote. She also wants to advocate for them to vote for people who will make improvements for refugees.
One thing that Phimmasone urges refugees to do is to vote in favor of improving transportation. Transportation is a crucial part of living. It determines how you get to work, get food, get to the hospital, and run any other personal errands. As a refugee, carrying out simple tasks is already much more difficult. But, when you also don’t have a reliable mode of transportation, it makes life that much harder. Some people argue that regugees can just take the bus, but in reality the bus isn’t always dependable. It doesn’t run all hours of the day, it’s often not running on time, and it usually doesn’t go everywhere you need it to go. This means that refugees may have to pass up job interviews due to lack of transportation. The hope is that if more refugees have more of a say in legislation, problems such as transportation won’t be as serious.
“Food is what draws people in but my non-profit is about so much more.”
Phimmasone Owen
Phimmasone relies on word of mouth, the University of Michigan, and digital platforms such as Next Door to spread information and awareness about the Refugee Garden Initiative. She worked with a class here at the University of Michigan called Communication and Non-Profit to help develop her own website. This website not only provides information about her efforts, but it also provides a place for politicians to add their endorsements. Having endorsements is so beneficial to small non-profits such as Phimmasones because it provides them with more exposure, recognition, and resources.
What is community? To me, community is a place where people can have a shared set of beliefs, goals, and attitudes. It’s a place where you feel safe to express yourself.
Phimmasone describes the community as “having a diverse group of people who are willing to listen to others without judgment and to come with solutions for everyone, not just give and take.” She says that it involves putting yourself in other people’s shoes in order to better understand everyone’s circumstances.
To be an exceptional community member is to “get along, be civil even if you don’t agree, be considerate, and acknowledge everyone’s different beliefs.” This also means providing everyone access to their cuisine. Whether the food is as common as mac and cheese or as unique as certain traditional Laotian dishes, people all around the world should be able to eat their idea of comfort food. For this to happen, further action must be taken. All cultures need to be represented and the voices of refugees must be heard.
Work Cited
“Downtown Districts Ann Arbor MI.” Destination Ann Arbor, https://www.annarbor.org/things-to-do/downtown/. Accessed 17 Feb. 2023.
Kim, Anna. “Street View of Tomukun Noodle Bar.” Tomukun Noodle Bar | Ann Arbor Eats, 8 July 2021, https://www.michigandaily.com/news/ann-arbor/tomukun-noodle-bar-ann-arbor-eats-umich-series/.
Levine, Jessica. “Tomukun Noodle Bar’s Tomukun Ramen, Complete with Pork Belly.” Tomukun Noodle Bar Bares All, 2 June 2010, https://www.annarbor.com/entertainment/food-drink/tomukun-noodle-bar-bares-all/.
Sprague, Kerry. “Refugee-Focused Community Garden Celebrates Its First Year.” Arts & Culture, 17 Jan. 2023, https://arts.umich.edu/news-features/refugee-focused-community-garden-celebrates-its-first-year/.
