photo by: Richard Gwin

Lucy White is owner of Panda Garden at 1500 W. Sixth St., which closed at the end of April after three decades in business.

When you think of Lawrence’s longtime successful Chinese restaurant Panda Garden, you don’t often think of it being built upon potatoes and goulash.

But as the restaurant at 1500 W. Sixth St. closed its doors for the final time on Saturday — the owners are retiring after 30 years in business — I heard a couple of stories that made me think that without potatoes and goulash, Lawrence never would have had Panda Garden.

First, the potatoes.

It is helpful if you understand that in Taiwanese culture, potatoes are considered the food of poor folks. That’s why Lucy White frequently would receive a bag of rice in the mail from her Taiwanese mother. She couldn’t stand the thought of her daughter eating potatoes in America.

“My family was kind of disappointed that I married an American, to be honest,” Lucy, the longtime owner of Panda Garden, told me recently.

Potatoes and American husbands aren’t high on the list of Taiwanese mothers, it seems.

“Only the poor would marry a foreigner,” Lucy says.

Her family was not poor. Her father was a mechanical engineer, and her mother oversaw a large staff that worked the family’s farm.

“Any good class person would not marry outside their world,” Lucy says. “My mother was worried that I married an American. She would send me a bag of rice because only poor people would eat potatoes. Finally, in 1975, I told her to quit sending me rice. I told her I had plenty of rice. That seemed to comfort her a great deal.”

But you can’t blame a mother for worrying. After all, Lucy’s life in 1975 already was much different from what she envisioned when she arrived in America three years earlier.

• • •

In 1972, Lucy figured she would teach Mandarin Chinese to a few American airmen at McConnell Air Force Base in Wichita, get her master’s degree in literature from an American university while doing so, then go back to Taiwan for a lucrative career as a university professor.

Her fortune cookie said nothing about three decades of owning and operating a Chinese restaurant in Kansas.

No, Lucy decided to come to America while she was working on a U.S. Air Force base in Taiwan. A colleague mentioned the opportunity, and 27-year-old Lucy thought the chance to get an American degree was too good to pass up.

But as nervous fathers the world over can attest, sometimes daughters find more than a degree when they go off to college. Lucy fell in love while at Friends University near Wichita. She met Keith White, a friend of a friend, and even though he was in Lawrence and she was in Wichita, the spark still took hold.

Yes, the dream of going back to Taiwan to be a professor was still there, until one day it wasn’t.

“I changed my dream,” Lucy says.

• • •

I know what you are thinking: Dreams are fine, but I promised you goulash.

To get to the goulash, we have to go to 1977. Lucy had received her master’s degree in library science from Emporia State two years earlier. But she quickly was finding out that a master’s degree was no guarantee of a job in America.

“The economy was very bad,” she recalls.

But Lucy also faced an additional hurdle: Getting a professional level job as an immigrant in those days was not easy.

“In the early years, people were not as open as they are now,” Lucy says. “They didn’t know me or my ability. I had to demonstrate my ability a lot. But I had a determination to do that. Coming from a different country, you have to build that discipline and determination.”

That meant moving to Chicago to take a job as a researcher for an architecture firm. But Keith, who by then was her husband, did not make the move. He stayed in Lawrence.

“I would have to come back and cook for him because he doesn’t know how to cook,” Lucy says. “I would cook two weeks worth of goulash at a time for him.”

If Keith ever would have learned how to love warmed-over goulash, there may never have been a Panda Garden in Lawrence.

But Keith never did, and Lucy decided to return to Lawrence.

• • •

If we are going to get specific, I suppose we should say that dirty diapers and a crying baby had something to do with the founding of Panda Garden.

In 1981, Lucy and Keith had their first child, Helen. Lucy says she came to a quick realization.

“I didn’t know how to take care of her,” Lucy says. “I never had a baby before, and my husband was an only child.”

Her mother arrived from Taiwan within a month.

“Back then it was much easier to bring her to America,” Lucy says.

Her brother Joe Peng also ended up coming to America with his mother. But there was a complication there: Joe could not find a job. He was about to return, and his mother would go with him.

“Then I wouldn’t have anybody to help take care of the baby,” Lucy says.

So, Joe learned how to cook. He got a job in a friend’s restaurant in Kansas City, and soon thereafter the family bought a small, eight-table restaurant in Raytown, Mo. Joe would wash dishes and cook, an American waitress would take care of the tables, and on weekends sister Lucy would come work as well.

During the weekdays, Lucy was earning a living as a librarian in the Piper school district in Wyandotte County, and trying to become accustomed to the different school environment that existed in America compared with Taiwan.

“On my first day in class, I saw a kid passing a note to another kid,” Lucy recalls. “I threw a piece of chalk at the kid. I was very good at that. Then I got a call from the principal. He told me next time to throw chalk at another kid because that one is one of our school board member’s kids.

“I had never thought of that. In Taiwan I never had that type of problem.”

In the restaurant business, Lucy had another type of problem. An eight-table restaurant wasn’t cutting it anymore. Lucy kept bringing family members over one by one from Taiwan, including her mother, her father, two brothers, a sister and their spouses. Then came the kids.

“My home ended up looking like a day care center,” she says. Her mother cared for all the children, which often numbered six or more.

In 1986, something fortuitous happened: A fried chicken restaurant went out of business. It was located at 1500 W. Sixth St. She approached the owner of the building, longtime Lawrence resident Mike Garber.

“He was truly a gentleman,” Lucy says. “He heard my story and said, ‘I’ve been offered a higher price, but I’m going to sell the building to you because you want to help your family.'”

Panda Garden was born, and success soon followed.

“I never thought about it being successful, and then people started lining up over the weekend,” Lucy says. If her memory is correct, it was one of only three Chinese restaurants in the city, The Royal Peking and one that was inside a hotel being the others.

Somehow, the restaurant even got kissed by celebrity soon after it opened. Movie star Matt Dillon was in Lawrence for filming of the movie “Kansas,” and Panda Garden became a favorite.

“Matt Dillon was something else,” Lucy says. “He would always sit in the back of the restaurant with a hole in his jeans, and people would come by to see him. I would ask: ‘Who is that?'”

Other successes would come too: good reviews, travel groups stopping for the food, repeat customers. But the success was never enough for Lucy to quit her teaching job in Piper. From 1986 until she retired in 2006, she worked at both the school and the restaurant.

Lucy said she kept the Piper job because she never forgot how hard she had to work for that job, or how the relatively (then) rural Piper district took a chance on an immigrant teacher.

“I was thrilled people accepted me so well,” she says. “I promised myself I would never leave my position there.”

Surely, there were diners who assumed Lucy would never leave her position at Panda Garden either. But the restaurant’s last day was Saturday. The property has sold to an out-of-town group that plans to open some other restaurant there, perhaps a Japanese one, I’ve heard.

For the first time in decades, Lucy has plans that don’t involve a restaurant, although she said she may write a cookbook in her retirement.

“My goal is to take good care of my parents,” she says, noting her father is almost 95 and her mother is 90. “Life is so fragile. Life is not going to last forever. Be kind to others and help others as much as you can is what I believe.”

In the final days of the restaurant, there was a steady stream of goodbyes from customers. Cards would come in the mail, and emotions would come out of nowhere.

“I’ve cried a lot,” Lucy says.

The restaurant had changed her life. It was evidence of what could happen if you decide to change your dream. And she had changed it for more than just herself. Lucy praises Taiwan as a wonderful place, but says she thinks many of her family chose to follow her to America because they thought their children would have a greater chance of advancement here.

“Over there it is very rigid,” she says.

Freedom still may be America’s greatest industry.

It has worked out well for Lucy’s family, she says.

“I’m very comforted to tell this community because of this restaurant every one of my family’s kids have had the opportunity to learn how to work hard, and they had a good education,” Lucy says. “None of them have become a burden on society. They have turned out to be good people.”

The meals are now done at Panda Garden, but Lucy’s family surely will have more together. The menu ought to be easy.

Much rice. Much riches.