About Meena Cheng
Hi, I’m Meena.
I came to the United States more than fifty years ago, carrying the food, values, and cultural memory of my Chinese heritage. I have been building a life here ever since — one shaped by resilience, reinvention, and the long work of making a home far from where my story began.
For more than thirty years, I have worked in the investment field, a world built on trust and discipline. And in 2014, I founded my own firm, Impact Financial.
The work taught me how to build relationships that last, sit with uncertainty, and keep growing through every season of change.
The Silence
My first book, Fortune in Your Cookies: Finding Financial Wisdom in Everyday Cooking, came out in 2002 and was named one of BookBrowse's Top Ten Nonfiction Debuts that year.
Then I stopped. Part of that silence came from the ordinary weight of a life. The other part came from underneath — I did not allow myself to believe I was a good enough writer, award or no award.
I never stopped telling stories. I told them through food.
For twenty-three years I kept doing what that first book had done — standing at the stove, reading meaning out of a pot. I simply stopped writing it down.
Cooking was how I cared. It was where my creative energy went, and how I made sense of things I could not yet put into words. Meals became a language of love — a way to feed the people in my universe while I raised my family and built a career in a country that had become home.
When the words finally came back, food was already waiting to carry them.
The Morning That Changed It
A voice arrived at 5 a.m. from 9,000 miles away and led me back to the page.
After one year immersed in those pages, Inspiration from 9,000 Miles Away was born.
What it left me with is a conviction I now organize my life around — inspiration is a gift. It arrives unannounced, and the most powerful response is a yes.
A Glimpse of Life Today
For more than thirty years I lived in Seattle. Lush, green, generous with rain — and gray. One year we went more than forty days without seeing the sun. That was when I decided to live somewhere the sun was a daily companion rather than an occasional visitor.
Now I spend part of the year in Las Vegas, where the desert sky is a vivid blue most mornings. The rest I spend in New York, doting on my grandchildren. Thanks to a very capable team at the office, I can work from anywhere.
I still cook with exuberance and host at the smallest excuse. I still travel when food calls. This year, I am planning to spend more time in Zhongshan — a city in Guangdong province, near Macau — where my parents were born. I want to learn more about their food and culture, the background of my next book.
I founded Five Most Splendid Years™ — a project for anyone standing at the beginning of a next chapter, wondering whether it is too late. It is built on what this book taught me: splendid living begins not with a plan but with a yes.
My forthcoming memoir, Inspiration from 9,000 Miles Away (releasing September 2026), brings together everything that shaped me — the girl who loved stories, the immigrant who built a life from the ground up, the entrepreneur who embraced reinvention, and the writer who found her voice again.
Beliefs That Shape My Life And Work
Drawn from the epigraphs that open each chapter of my memoir.
Dreams do not expire. They simply rest.
Food carries memory and keeps our stories alive.
True flavor, like true self, does not ask for approval. It simply is.
Authenticity is revealed, not crafted.
To begin again is not to return. It is to rise with new purpose.
Transformation does not always roar. Sometimes, it whispers.
Joy needs no grandeur, no justification.
Closing Reflection
Thank you for stopping by.
If you are standing at a crossroads you did not expect — a new chapter, a quiet turn, a pull you can feel but cannot yet explain — I hope this story is good company.
Inspiration from 9,000 Miles Away publishes September 2026.