For refugees who can't return home again for political reasons, sometimes "food is the only way to go home," said Tin Myaing Thein, executive director of the Pacific Gateway Center (formerly The Immigrant Center), which offers assistance to newcomers to the Islands, including those from her native Burma (aka Myanmar).

Burmese specialties, along with special dishes from Thailand and Sri Lanka, will be featured at a benefit brunch at E&O Trading Co. on Sunday, including a fish dish introduced to the Islands, and to E&O chefs, by immigrant Aye Aye Maw, a physicist who came to Hawai'i six years ago from a refugee camp. (More than 1 million Burmese have been displaced from their country due to a repressive government.) Pacific Gateway Center helped Maw find a job making sushi at the Ala Moana Foodland, but she likes to prepare the foods of her home country, too.

The goal of the Pacific Gateway events at E&O is to introduce Southeast Asian dishes that most Westerners will not have tried before. As these dishes are on the menu only during the quarterly benefits, and there is no Burmese restaurant on O'ahu, it's a rare chance to experience this cuisine. Maw thought the river catfish stir-fry was one many would like. Kapi'olani Community College chef-instructor Kusuma Cooray, who did a tasting of suggested dishes, enthusiastically agreed.

Thein prepared nga yeo ywet — fish with noni leaf — for an Advertiser photo shoot. Here, noni is known primarily for its fruit (and its smell), but in Burma, the vegetation appears in a number of dishes. The large, bright green leaves, which turn a shiny black when they're cooked, resembling Japanese kombu or nori seaweed, add a slightly bitter flavor to dishes such as the quick fish stir-fry. It's flavored with a classic Burmese trio: fried garlic, onion and ginger, as well as lemongrass, fish sauce and the two spices most common in Burmese cooking for both color and flavor, paprika and turmeric.

Than Htut Aye, refugee resettlement expert at Pacific Gateway Center, said there are about 350 Burmese immigrants in Hawai'i, 300 of them living on O'ahu. The center has noted an increase in "secondary immigration," as people who first settled on the Mainland find both assimilation challenges and cold weather too difficult. In Hawai'i, the immigrants can find the multicultural society, the warm weather and, of course, the foods that they're used to.

The refugees face the same challenges as others — lack of English, the need for jobs and shelter — but it's the cultural differences that create the most difficult-to-solve problems. For example, many Burmese are Buddhists, who expect to be able to celebrate particular holidays, and to build their lives around religious observances as they did at home, but Western society doesn't recognize these customs.

As well, there is a strong tradition of keeping young women apart, and of arranged marriages. "There is no such thing as dating in Burma," Thein said. A boy might come to ask parental permission to visit a girl at home, but young men and women don't go out alone together. When prom time rolls around and the more acculturated younger generation wants to attend, Burmese elders don't know what to think.

Aye said Burmese love to cook at home and much of the day can be spent in the chopping and grinding of the flavoring ingredients essential to the dishes they enjoy. Most homes include a heavy stone mortar and pestle, like the ones familiar from Thai cooking, though Aye said homemakers are beginning to use modern choppers as well.

FAVORITE BURMESE EATS

The Burmese diet is heavy on rice (both jasmine and short-grain) and noodles (both rice flour and wheat), except in the cities, where Indian immigrants have introduced their flatbreads. Vegetable salads are eaten with most meals. Popular vegetables include tomatoes, eggplant, okra, gourd squash, cucumber and the tree seedpod Filipinos call marungay and they call dandalon, meaning "drumsticks." Curries, soups, stews and stir-fries of fish, pork and chicken are featured, though a significant portion of the population doesn't eat beef. Many snacks are made from rice flour and glutinous rice flour.

Breakfast might be mohinga, a dish so popular as to have been termed the national dish of Burma — an intensely fishy noodle soup often garnished with hard-boiled eggs. Or perhaps the Burmese version of Japan's sekihan — dark sticky rice steamed with azuki beans. For lunch, more rice, soup, a salad with a fish sauce-based dipping mixture. And for dinner, eaten later in the evening, about 8, soup, rice, curry and more salad.

The Burmese ginger salad that has become so popular around the U.S. is a snack food in Burma, eaten between meals, with green tea. They also make la phet, a salad of tea leaves preserved in oil.

Thein's nominee for Burma's national dish would be ohnoh khawswey, a coconut-milk soup with chicken, lemon and cilantro and round wheat noodles like spaghetti. "That is what everybody likes," she said.

All this is eaten with the fingers in traditional homes: "It tastes better that way," said Thein, with a laugh.

But about those noni leaves. "Noni is known throughout the Pacific and Southeast Asia," said Thein.

Only the tender leaves at the tip of the branch are used for the fish stir-fry, which originated in the old Burmese capitol of Rangoon (aka Yangon). The dish is typical of Burmese cuisine in that it's light, well-spiced without being hot or spicy and quickly cooked (once you have everything chopped!). Burmese cuisine focuses on stovetop cooking — steaming, frying, stewing, braising — because not all homes have ovens.

Older, larger noni leaves are used to wrap a sort of Burmese fish laulau seasoned with the standard garlic, ginger, onion and fish sauce.