AAPI Heritage Month with Cafe Cà Phê: Bety Le Shackelford

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By Kelcie McKenney
Photos by Travis Young

For Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month, we teamed up with Catcall magazine to highlight the AAPI team members who make Kansas City’s first Vietnamese coffee shop Cafe Cà Phê possible. Read the intro here, and stick around this week to hear their stories.

What’s your title at Cafe Cà Phê?

Director of Community Outreach

Where is your family’s country of origin? 

Vietnam

What brought you and/or your family to Kansas City?

I moved to KC at the end of 2018 with my then-fiance/now-husband, James, who is originally from here. And my mom moved here last summer when Mia was born! I love that Mia gets to grow up with her Bà Ngoại. It means the world to me that our little mango gets to experience her Vietnamese culture straight from the source. 

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The new, sexy FDA-approved way of protecting against STIs

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By Nicole Mitchell

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved latex undies brand Lorals’ Lorals for Protection underwear as STI protection devices. Lorals for Protection protects its users from STIs during oral sex while being worn similarly to underwear.

The team of designers at Loral spent three years creating the latex undies for safe (and pleasurable) sex, and spent the last two years adapting the product to make sure that it met FDA and ISO standards, according to its website.

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AAPI Heritage Month with Cafe Cà Phê: Madoka Koguchi

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By Kelcie McKenney
Photos by Travis Young

For Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month, we teamed up with Catcall magazine to highlight the AAPI team members who make Kansas City’s first Vietnamese coffee shop Cafe Cà Phê possible. Read the intro here, and stick around this week to hear their stories.

What’s your title at Cafe Cà Phê?

Manager

Where is your family’s country of origin? 

Japan

What brought you and/or your family to Kansas City?

Helping my best friend Jackie open the first Vietnamese coffee shop in KCMO, Cafe Cà Phê.

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The Cafe Cà Phê team is serving up hella good coffee, culture, and AAPI inclusion.

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By Kelcie McKenney

For Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month, we teamed up with The Pitch to highlight the AAPI team members who make Kansas City’s first Vietnamese coffee shop Cafe Cà Phê possible. Stick around this month to hear their stories.

Cafe Cà Phê makes a damn good cup of coffee. But mixed in with the Vietnamese drip and sweetened condensed milk is the recipe for representation.

If you’re tapped into the Kansas City coffee scene, chances are you’ve heard Jackie Nguyen’s story. But we’ll give you a quick refresher. Nguyen, a first-generation Vietnamese American, left Broadway at the start of the pandemic, moved to Kansas City, and opened Cafe Cà Phê—Kansas City’s first Vietnamese mobile coffee shop. And since then, Nguyen and her coffee shop have positioned themselves as advocates for KC’s Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community.

“When I grew up, I felt so ashamed to be Asian. I thought it was so uncool, and I felt like we were always teased and looked down upon,” Nguyen said. “I do not ever want any Asian kid to feel that way because it’s so far from the truth. I hope to combat that.”

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How Caley Rose Uses Her Music as a Form of Empowerment

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By Nicole Mitchell

Caley Rose is a female empowerment pop singer of four years—and she’s just getting started. So far, her music has been in commercials, she’s been streaming her music creation, her single “GAME OVER” is on the Billboard charts, and, coming up soon, Rose will be performing at an event this Saturday in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

While Rose has been booked and busy regarding her music career recently, it wasn’t always that way. “I was always a singer,” she said. “But I got lost along the way and took some detours.” Her original end goal was to join Broadway as a performer. “However, if I was honest with myself, I really just wanted to do pop music.”

It took Rose a while into her music career to make the switch to pop. “I was working with different producers, and I wasn’t a songwriter,” she said. At the time, Rose followed the lead of what her songwriters wanted her music to sound like. “It wasn’t until four years ago that I started songwriting,” she explained. “Once I realized myself as a writer, I saw myself as a singer.”

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