Just out., January 05, 2007, Page 22, Image 22

22 j lU Stout
JANUARY 5. INI
A Man of Many Col ors
As Chameleon Restaurant and Bar prepares to celebrate
its 10th h irthday, meet the wizard hehin d the curtain
by Tony le Tigre
Pat Jeung shops at a farmer's market in September 2006 in Budapest, Hungary.
Jeung with friends in Prague, Czech Republic.
at Jeung, who came to the United States in 1980 as a Laotian refugee, and
■ whose days in high school were followed hy nights working at McDonald’s, is
now the chef of his own restaurant: the low-key, somewhat-well-kept secret
Chameleon in the Hollywood district. With that flair for both irony and
metaphor that life often shows, there’s a McDonald’s across the street. In fact,
the building that Chameleon now occupies was itself once a fast food fish ’n’ chips restaurant,
though you wouldn’t guess it now.
.
The chef has come a long way, been many places, experienced many cultures.
“Jeung means ocean in Chinese,” he says. “Both my parents were from China. 1 lived back
and forth between Laos and Thailand in my early childhood, but 1 was brought up in the
Chinese communities there. My parents owned a cargo ship and a small department store;
most businesses in Laos and Thailand were owned by Chinese people.”
When Laos became a communist state and closed its borders, Jeung came to the United
States in 1980 as a refugee, at the age of 16. “I came to live in Portland with two of my sisters
and a brother,” he remembers. “1 come from a really big family—1 was number nine of eleven.”
In the midst of such a large family, he sometimes got lost in the shuffle. “If there was a
forgotten child, it was me,” he says now. But with the insuperable optimism that has kept him
afloat through the harder phases of his adventurous life, he spins the straw of his childhood
into gold. Whenever he says something that could be construed as negative, in speaking of
his past, he takes pains to represent it as a learning experience, turning it from bad to good.
“Looking back, I see it as a good thing,” he says of being largely left to his own devices as
a youth. “It teaches you to be self-reliant.”
Still, he admits it wasn’t a cakewalk being an immigrant high school student in the
United States of the early ’80s. “It wasn’t always easy. You get treated like a foreigner, teased
in school. But 1 felt like I fit in in America more than anywhere. It was really tough at first,
though. 1 didn’t speak English. 1 could have stayed within the immigrant community, but
if you only speak with people who speak your language, you’re never going to learn."
I
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