When a national fast food chain told Keri Coate they were pulling out of their school partnership — 28 homerooms, one recognized student each per week, too many free meals to sustain — Keri barely had time to start looking for a replacement. Within a week, an email landed in her inbox.

It was from Judy Wang. I want to partner with you.

"I went, oh my gosh," Keri said.

A national chain had stepped back. A single mom with a small breakfast restaurant stepped forward. That is, at its core, the Judy Wang story.

Judy arrived in Galesburg from Beijing in 2017 with her daughter, almost nothing in the way of English — "Hello, bye-bye, that's all," she said — and a willingness to work. She spent eight months at a buffet, eight months at a local coffee shop, and then took stock of her situation. She was a single mother with a toddler son and an 11-year-old daughter. A regular job didn't fit around the kids. So in September 2019, she opened a restaurant.

She had one problem. "I don't know about pancake," she said. "You go to China, you know the pancake, and here, the pancake is totally different." She figured it out anyway — and figured it out well enough that people now tell her she makes the best pancakes they've ever had. "People say that," she said. "That's true."

Then the pandemic hit. Some days the restaurant pulled in $90. Total. That time almost killed me, she said. One day, $90 — can't pay nothing. Her daughter, then 11, worked beside her. And then the community showed up. Neighbors ordered food. Teachers ordered. The hospital ordered. The city came through with a grant. Judy's survived.

She has not forgotten that.

"If the community help me, then I need to give back."

So when she heard that Steele School was rewarding students for coming to school every day, on time, ready to learn — and that the program needed a partner — she reached out. Her son, now in third grade, is a Steele student. This wasn't abstract community spirit. It was personal. "I want to partner with you," she told Keri.

Three years in, 28 homerooms every week, thousands of meals served: pancakes, bacon and eggs, milk or juice. And if a kid walks in with their reward coupon and says they want French toast instead, Judy says okay. "Of course," she said, when asked if there's cinnamon in it.

Keri brought Judy to a school assembly last year. They calculated the meal count together — 28 rooms times every week of school, creeping toward 900 meals a year. Thousands over the course of the partnership. Judy brought pancakes. The whole school put on glasses and ended up in one of her videos.

Because Judy Wang is also, as she put it when she walked into the room, "famous pancakes."

The social media story starts with nervousness. Early on, she only filmed herself cooking — afraid of her English, worried people would laugh. Then she started watching other non-fluent English speakers doing well online. If they can do it, she thought, how about me? She reached out to Victor, a Brazilian-born Knox College graduate who'd been teaching kids and playing soccer in Galesburg. They made one video together. It now has 70 million views.

What Keri describes as the video format is the key to it: Judy takes clips of other people doing absurd viral gimmicks, then inserts herself as the unexpected punchline. A Tesla Cybertruck rolls past — Judy pulls up behind it on a moped. Two people wipe out on skateboards — Judy comes rolling with a plate of pancakes. It's funny, it's genuine, and it translates across every language barrier there is. Humor, as it turns out, is universal.

People now fly into Galesburg just to eat there. Last couple weeks, Judy said, six people fly in — three and a half hours — for the pancake. Victor has been her partner for nearly two years, and together they're building what she calls the Judy's family brand: a packaged pancake mix nearly ready to launch, a coffee line with Innkeepers, a sour beer and lager collaboration with local brewery Artisan Reserve. A woman who came to the United States knowing "Hello, bye-bye" is building a Galesburg brand with global reach.

Before all of this — before Galesburg, before the restaurant, before the videos — Judy Wang was a stay-at-home mother in Beijing. She also sold and fixed computers for years. When asked what, exactly, prepared her for everything she's built, she didn't hesitate.

"I'm a mom," she said.

Now she has two locations. And she's already thinking about the next step — how to reach every school in the district, how to expand the partnership she started with one third-grader's school into something that touches all of them.

"We want to support all the school," she said. "We can do that."

In Galesburg, it turns out, the most powerful force in a community isn't always the biggest name on the building. Sometimes it's the woman who shows up on a moped, pancakes in hand, and says: I'm in.