Christine Hà

Christine Hà
Born Christine Huyentran Hà
(1979-05-09) 9 May 1979
Los Angeles County, California, United States
Education Bachelor of Business Administration
Master of Fine Arts for creative fiction/nonfiction
Spouse(s) John Suh
Website www.christineha.com

Culinary career

Cooking style Vietnamese, Asian Fusion, Southeast Asian, Southern, Japanese, Korean, Cantonese
Christine Hà
Vietnamese alphabet Hà Huyền Trân [1]
Hán-Nôm 何弦珍[note 1]

Christine Huyentran Hà (born May 9, 1979)[2] is an American chef, writer and TV host from Houston, Texas. She is the first blind contestant of MasterChef and the winner of its third season in 2012.[3][4]

Profile

Hà is the only child of parents of Vietnamese-origin and she lived in Lakewood, California and Long Beach as a young child before her family moved to Houston.[5] She revealed that her mother died from lung cancer when she was 14.[6] Her paternal aunt also died from the same illness, even when both were non-smokers.[7]

Hà suffers from neuromyelitis optica, in which a person's own immune system attacks the optic nerves and spinal cord. In 2004 she was diagnosed and gradually started losing her vision, and was almost completely blind by 2007,[8] and describes her vision "as looking at a very foggy mirror after a hot shower".[9] Despite this, she uses adaptive technologies to help her manage her social media by herself.[10]

She received a Bachelor of Business Administration degree in Finance/MIS from University of Texas at Austin in 2001 and a Master of Fine Arts degree for creative fiction/nonfiction at University of Houston's Creative Writing Program in 2012.[11] She recently received the editor's poetry prize from The ScissorTale Review and was a finalist in the 2010 Creative Nonfiction MFA Program-Off contest.[11][12]

She also serves as Fiction Editor for Gulf Coast Journal and her work has appeared in Fire Point, The ScissorTale Review, and PANK Magazine among others.[11][12] In January 2014 she began hosting the cooking Television show Four Senses on AMI-TV.[13]

Career

2012: MasterChef USA & Recipes from My Home Kitchen: Asian and American Comfort Food

Midway through of this year's competition, my money would not have been on Christine for the win – and not just because of her disability – because she just didn't come across as the typical frontrunner. With Christine, slow and steady won the race. She subtly climbed her way to the top by performing consistently well, triumphing over her own self-doubt, all the while maintaining her signature grace and integrity. It was thrilling to watch. And I can say with absolute confidence there was no one more deserving.

“
”

Joe Bastianich, a judge on MasterChef[14]

While she has never studied cooking, she has a large following on her food blog. She states: "I have to depend a lot more on the other senses to cook – taste, smell, how certain ingredients feel", adding that cooking without sight just involves "a lot of organization".[8]

In the nineteen episodes where she competed on the third season of MasterChef, Hà won seven times in both individual and team challenges; additionally, she placed three times in the top three group. However, she was also in the bottom group twice. On September 10, 2012, Hà was announced the winner of the competition and took away $250,000, the MasterChef title, the MasterChef trophy, and a cookbook deal.[4]

Her cookbook, Recipes from My Home Kitchen: Asian and American Comfort Food (ISBN 978-1623360948), was released on May 14, 2013.

2013-Present: Four Senses, Masterchef Vietnam & guest appearances

In 2013, Hà began co-hosting the Canadian TV show Four Senses with Carl Heinrich, the winner of Season 2 of Top Chef Canada. It is a cooking show geared towards the visually impaired, and airs on AMI (Accessible Media, Inc.) TV, a Canadian cable network designed to make television accessible to the vision and hearing impaired. To compensate for the vision-impaired, the show contains a great deal of audio description, where they are narrating what’s going on in the kitchen, what they're doing, how things feel or smell or sound.[15][16]

In 2015, she revealed on her blog and Facebook that she would become a judge on the third season of MasterChef Vietnam, having been a guest judge in the previous series, and a guest judge of US MasterChef (season 4), making her the first former contestant and winner worldwide to become a regular judge, and also the third ever female judge after Michal Ansky of Israel and Christina Tosi.[17] In the meantime, she also returned along with Luca Manfé and Courtney Lapresi as guests of US MasterChef (season 6). Later in the year, she also made an appearance in MasterChef Celebrity Showdown in the battle of "Champions vs Juniors", where she, alongside Season 4 winner Luca Manfe and Season 6 winner Claudia Sandoval, cooked against 3 contestants from MasterChef Junior season 4 in a Salmon Wellington tag team battle. The three champions emerged as the winner and donate their winnings to their chosen charity.

She also revealed that she was the first chef/author to become the winner of Helen Keller Personal Achievement Award in 2014, an award to people and organizations that "demonstrated outstanding achievement in improving quality of life for people with vision loss".[18] Past/current winners included musicians Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles and Tom Sullivan, actor Charlie Cox (who portrayed a blind superhero, Matt Murdock/Daredevil, was awarded in June 2015[18]) and businessman Bernard A. Newcomb.[19]

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ Had to use the Chu-Nom editor (on ChuNom.org) to come up with Christine's Chu-Nom charactered name.

References

  1. ↑ Ngô Minh Trí (2012-10-07). "Vua bếp Mỹ quảng bá hương vị Việt". Thanh Nien News. Retrieved 2012-10-09.
  2. ↑ "THE BIRTH OF CHRISTINE HA". California Birth Index. Retrieved 20 January 2016.
  3. ↑ Aaron Parsley; Liza Hamm (2012-06-04). "Christine Ha Is MasterChef's First Blind Contestant". People. Retrieved 2012-09-11.
  4. 1 2 RYAN OWENS and MEREDITH FROST (2012-09-11). "Blind Chef Christine Ha Crowned 'MasterChef' in Finale". ABC News. Retrieved 2012-09-15.
  5. ↑ Rene Lynch, 'MasterChef' finalist Christine Hà on being blind, and a fighter, LA Times, September 5, 2012
  6. ↑ Masterchef US Season 3 Episode 19
  7. ↑ Christine's Twitter.
  8. 1 2 Olivia Fleming (2012-06-07). "The talented cook who is holding her own on Gordon Ramsay's Masterchef - despite being completely blind". Daily Mail. Retrieved 2012-09-15.
  9. ↑ Blind chef serves up tough competition, FoxNews, September 09, 2012
  10. ↑ [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= OO9w oK6dQ&index=5 Episode 4: How the Blind Email, Tweet, and Blog (or "Yes, That's Really Me on Facebook!")]
  11. 1 2 3 Christine Ha at Zoominfo
  12. 1 2 "The Art of Food and Literature". Gulf Coast - A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. 2012-02-02. Retrieved 2012-09-15.
  13. ↑ "Four Senses set to premiere on AMI-tv" (Press release). AMI-TV. January 21, 2014. Retrieved 2014-06-19.
  14. ↑ Joe Bastianich Blogs: Why Christine Ha Won MasterChef, People, 09/11/2012
  15. ↑ http://www.theblindcook.com/2014/01/16/four-senses-my-new-cooking-show-premieres-christine-ha/
  16. ↑ "Four Senses". www.ami.ca. Retrieved 2015-08-27.
  17. ↑ Newspaper, Tuoi Tre. "American chef Christine Ha to judge MasterChef Vietnam". tuoitrenews.vn. Retrieved 2015-08-28.
  18. 1 2 "Helen Keller Achievement Awards 2015 - American Foundation for the Blind". www.afb.org. Retrieved 2015-09-06.
  19. ↑ "The American Foundation for the Blind Helen Keller Achievement Award Recipients - American Foundation for the Blind". www.afb.org. Retrieved 2015-09-06.

External links

Preceded by
Jennifer Behm		 MasterChef winner
2012 		Succeeded by
Luca Manfé
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