Peter Fang, the restaurant’s legendary patriarch, and his wife did not build House of Nanking so their daughter could inherit it, Kathy Fang told Fortune in a recent interview. To them, cooking was a necessity born of survival, not a career choice for the educated. “For my parents being very traditional, they also didn’t want me to do it,” she explained. “In fact, we have a saying that, you know, if you don’t cut it in school, you can always go be a cook because it’s considered manual labor. You don’t need to have a proper education to go work in a kitchen.”

Her parents don’t know about “foodie” culture, she explained, and don’t even know how famous they’ve become. Speaking to Fortune as she releases the first-ever cookbook dedicated to her family’s restaurant, she said even that was a struggle.

“It took me decades,” she said about convincing her father to go along with it. “He thought that if he shared his recipes, people would just make it at home and not come to the restaurant anymore.” He didn’t understand his restaurant is a San Francisco institution, frequented by the likes of Francis Ford Coppola and Keanu Reeves, celebrities that her father wouldn’t—and didn’t—recognize anyway.

Fang, who recently turned 40, shared Reeves was her favorite actor since high school, and the first time he visited her family’s restaurant, she begged her father not to make him wait in the queue stretching around the block, as it does every night. His response was that “everybody waits in line,” until she promised to get straight A’s, and he relented. What happened next summed everything up.

“[My dad] walks up to him and says something to him. Then looks at me and goes, ‘Kathy, come over, take a picture with him. It’s Sean Connery.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, my God. My dad doesn’t know anybody, but he’s heard of Sean Connery.” Reeves, who is famously polite and good-hearted, told the Fangs that he was “really flattered.”

“We took a picture that day and that picture sits on the wall at the restaurant,” Fang said, happily. “But the story is that nobody there knows any of the famous people who go in.” As a born and raised Californian, she would know all the celebrities, she added, but she’s always busy, running her own restaurant, Fang, in the SoMa business district, which is about a 20-minute walk away. Fang and Reeves recreated the photo 29 years later, as shown by the House of Nanking’s Instagram.

Kathy Fang is a busy businesswoman. Besides running her Fang restaurant and releasing a cookbook, she is a Food Network star as a two-time Chopped champion and a cast member of “Chef Dynasty: House of Fang.” San Francisco Magazine even crowned her as a “culinary queen,” and she’s the mother of two children with her husband who, she notes, doesn’t even like Chinese food. She talked to Fortune about how she disappointed her parents by failing to become a doctor or lawyer—and finally found out how proud they were of her through her reality TV side hustle.

A calling to a crowded kitchen

Like many immigrants to the U.S. (the Fangs moved to San Francisco from the Shanghai area), the Fangs pushed Kathy toward a stable, prestigious future.

“They wanted me to be a doctor or a lawyer [or] go into the corporate world,” she said. She dutifully followed this path to the University of Southern California as a pre-med student, only to discover that, while she had no fear of cooking oil in a giant wok, she had no stomach for medicine.

“I realized I was terrified of needles, like irked by hospitals,” she said. “That would be a problem. Yeah, I still to this day cannot see a needle go into an arm.”

She subsequently landed in the corporate world, working at Fortune 100 company Johnson & Johnson and Wall Street stalwart Merrill Lynch. But the corporate environment left her feeling uninspired. When she finally called her father to announce she was quitting her job to return to the family restaurant, he was befuddled and upset. “He’s like, ‘Why, did you get fired or something?’” Kathy recalled, and she responded: “No, I just really don’t like what I’m doing and I love food, I love cooking and I like miss that kind of environment.”

The environment she missed is one of organized chaos and high-pressure efficiency. While she declined to disclose financials, and acknowledged Fang had struggled more during the pandemic (as many restaurants did), she acknowledged her family’s restaurant is a “cash cow” that has served an estimated 5 million to 6 million people over its 38 years in business, quite a feat considering the tiny footprint.

“That’s tough when you think about how big the restaurant was when they first got started,” she said, noting it could only seat 30 to 40 people for its first decade in business. “And the kitchen can only fit about two to three people.” It’s since doubled the size of its dining room, but “the kitchen hasn’t changed at all. It’s just kind of wild.”

A business career to be proud of

Kathy’s return marked a turning point for the brand. While Peter Fang had built the restaurant’s reputation through culinary ingenuity, the family was media-shy, unlike their telegenic, media-savvy daughter. She said she was approached to try food television, and she sees it as something that allowed her to share her family’s story.

“I felt like I was kind of helping build this brand that my parents already built,” she said. “Everybody knows House of Nanking, but they’d never done anything with it. They’d never done any marketing, never done any PR around it.”

Her involvement proved to her father the business could be multigenerational, easing his fears the restaurant would die when he could no longer work.

“My dad now knows that this is something that can continue down generations,” Kathy notes, adding he even looks at his 8-year-old granddaughter as a potential future successor.

Fang said strangers and customers at the restaurant have come up to her and said, “your dad’s so proud of you,” and about three years ago, she recalled, during filming for the Chef Dynasty show, her dad said during a green-room recap interview, “I’m just very proud.” But she’s never heard it directly from him. “My dad will never tell me, and that’s a very Chinese thing, they just, they’ll never compliment you to your face.”

The restaurateur shared that one of her big jobs now is managing her parents’ workload. Now in their mid-70s, they still both work the lunch and dinner shifts every single day. The thing is, Fang noted, the 18-month hiatus during the pandemic revealed that retirement might not be an option; during the lockdown, Kathy’s mother, restaurant co-founder Lily, developed health issues from no longer being on her feet all day, and her father actually went totally silent.

“My dad lost his voice because he was using it every day that the vocal cords became weak,” Kathy said. “It’s like wild… As soon as he got back to work and started using his voice again, it came back.”

She said there’s no plan for them to slow down anytime soon. “They like the routine. Staying at home is not good for them. They also, because they work every day, have never developed any hobbies or made any friends,” she said with a laugh.

There aren’t plans to further expand, either. Kathy said she respects her father’s wish to keep the business small and Chinatown-bound, waving off talk of any kind of nationwide expansion.

“I’m not going to do it if my dad doesn’t want to,” she said. “It would kind of lose that essence and soul to it.”

Justin Harlan is the managing director of Tulsa Remote, the largest relocation incentive program in the U.S., with over 3,500 members. Publications such as the Harvard Business Review and the Brookings Institute have looked to Tulsa Remote as a prominent example of how remote work attraction programs are reversing the brain drain in smaller U.S. cities and have confirmed the economic impact of the program.

Justin previously served as the Senior Executive Director for Reading Partners Tulsa. He launched his career with Teach For America-Oklahoma when it opened in Tulsa in 2009 and quickly rose through the organization as it expanded across the state. In various roles, Justin raised over $7.5 million for Teach For America and secured funding from the State of Oklahoma. He was a founding board member for Collegiate Hall College Prep Charter School in Tulsa.

Trump has prioritized breaking China’s stranglehold on the global supply of rare earths ever since the world’s number two economy sharply restricted who could buy them after the United States imposed widespread tariffs last spring. The Trump administration has invested hundreds of millions of dollars and even taken stakes in several companies. Now the president is again pitching the idea that wresting control of Greenland away from Denmark could solve the problem.

“We are going to do something on Greenland whether they like it or not,” Trump said Friday.

But Greenland may not be able to produce rare earths for years — if ever. Some companies are trying anyway, but their efforts to unearth some of the 1.5 million tons of rare earths encased in rock in Greenland generally haven’t advanced beyond the exploratory stage. Trump’s fascination with the island nation may be more about countering Russian and Chinese influence in the Arctic than securing any of the hard-to-pronounce elements like neodymium and terbium that are used to produce the high-powered magnets needed in electric vehicles, wind turbines, robots and fighter jets among other products.

“The fixation on Greenland has always been more about geopolitical posturing — a military-strategic interest and stock-promotion narrative — than a realistic supply solution for the tech sector,” said Tracy Hughes, founder and executive director of the Critical Minerals Institute. “The hype far outstrips the hard science and economics behind these critical minerals.”

Trump confirmed those geopolitical concerns at the White House Friday.

“We don’t want Russia or China going to Greenland, which if we don’t take Greenland, you can have Russia or China as your next door neighbor. That’s not going to happen,” Trump said

A difficult place to build a mine

The main challenge to mine in Greenland is, “of course, the remoteness. Even in the south where it’s populated, there are few roads and no railways, so any mining venture would have to create these accessibilities,” said Diogo Rosa, an economic geology researcher at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland. Power would also have to be generated locally, and expert manpower would have to be brought in.

Another concern is the prospect of mining rare earths in the fragile Arctic environment just as Greenland tries to build a thriving tourism industry, said Patrick Schröder, a senior fellow in the Environment and Society program at the Chatham House think-tank in London.

“Toxic chemicals needed to separate the minerals out from the rock, so that can be highly polluting and further downstream as well, the processing,” Shröder said. Plus, rare earths are often found alongside radioactive uranium.

Besides the unforgiving climate that encases much of Greenland under layers of ice and freezes the northern fjords for much of the year, the rare earths found there tend to be encased in a complex type of rock called eudialyte, and no one has ever developed a profitable process to extract rare earths from that type of rock. Elsewhere, these elements are normally found in different rock formation called carbonatites, and there are proven methods to work with that.

“If we’re in a race for resources — for critical minerals — then we should be focusing on the resources that are most easily able to get to market,” said David Abraham, a rare earths expert who has followed the industry for decades and wrote the book “The Elements of Power.”

This week, Critical Metals’ stock price more than doubled after it said it plans to build a pilot plant in Greenland this year. But that company and more than a dozen others exploring deposits on the island remain far away from actually building a mine and would still need to raise at least hundreds of millions of dollars.

Producing rare earths is a tough business

Even the most promising projects can struggle to turn a profit, particularly when China resorts to dumping extra materials onto the market to depress prices and drive competitors out of business as it has done many times in the past. And currently most critical minerals have to be processed in China.

The U.S. is scrambling to expand the supply of rare earths outside of China during the one-year reprieve from even tougher restrictions that Trump said Xi Jinping agreed to in October. A number of companies around the world are already producing rare earths or magnets and can deliver more quickly than anything in Greenland, which Trump has threatened to seize with military power if Denmark doesn’t agree to sell it.

“Everybody’s just been running to get to this endpoint. And if you go to Greenland, it’s like you’re going back to the beginning,” said Ian Lange, an economics professor who focuses on rare earths at the Colorado School of Mines.

Focusing on more promising projects elsewhere

Many in the industry, too, think America should focus on helping proven companies instead of trying to build new rare earth mines in Greenland, Ukraine, Africa or elsewhere. A number of other mining projects in the U.S. and friendly nations like Australia are farther along and in much more accessible locations.

The U.S. government has invested directly in the company that runs the only rare earths mine in the U.S., MP Materials, and a lithium miner and a company that recycles batteries and other products with rare earths.

Scott Dunn, CEO of Noveon Magnetics, said those investments should do more to reduce China’s leverage, but it’s hard to change the math quickly when more than 90% of the world’s rare earths come from China.

“There are very few folks that can rely on a track record for delivering anything in each of these instances, and that obviously should be where we start, and especially in my view if you’re the U.S. government,” said Dunn, whose company is already producing more than 2,000 metric tons of magnets each year at a plant in Texas from elements it gets outside of China.

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Funk reported from Omaha, Nebraska, and Naishadham reported from Madrid.