Zhiyong had been cooking in a restaurant for a few years and Ruifen was doing office work. They were invited to Wanganui by a cousin who owned Ridgway St's former Hong Kong restaurant and wanted a cook.
They've been running the Magic Wok Restaurant & Takeaways in Victoria Ave for 12 years. It's open seven days a week, with Ruifen at the counter and Zhiyong out the back cooking. The hours are long, but time off on Monday mornings gives them a chance to play club table tennis.
The Magic Wok sells Chinese food as well as fish and chips and burgers.
Customer Samuel Yangpin says it's more authentically Cantonese than most Chinese restaurants in small New Zealand towns.
Fried rice, vegetables with cashew nuts, sweet and sour pork and garlic chicken are the most popular dishes for Kiwis, Ruifen said. Recently they've added home-made barbecue pork buns, dumplings and pork spare ribs to the menu.
The pork buns are steamed not fried, and especially popular with Maori, Filipino and Pacific Island people.
In China breakfast can be a rice soup with vegetables. Mothers usually do the cooking, and everyone sits down together for an evening meal of several shared dishes.
South Chinese food is extremely varied, Samuel said. Duck, chicken and pork are popular meats. Eggs are used, and there's all kinds of seafood - fish, crayfish and prawns cooked in their shells. Rice is a staple - boiled, fried or as rice flour noodles.
Tofu is rarely offered in New Zealand, but popular in China.
"Cantonese make fantastic spicy and non-spicy tofu. It's a signature dish, very popular, called mapo tufu."
Canton has a huge variety of vegetables. Some, like bok choy, are now available in New Zealand. Ruifen grows some in her garden and gets some from a Chinese woman who sells them at the River Traders' market. They buy vegetables from Wanganui's Laugesen market garden to cook in their restaurant.
Canton also has lots of styles of cooking. Food can be steamed, boiled, baked, fried or grilled, and it can be very spicy.
The Chinese food that Kiwis prefer is sweeter and saltier than Chinese people like. Food at Chinese restaurants is customised to suit Kiwi tastes, Samuel said.
Sweet and sour pork, one of the most popular dishes at the Magic Wok, is not popular in China. It's said to have originated in the United States gold rush and percolated back to China from there.
The deep fried chicken wings in the restaurant's smorgasbord have more in common with a Kiwi barbecue than a typical Chinese meal.
Samuel can get Chinese food that's more to his taste at the Magic Wok.
"What they do really good here is pork spare ribs, and the fried rice here is quite authentic. It's less sweet, and the cooking skills that the chef utilises is pretty local."
He also recommends the won ton soup, pork buns and dim sums.
The Lais eat a lot of vegetables, not always with meat. Roast duck is their special occasion meal, but they also like a Kiwi roast dinner.
They live in Wanganui with Zhiyong's mother, who speaks little English, and their two boys, aged 15 and 17. The boys go to Wanganui High School. They play sport, especially badminton, and like fish and chips. They're studying science, maths and English, and Ruifen hopes they will do well.
"It's their choice. It's hard though, because you want them to do their best but you don't know."
She speaks four languages - Cantonese, Mandarin, a local Chinese language and English. Their children speak a little of each as well. At home they speak their local language to each other and to Zhiyong's mother. There are about 200 Chinese people in Wanganui, and the Lais have a cousin in Auckland. Ruifen rings her mother and sister in China every day, and said she and Zhiyong were too busy with their children and business to miss their homeland.
"Not lonely. Not much time. Lots of things to do."
They were back in China last year, and another time five years before that, and say it has changed a lot. When they left, the buildings in their city were two-storeys high. On their return they were seeing 10- storey buildings and many more people.
Zhiyong said living in New Zealand was better. "Better life. Really comfortable."
YUNUS Ozturk came to New Zealand in 1997, to work in Halikarnas Restaurant in Wellington. He was one of many Kurds who were told not to speak their language at school and displaced from their homeland in 1980. He now speaks both Kurdish and Turkish.
He said Turkish people were more modern and western, whereas Kurds put family first and were still tribal.
He was the first in his family to leave for a better life. He went to the city of Istanbul, landed a job, started a restaurant and brought his family there. It was a city of 15 million and very busy. Coming to New Zealand was a chance for a peaceful life.
In 2006 he moved north to Wanganui and started his own restaurant, Kebabholik, in Victoria Ave. It's near Jabies Doner Kebab and he's annoyed another Turkish food shop is starting two doors away.
He tries to get back to Turkey every two years, to spend time with his mother and enjoy his sister's cooking and a rest from cooking himself.
At Kebabholik he sells a version of the Turkish traditional food that Kiwis expect. He gets lamb mince from Chef's Choice, and chicken breasts, mixes them with herbs, marinates them for 24 hours, shapes them and cooks them. When customers want meat he slices it off to add to bread, salads, humus, hot peppers, olives and sauces.
He also makes his own baklava for dessert. He loves cooking and would make and sell a bigger range of foods if he had a bigger shop.
His food is similar to what would be eaten in Turkey, but different.
He said Turkish people love hot, spicy food. They like meats like lamb, goat, chicken and beef. They also eat a lot of anchovies, little fish they call hamsi, cooked whole and eaten bones and all. Most are Muslim and don't eat pork.
One of their favourites is guvec, a kind of stew of meat, capsicum and potato baked in the oven in a clay dish. Lentil soup is popular, especially for breakfast. Other breakfasts might be more traditionally Mediterranean - olives, cheese, tomatoes and cucumbers.
They make a filo pastry savoury with spinach and feta cheese, and a sweetmeat called halvah out of ground sesame seeds.
In Turkey, kebabs are usually made with pocket breads rather than flat bread, and not toasted. They can be a hefty sandwich containing flavoured meat, capsicum, onions and tomatoes, and without sauces. Or there are shish kebabs - chunks of meat cooked on skewers.
Yunus heard of one traveller who tried a kebab in Turkey and said it was completely different, and he didn't like it.
In Turkey most of the men go out to work and the women do the cooking. In the evening Turkish families are expected to eat together. They sit on the floor, on pillows, with the food on low tables.
What Mr Ozturk misses most from Turkey is the weekly markets in the middle of town.
"Anything you want you can get in the market. They are big, big markets and would take you an hour to get around."
He said Wanganui was very slow compared to Istanbul, and that was good.
"Slow is better."
KULWINDER Kaur is part of a family from the Punjab region of northern India that works hard across three Wanganui businesses.
Her father Billa loves cooking. He arrived in 1997 and his wife Jasveer, two daughters and a son came in 1999. He started the Bollywood Stars Restaurant in Wanganui's Guyton St in that year.
Punjabi cooking is spicy, Kulwinder said, with curries and flat wholemeal breads called roti the most common foods.
The restaurant, now called Tandoori Bite, uses a tandoori oven - a clay cylinder fired with gas - to cook breads, fish and chicken and kebabs. The oven is very hot. The chefs' hands are tough, or they use sticks to handle food in it.
The chicken in the restaurant's famous butter chicken is cooked in a tandoor. Lamb rogan josh and cheese and garlic naan breads are also popular with its customers.
None of them are things the family would usually eat at home. They are mostly vegetarian and don't find sweet dishes like butter chicken very tasty.
Food in India is more seasonal, eating what is available at the time, Kulwinder said.
Their favourite dishes use paneer, a kind of curd they make by adding a thickening agent to boiled milk. The milk solidifies and is cut into cubes and cooked in curry sauces.
One of Kulwinder's favourites is dahl makhani, a curry made with brown lentils. They eat their curries much hotter than the ones they prepare in the restaurant.
She also loves parantha, a buttery Indian bread stuffed with potatoes, green vegetables, beans or paneer. It can be eaten at any time of day, often for breakfast with lassi, a yoghurt drink.
Her father sometimes brings a warm parantha to Kulwinder's workplace at Shotz Bar, a bit further along Guyton St.
In the Punjab lunch often consists of saag, a spiced puree of spinach or other greens, with some kind of bread. Roti made of wholemeal flour is usually preferred.
In the evening the whole family sits down to eat. They might have aloo gobi, a potato and cauliflower curry, or muttar paneer, a curry made with paneer and peas. The curry is always served with a roti, and sometimes with rice and peas as well.
The family would then spend the evening together.
"In India there's nothing to do at night. Everyone would be at home."
Kulwinder has spent some time in the Punjab and said what she misses most from there is the festivals. She said there were lots of them and New Zealand ones were not the same.
Her family now owns Shotz Bar in Guyton St and the Castlecliff Hotel as well as the Tandoori Bite.
Adults in the family work in them day after day, with Kulwinder's mother Jasveer looking after the children. Though they sell alcohol the family are Sikhs, like most others from the Punjab, and are not supposed to drink it.
They do celebrate Christmas, but Kulwinder said the most special thing about it was a rare day off for all the adults, when they could sit down together for lunch and dinner.