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Annapolis, Maryland — only to discover that life in the military was just as rigid and demanding as life in a family-run restaurant. Ma graduated from Annapolis in 2018 and served for six years as a Marine officer. Yet even as his career took him from Texas to Japan to Southern California, food and the restaurant business remained a constant in his life — an industry that would soon face unprecedented challenges during the pandemic. Ma's father was born in 1966 in a rural Cambodian village with no running water or electricity. He lived in a wooden house on stilts over the Mekong River, one of ten children. When the Khmer Rouge rose to power in the 1970s, political conditions turned deadly, and Ma's grandfather moved the family to Vietnam. But Vietnam in the 1970s could be just as deadly as Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. At 11, Ma's father was orphaned, and he and his siblings struggled to survive. Several did not. In 1984, he and four siblings fled through the jungle to a refugee camp on the ailand-Cambodia border. From there they were COURTESY PHOTOGRAPHY From the Mekong to the Wok F rom age 8 to 18, San Diego resident Tong Ma, now a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and a Marine veteran, worked in his family's Chinese restaurant, Twin Lion, in Austin, Texas. It was not by choice. "You ever walk into a restaurant and have your order taken by a kid who could barely see over the counter? at was me," Ma laughs. "I'd take your order, run to the back, cook your orange chicken, then run it back to your table. And to really lean into the Asian stereotype, you'd probably spot me doing homework in the corner between tickets." Twin Lion, a strip-mall kitchen in North Austin, put roofs over the heads of five families, but restaurants are labor-intensive operations, and as Ma puts it, he "rebelled." He was not going to work in the restaurant business. Still, Ma came from an immigrant family and wanted to serve the country where his family had found its greatest success. He applied and was accepted into the U.S. Naval Academy in Focus military How food became one Marine's way home BY BILL ABRAMS Tong Ma ranchandcoast.com 38 MAY 2026 RANCH & COAST MAGAZINE