Danielle Chang speaks before the screening. Niu Yue / For China Daily

Chang said because she lives in Chinatown she can feel the small transformations every day. It "feels exactly like New York City should, with its mash-up of cultures and identities at an incredibly innovative Chinese food scene, whose impact can be felt around the world," she said.

Chang moved with her family from Taiwan to Houston, Texas, when she was 5 years old.

She said her work has always revolved around pop culture, storytelling and entrepreneurship.

She began her career at The New York Times and later founded the lifestyle magazine Simplycity. After earning a master's degree in critical theory from Columbia University, she was a professor of contemporary art history at Rochester Institute of Technology, as well as a curator of emerging art.

Now living with her family in New York City, Chang's focus is on the culinary arts, what she calls an appetizing and universal lens through which to share stories about the current obsession with Asian culture.

Chang launched the LUCKYRICE food festival in 2010. Now entering its seventh year, the festival celebrates people's love of Asian food through large-scale feasts and festive dinners.

"We've since taken the festival on the road, bringing festivities like night markets, ramen slurpfests and cocktail feasts from coast to coast, whether you're in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Miami, or Toronto," as the LUCKYRICE website says.

This year, Chang published her book Lucky Rice (Clarkson Potter, 2016), offering 100 recipes of innovative Asian cuisine inspired by a range of cultures.

"Spicy tacos stuffed with bulgogi and fermented kimchi, gingery Japanese-style fried chicken, bright and frothy bubble teas," she writes in the introduction. "These are the delicious new classics that have breached the culinary borders between Asia and the rest of the world. More and more, we're sitting down together to enjoy bowls of rice rather than to break bread. As our hunger for and curiosity about Asian food intensify, our repertoire is no longer limited to fortune cookies, take-out Chinese and California rolls."

"We're not just becoming more adventurous eaters: we're also more knowledgeable about Asian culture," Chang added.