You don’t realize how much work goes into choosing a name, until your husband tells you that once you decide there is “NO GOING BACK.” I have a hard enough time making everyday decisions, let alone choosing a name that will pretty much be set in stone. From the start we knew that we wanted the name to be set around my mom, she was our reason for opening the restaurant, she would be the one making everything and we would be using all of her passed down recipes. Our brainstorming started with her place of birth, we tried her favorite city in Vietnam, changed it to her favorite dish to make. We thought about using her first name, tried her last name, my grandmas name anything and everything we could think of. We were stuck. We knew we wanted a name that was easy to pronounce, easy to remember and that if you drove by, you would immediately know that it was a place that served Asian cuisine and of course a name that we would one day be able to expand and grow into something more. We knew that we wanted to have “Chopsticks,” in the name because when you hear it you just immediately associate “chopsticks” with Asian food. We also wanted to acknowledge my mom’s life. She had a hard one, and we knew that the struggles, hardships and sacrifices should never be forgotten. My Mom felt as though her time in the Malaysian refugee camps was what most impacted and changed her life. So we chose bamboo to represent those days. Bamboo is a very flexible, versatile, strong and resilient plant. It can grow in the most unfit environments, you can bend it and twist it, you can neglect it and leave it to die and it will still forge on and grow. But what makes bamboo so special is that, with just a little bit of hope, a little bit of care and of course work, it can grow and become something so spectacularly breathtaking. My mom’s name is Bach, and the first two letters or BAmboo and CHopsticks actually spells her name. The name immediately stuck and in the end we felt like, not only did it represent her past; it also represented our future, a family with A LOT of hope and perseverance, trying to make something of what we have and possibly grow and become something amazing.