At Beard Papa’s in Monterey Park, Bonnie Jiang serves tea and treats with hands that once helped develop U.S. fighter jet materials and managed Xbox product projects.
From aerospace and tech to cooking and tea, each move has brought her closer to a life she loves.
Engineering taught her precision; cooking refined her palate. At her tea table, both become hospitality, connecting generations and cultures.
Scholarly Roots, Immigrant Dreams
Bonnie grew up outside Guangzhou. Her parents met and fell in love after her mother moved from the city to the countryside.
Both taught; her father became a principal while young, then joined the local education bureau.
As a child, she wondered why people older than her father still respectfully called him “Principal.”
Only later did she understand: hardship had delayed their schooling until adulthood. That title held years of hard-won opportunity.
Young Bonnie (far left) with her parents and relatives.
Home meant well water, firewood and unreliable electricity. Despite her father’s promising career, her parents chose America. “They wanted better educational opportunities for us.”
Bonnie knew America only through the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics opening ceremony on a friend’s color TV.
When told they were moving, she protested: “I don’t want to go!”
In 1986, they settled in the very city she had watched onscreen. A sixth grader, Bonnie began learning English from scratch.
Her parents took garment factory jobs, supporting the family on meager piecework pay. They stayed with relatives before renting their own home.
Within six months, a car accident left her mother facing the possibility of never walking again. The driver evaded responsibility and moved out of state.
Her mother fought her way back onto her feet—and back to work. Her father spent more than 20 years pressing garments before retiring.
“I was too young to understand,” Bonnie says. “Only later did I realize how hard they worked.”
Starry Dreams, Solo Miles
Bonnie learned early to find her own way.In high school, she worked at McDonald's and also made the basketball, developing independence and gaining confidence between classes, shifts and games.
At UC Irvine, she became one of just two women in her mechanical engineering class. Strong grades earned her a Northrop Grumman job offer before graduation.
Before starting work, she set off with two friends on a five-week, 9,726-mile road trip across America, into Canada and back to California.
Before New York, both friends flew home for work. Bonnie drove the rest alone.
Those miles taught her she could go far on her own—a courage she carried into every career change.
Bonnie still keeps gas receipts and mileage logs from her U.S. road trip.
Pushing Limits, Finding Passion
At Northrop Grumman, shrinking orders redirected Bonnie from B-2 production to early Joint Strike Fighter research, which later led to the F-35.
Alongside senior engineers, she analyzed composite replacements for metal wing-box structures for testing.
“We weren’t working on the here and now,” she says. “Our job was to push limits.”
Later, she also worked on the more matured F-18 program. The production line stood just outside her office. She climbed through unfinished aircraft inlet ducts daily, watching drawings become fighter jets.
The girl who had looked skyward in the desert was helping build her dream.
Still, another thought surfaced: “I could do well here, but I’d never be the best. I wanted to find my true gift.”
Her supervisor encouraged her to explore while young.
She joined Foxlink company as a product project manager for Xbox controllers.
Her engineering skills and bilingual fluency connected clients and factories across Taiwan, China and Mexico. She also helped open a Seattle office.
Over three years, she gained expertise but found herself at odds with the workplace culture.
Visiting New York after 9/11 sharpened a realization: tomorrow was uncertain. What mattered could not wait forever.
Culinary School, Humble Beginnings
With her parents working long hours in America, Bonnie took over family meals in middle school. That daily responsibility grew into something she wanted to master.
She invested $50,000 in a year at Le Cordon Bleu in Los Angeles, studying Western cuisine. “Its value depends on how much you’re willing to learn.” She finished first in every course.
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At Lucques, a renowned California cuisine restaurant, she started at the cold station for $8 an hour.
The former aerospace engineer was a beginner again. Watching coworkers juggle two jobs, she learned how much unseen labor went into each plate.
Shanghai Lessons, Kitchen Trials
A scholarship took Bonnie to Shanghai in 2005 for an internship at the Whampoa Club atop Three on the Bund. Fine ingredients, disciplined service and thoughtful hospitality deepened her understanding of food.
In 2011, a friend introduced her to Bryant, founder of The Spice Table, a Southeast Asian restaurant opening in LA’s Little Tokyo.“I have only eight months of professional kitchen experience,” she admitted.
“No problem,” he replied. Named a 2012 Food & Wine Best New Chef the following year, he gave her room to prove herself.
For three years, Bonnie helped run the kitchen—from opening preparations and standardized recipes to staffing and service. She traveled with the team to food festivals in Aspen and Hawaii, serving thousands.
Just as the restaurant flourished, subway construction forced its closure.
She next helped launch the kitchen at Newport Seafood in Beverly Hills. Across Western, Southeast Asian and Chinese cooking, she learned how much skill a seemingly simple dish could hold.
Engineering shaped her kitchen management. For large banquets, she insisted on portioning lobster before cooking rather than dumping it into a pot.
“It looks slower, but it won’t go wrong.” Preparation protected flavor under pressure.
Tea Encounters, Lasting Bonds
Tea entered her life through that Shanghai internship.
Afterward, she joined a tour of eastern China. A Hong Kong couple (standing in the photo below) took her under their wing, then brought her to Shenzhen to meet Ms. Lin, a tea seller from Anxi, Fujian. Bonnie’s tea education began there.
On a business trip to Taiwan around 2012, a shop owner and tea judge brewed her Alishan oolong. “That tea opened a whole new world. I still remember it.”
Later, a Beijing tea enthusiast sent her more than a dozen samples, free. She visited that winter, sitting in a heavy coat as temperatures fell well below freezing, sharing pot after pot.
Through him, she visited tea farms and factories in Fuding, Tongmuguan and the Wuyi Mountains.
Picking nearly weightless buds herself, she understood how many reaches and bends filled a single cup. Tea now had faces—and labor—behind it.
Years later, visiting Ms. Lin in Shenzhen, she discovered the Hong Kong couple, now living in Australia, had arranged to visit that same day.
Nearly two decades after their first meeting, she found their old photo on her phone and looked at the familiar faces before her. “It felt meant to be.”
Blending Flavors, Sharing Tea
Nine years ago, a friend took over a Monterey Park cream puff shop, giving Bonnie space to make desserts and share tea. Her wish came into focus: bring the flavors she loved into more lives.
She pairs warm chocolate chip cookies with homemade ice cream and adds black tea to ginger broth for sesame- and peanut-filled tangyuan.
She welcomes invention but believes a dish’s original spirit must be understood before deciding what to change—or preserve.
That also describes her Chinese American identity. “Both are part of me. I don’t have to give up either.” Chinese heritage and American life nourish her equally.
“Tradition can live on in new forms.”
In recent years, she and friends have brought tea to New Year celebrations at Amazon MGM Studios, Paramount in Los Angeles and other companies.
Indoors and out, she explains tea while serving hot and cold brews with homemade treats—anywhere from 100 to over 1,000 portions.
Some include red envelopes holding Phoenix Dancong tea in the Mi Lan Xiang, or Honey Orchid, style.
“Red envelopes—with tea, not money.”
The gift carries a cultural greeting and an invitation. Back at a desk, a cup of tea and a bite of something sweet might spark curiosity about the culture behind them.
She has also designed tea gatherings for nonprofit fundraisers and at a retired NBA player’s home, connecting cultures through hospitality.
She studies teaware, craftsmanship and tea’s history with the precision she once brought to engineering and kitchens. But care need not mean ceremony.
Restaurant dishes required consistency; tea should fit the drinker. She asks how customers brew and whether they prefer hot or cold before recommending a tea.
Everyday understanding makes room for everyday tea.
Shared Tea, Bridged Generations
More than brewing technique, Bonnie values how tea brings people together: relaxed, ready to speak and willing to listen.
Soon after arriving in America, her family visited Disneyland. A roller coaster left several elders pale with fear. One compared the terror to fleeing Japanese troops during the war.
Years later, a friend brought her mother and grandmother, then in her 80s, to Bonnie’s shop.
Hearing that memory, the grandmother recalled hiding beneath a stove during wartime. Her family was stunned. They had never heard these stories.
What elders leave unspoken, their children may never know. Tea made time for memories that had waited years for a listener.
Bonnie began hosting tea gatherings in 2019. The pandemic interrupted them, but not her hopes.
When a boy who had founded a high school tea club celebrated his birthday with family at her shop, she saw tradition taking root in youthful curiosity.
Having come to America young, she says her Chinese is limited. Yet the older she grows and the more she learns, the more deeply she appreciates her heritage.
From cooking family meals to serving tea, her purpose remains making people feel cared for.
“The world keeps changing, but our longing for warmth, understanding and connection hasn’t changed in a thousand years.”
Her parents left home to widen her world. Now, pouring tea far from her birthplace, she is finding her way back to her roots.
She dreams of opening a Los Angeles tea house. Until then, she carries her tea and teaware wherever people gather.
Some find memories of home; others discover a heritage they want to explore.
She keeps pouring—so memories find listeners, and a culture carried across an ocean stays warm in the next pair of hands.