An interview with Alice Chen Anderson

March 5, 2021

The pandemic brought major changes for Alice, who chose to (mostly) leave work as a lawyer behind and dive into the wine universe that she’d always dabbled in. At Winston-Salem’s premier wine store/wine bar/bakery The Caviste, Alice shifted from being occasional bar help to being a full-time wine seller and right hand person for her partner Russ Anderson. In this interview we discuss how the crisis was a catalyst for change in their organisation.  

Imagine the sound of me eating a prosciutto-on-butter sandwich as background audio for this interview. It’s 3pm on a beautiful sunny day in Winston-Salem. Snack time. We are camped out on the patio behind Caviste. Some not-very-tough looking bikers join us for lattes mid-conversation, adding the grumble of Harleys to our audio collage. 

What is your day like now?: It depends on the day. Last half of the day, since I shifted away from the law practice, it’s basically trying to sell as much wine as possible. No wine bar stuff right now, though it’s on the horizon. It’s the calm before the storm, and I think everyone is in the same position. 

This was a good time for us to transition. I want to bring (work/life partner) Russ out of the dark ages. His website sucks. I was just never involved in that. Give it a fresher look that reflects the move we’ve made from the old store. (Caviste opened a beautiful, spacious new location a few months before the pandemic.)  It was a quirky little cave with a lot of character and a ‘going down to the basement’ kind of feeling, but now we’re in this new building. We’re upgrading our POS, so this is a great time (for changes.) It’s a little daunting. Putting bottles online. Automating a little bit more. We know it’s important. I’m probably going to be, ironically, the tech person, just by default. It’s either him or me, and he’s not gonna do it! And I don’t mind that right now. It has been such a huge career shift for me in the last year anyway, everything is kind of exciting, stimulating, me fully getting into the store at the same time that the store is going through this transition, bringing itself online, trying to become more accessible to people. 

Before the pandemic, you were basically working an office job, right? That was a huge change: It was between not talking to anybody, staring at four walls, trying to keep people from fighting with each other (clients), to now talking to lots of people during the day. I was doing the wine bar stuff last year, so it wasn’t ‘that much’ of a shift, but the shift was not being in the office anymore, which has been great. People used to come to (the law firm) because they were having problems. People come here (The Caviste) because they are having a great time. They want to forget about their problems. 

Do you feel other motivations for what is drawing you along this path? Is it family relations, or other things, too: A lot of things. I think I go through existential angst every 8-10 years. I still feel like I’m 10 years old, like a ‘I still don’t know what I want to be’ kind of thing. I do come from a pretty conservative view of what someone should want to do with their life. My dad is an engineer, my mom is a real estate broker. They didn’t put that much pressure on me, but I put that pressure on myself. So I started off with, ‘I want to be a lawyer.” Then I changed my mind to, ‘I want to be an English major, I want to be a writer.’ So then I went back to, ‘well, that’s not practical, so I could be a pastor.’ There’s some stature to that. I was just seeing this pattern in my life, back-and-forth between traditional and creative. After the pastor stint, I went to ‘I really want to be a chef,’ I wanted to go culinary school, and so I cooked for a restaurant for a year. And then I was like, that’s not gonna happen, because suddenly all my daytime friends I’d lost track of. That was up in Vancouver. It was great, it really got me to appreciate hospitality folks, it’s really so much work. If you have 200 covers in a restaurant, how are you going to manage and control and organize all that? 

In my extended family, food has always been a part of life. It’s all we talk about. We don’t really talk about real feelings to each other, we just talk about ‘what are we gonna eat?’ So food has always been a pull. So it was just a confluence of great events that fell into my lap in the past year. John and Lucia (who own/operate Bobby Boy bakery, which shares space with Caviste) came into our lives. Their vision, their passion, it’s so contagious. We just want to be a part of that. Russ knew I wasn’t having the greatest time with the lawyer thing, so he was like ‘what do you think about this?’ And it was Covid, so I was thinking about, where am I, what’s the meaning of life? I thought, you know what, this is a good time to shift. It seems like a natural thing. 

What are you doing to stay sane these days? People’s lives have changed a lot. I feel quite grateful that I am where I’m at in terms of still seeing friends that come into the store. They are all masked up, but there’s definitely still a nice community that we interact with, maybe not on as large a scale as before, we’ll have one or two people over outside. That’s been a huge thing. I miss randomly running into someone, when you go get your coffee, the haphazard encounter. We definitely don’t go out as much. 

I haven’t picked up a new hobby or anything. I’m still trying to finish up some stuff I have leftover from the office. Half of my week is working on cases. It has been a really great experience, it has just been really stressful for a variety of reasons. I got a chance to work on a civil rights case, it was very invigorating. 

I’ve been listening to podcasts. Dolly Parton’s America. It is amazing! It is fantastic. It touches on a lot of things I’ve been struggling and working through. What does home mean? Where do you belong? I never thought I would have connected to her in this way. The immigrant experience, too, the co-interviewer’s parents are immigrants, his parents lived in the same part of eastern Tennessee. 

What has been the hardest thing about the last year, in your professional life? The pandemic became a cover for what I’d normally experience when I transition between careers. I’m always doubting myself. I have “the imposter” syndrome. And definitely here. People come in and... Russ has definitely established his brand. And he’s great at it. I’m coming in as a pure amateur, no degrees, (learned by) pure drinking, there’s a sense, people look at me and I start working it through in my head, like is it because I’m female, or maybe I’m just less experienced. 

It’s a nice thing to see the shift in how people are drinking their wines, paying attention to what goes into the bottle. What’s nice about that shift is, there’s room for a lot of females to come forward through that. They have a different voice, a different perspective. Better than the formulaic description of a wine, the points. 

Coming to Caviste from a family that talked a lot about food probably got you halfway there: Yeah, I think so. I’m really grateful for my development as a person and also as a woman in the legal field. I started off like (and for a variety of reasons, maybe because of my Asian upbringing) very quiet, very shy, very meek. I remember a couple of my first mediations and court hearings I would always kowtow to opposing counsel, because they had more experience 99% of the time, old white men. It was something I struggled with myself. I couldn’t blame them necessarily, but then at the same time I had some really great mentors who pushed hard for me to speak up. Because of that, coming here I was able to get pushy a little, hopefully not in a rude way, with customers who ‘only want to speak to Russ.” That has helped me to realize I can do this. It has been a pleasant surprise to realize I can stand up to the old white guys. 

When I think about what it means to be a female, for me more often than not I focus on what it means to be an Asian-American person. All my struggles in my head are related to who I am as an Asian American. Which is weird because when I was doing the law stuff I’d join all the female lawyer groups and I’d still always felt left out. And I'd think, ‘why is that?’ I mean, I have women’s issues. It really didn’t hit home to me until the past few years. And then the media has been highlighting a lot more the anti-Asian assaults going on, because of the pandemic. 

It’s just that, I know that talking to other Asian American female friends, we want to be liked a lot, so we’re going to tell people what they want to hear a lot. I’m an expert in that. Most of the time. And so, as well, the whole “model minority” myth, there is definitely this structure or construct that we set up that we say, ‘we need to just show that we absolutely have it all together.’ Anything that goes on, even if we experience racism, it’s not going to be as bad as what black people experience, there’s this idea that we’re going to be next in line in terms of who’s going to be successful, because we have all the degrees. For me I’ve actually ignored some of the things I actually did experience, and just say, it’s both (related to gender and ethnicity.)

Do you feel that in North Carolina it is hard to be in a wholly Asian American space? This is something I and my cousins and my brother talk about a lot. I never think of myself as an Asian American. Or, instinctively I just don’t, I’m just me. But at the same time, I work myself up in this cycle or you know, I do feel different, so maybe it’s because I am different, or it’s my culture, and I’m proud of it, so I do want to talk about, so it’s part of me, but I don’t want it to define me. It’s not good or bad. What would be bad would be not to acknowledge or recognize it. 

I always know when an Asian person comes into my peripheral vision. Like Asian radar, or something. Before (liked 20 years ago) I would just ignore them completely. Like, ‘I’m not like them.’ It was this conflict that happens. It’s just this weird… there are so many cultures and nationalities within this whole general term, I don’t mean to lump all of us together. 

This shift has been nice, from the office to talking about wine to people, and maybe this lines up with my upbringing, and who I am in terms of food. In the office I had to sell myself, because what they were purchasing were my services, me. And I hated that. In the wine industry there are so many families, so many stories you can talk about in one bottle. Sense of place, where that wine is coming from, who these people are. I’m convinced if you start knowing their personalities, you can pretty much taste their personality in the glass. And that’s what’s so cool about wine. And I think food is the same way. 

We all struggle with our own racism towards everybody else, and this definitely didn’t set out to be a piece about racism in America. But I do assume that you are a better piano player than me, which is of course a racist assumption, because I have no knowledge of that. I buy into the stereotype that Asian-American children practice the piano. Of course, there are Asian children who don’t practice. I probably am (better than you) actually. Good at math, or good at music? I’m good at music. There’s a reason why they are stereotypes, too. Maybe that word needs to be reclaimed. I don’t think stereotypes are necessarily bad. They are bad if that's how you define that person only, and it’s like a snap judgement.  And you don’t actually get to know the person. 

One of the challenging things that I’ve experienced from a customer was being asked “where is the diversity (at Caviste?) And I was like, ‘what am I, chopped liver?’ I know what they were saying, and I got it, what’s weird is there is a sense of maybe blind pride, that because I’m Asian-American I’m going to focus on diversity, like it’s going to be natural for me, where that is not necessarily the case. I’m just as guilty as the next person in terms of really trying to figure out how to be more inclusive and open.  

I don’t mean to say I’m naturally aware of diversity issues. Asians can be the most racist people. If you say that, I feel like I need to introduce you to my white family. If there’s one thing we’re good at… it’s at least going to be an arms race on the racist front. And that’s what’s so fascinating, this whole increase in anti-Asian assaults, just this year in San Francisco and Oakland, they were committed by black people. There’s a struggle, we don’t want to say too much, because we are very supportive of the Black Lives Matter movement, so we end up saying nothing, which perpetuates the ‘we shouldn’t have much to complain about.’ The intra-stuff that goes on between minority groups is so weird to be talking about. 

The culture is structured to make all non-elite white groups see each other as the enemy. And not necessarily an ally. An imperfect ally. I struggle with this when I talk to liberals. They get so entrenched. Like this is the only way, to the extreme, there are not alternative views. Just recognizing it’s not pure, simple, whites against minorities. It’s more complex than that. I have to deal with my own racism, I have to acknowledge it at least. There’s some racist stuff that goes on inside me, for sure. 

Related to those terrible incidents, a lot of times I have to step back and think, well those are individuals, of a group, they felt permission for some reason to do that, like racists of any stripe felt like this is the time we can let loose our racism, but you are right, it’s not... there is a rigidity to the way college-educated, academic, progressive liberals have talking points, and a lot of times don’t get beyond the talking points into how those ideas play out in the actual society, which isn’t any more useful than being conservative and rigid in worldview. 

I’ve asked you 48 minutes of questions. Has Covid revealed elements of what Caviste is all about, so that you see (your mission) more clearly now?

It’s incredible to watch John and Lucia work with the staff. I probably wouldn’t have gotten that opportunity. The reason why I mention them is because it instilled in me to be sensitive, to learn how to train staff. It’s a very personal thing for us to try to find people who are the right fit, to try to figure out how to train them in a way that they feel it’s their own. And that’s what John and Lucia do with their staff. That’s been really cool to watch. It’s a piece of the business. The goal is to sell wine, of course. Trying to get people hooked on this path, this point of no return, when they just start tossing out their grocery store wine. I love these wines, I’m excited about them. You want people to join in on that. 

They have more meetings with an individual staff member than I ever had in the legal world. And they care deeply about what each staff person wants to do with their career. And they will invest in it emotionally, financially, they really care about where you are going as a staff person. It’s just so cool to see that. 

At the end of the interview I bought my bare minimum two loaves of Bobby Boy bread, a handful of the tinned conservas Caviste sell (the sea scallops in Galician sauce are my favorite) and motored back to Durham, my mind abuzz with all of Alice’s ideas. What a blessing, to talk with a person face-to-face again. What an inspiring wine professional! I really learned something. And I crushed that sandwich.