Andrew Cherng

**Jessica Harris** (0:03)
I'm Jessica Harris. This is From Scratch. My guest is Andrew Cherng, co-founder of Panda Express, an American-Chinese food chain located across 50 states. Panda Express has roughly 2,000 restaurants and airports, malls, universities, military bases, amusement parks, among other locations. Andrew started Panda Express with his wife Peggy in 1983
Its first restaurant was located in a mall in Glendale, California.
Andrew and Peggy are originally from Mainland China. Welcome.

**Andrew Cherng** (0:39)
Well, thank you very much.

**Jessica Harris** (0:41)
I'd like to start with your childhood, because I think it demonstrates just how far you've come, from a child in Mainland China to now the owner of one of the largest restaurant chains in the United States with more than $3 billion in sales.
There was a civil war in China when your parents finally decided to leave. This was after about a decade of the Japanese occupation. Is that correct?

**Andrew Cherng** (1:05)
There was a civil war between the communists and the nationalists. Around 1949, a year after I was born, the communists took over Mainland China.
My father left to go to Taiwan. However, my mother and I lived in the countryside.

**Jessica Harris** (1:27)
And your mom decided to take you out of the country, but she left separately because she was afraid that your crying might expose her.

**Andrew Cherng** (1:37)
So my mother could snuck out at night, and they could be quiet, they could be controlled, right? As a child, I had to be snuck out, smuggled out.
That was pretty traumatic for my mother.

**Jessica Harris** (1:57)
How old were you?

**Andrew Cherng** (1:58)
I was almost six years old.

**Jessica Harris** (2:01)
You were an obedient child. Your mother asked you to clean a fan in the house.
For example, can you tell me about that as a demonstration of your obedience?

**Andrew Cherng** (2:14)
I'm not sure.
Obedience is the term that I will use. When I take on a task of cleaning, for example, cleaning the fan, I would take it apart and I would like wipe each wires and make it so it looks like brand new. And that's how, as an example, the thoroughness in which I like to take care of my things.

**Jessica Harris** (2:44)
Your father was a chef, so you certainly had a connection to the culinary life through him.
But you decided to go to the United States in the 1960s to college, to Baker University in Kansas, where you majored in applied math. What did you think you might want to do as a math major?

**Andrew Cherng** (3:06)
You know, I have very little choice. Coming from Japan, I spoke little or no English.
The choices that I have was subjects that didn't require much reading.

**Jessica Harris** (3:18)
What were your first impressions of the United States?

**Andrew Cherng** (3:22)
I just felt what a wonderful opportunity to be here. Of course, never have left the family. I felt very lonely. I missed comfort having home cooking.
In those days, you didn't get to make phone calls. You go to the post office and to retrieve your letters in the mailbox. That's a highlight. Anytime you get a letter from home, you read it over and over again.
I still go back to that. I think that was a very precious time.

**Jessica Harris** (3:59)
You talk about missing home cooking, and at the time, Americans did not have the exposure to Chinese food. So, were there other Chinese people with whom you ate the food of your culture?

**Andrew Cherng** (4:13)
We will always find things that resemble that, you know. We'll cook rice in the dormitory, and then put some soy sauce on it, you know. Something very simple.
That was a highlight, actually.

**Jessica Harris** (4:29)
What did you think you wanted to do with your life professionally? Or were you too young to know?

**Andrew Cherng** (4:35)
You know, I always admire people that had business.
And a lot of my classmates, their family all had restaurants. So the thought of having a business, that was very, very top of my mind.

**Jessica Harris** (4:51)
In 1973, you opened your first business. You opened Panda Inn, your first restaurant, with your wife and with your father, who came from Japan to the United States.

**Andrew Cherng** (5:06)
We were very fortunate that we found a place with the very little money that we had that we can afford.

**Jessica Harris** (5:13)
You said to your mother after you opened it at one point, Mama, I want to open 99 more restaurants. Could you talk about just kind of the magnitude that you had in your mind, and what hopes you had for yourself?