USA: Christine Ha An American Chef Wins TV Competion

Christine Ha, born May 9, 1979 in California),is an American chef and writer from Houston, Texas. She is the first blind contestant of MasterChef and the winner of its third season in 2012.

Both of Hà's parents are of Vietnamese-origin and she lived in Lakewood, California and Long Beach as a young child before her family moved to Houston.

Ha suffers from neuromyelitis optica, in which a person's own immune system attacks the optic nerves and spinal cord. In 2004 she was diagnosed and gradually started losing her vision, and was almost completely blind by 2007,and describes her vision "as looking at a very foggy mirror after a hot shower".

She received a Bachelor of Business Administration degree in Finance/MIS from University of Texas at Austin in 2001 and a Master of Fine Arts degree for creative fiction/nonfiction at University of Houston's Creative Writing Program in 2012. She recently received the editor's poetry prize from The ScissorTale Review and was a finalist in the 2010 Creative Nonfiction MFA Program-Off contest.

She also serves as Fiction Editor for Gulf Coast Journal and her work has appeared in Fire Point, The ScissorTale Review, and PANK Magazine among others.In January 2014 she began hosting the cooking Television show Four Senses on AMI-TV.

MasterChef 2012
Midway through of this year's competition, my money would not have been on Christine for the win – and not just because of her disability – because she just didn't come across as the typical frontrunner. With Christine, slow and steady won the race. She subtly climbed her way to the top by performing consistently well, triumphing over her own self-doubt, all the while maintaining her signature grace and integrity. It was thrilling to watch. And I can say with absolute confidence there was no one more deserving.

While she has never studied cooking, she has a large following on her food blog. She states: "I have to depend a lot more on the other senses to cook – taste, smell, how certain ingredients feel", adding that cooking without sight just involves "a lot of organization".

In the nineteen episodes where she competed on the third season of MasterChef, Christine Ha won seven times in both individual and team challenges; additionally, she placed three times in the top three group. However, she was also in the bottom group twice. On September 10, 2012, Christine Ha was announced the winner of the competition and took away $250,000, the MasterChef title, the MasterChef trophy, and a cookbook deal.

Her cook book, Recipes from My Home Kitchen: Asian and American Comfort Food (ISBN 978-1623360948), was released on May 14, 2013.