The accidental chef

A turn-of-the-century Chinese physician changed culinary culture forever

Yang Buwei (楊步偉) was taught that proper ladies do not belong in the kitchen. She was born the ninth granddaughter in a respectable, traditional family in 1889 in Nanjing, and her purpose in life was to get married and be the mistress of her own household, engaged to her cousin before she was even born. But her life took her on a different course, one that would turn her into the first person to introduce authentic Chinese food culture to an English-speaking audience.

With the California gold rush in the mid-19th century came Chinese immigrants and their food, but Chinese culinary culture had not yet garnered any attention. Later, Chinese-style American dishes such as chop suey and chow mein appeared, but no one is sure of their true origins.

Yang's landmark work, How to Cook and Eat in Chinese, was first published in 1945 by the John Day Company in New York. It offered over 200 authentic family recipes from across China - from salt-water duck to crossing-the-bridge noodles, from red-cooked pig feet to pot-stuck bean curd, and from stirred beef kidney to soup for the gods. All could be cooked with ingredients found in ordinary markets and the burgeoning Chinese shops opening in the United States. If nothing else, this book coined the English term stir-fry, which was defined as "a big-fire-shallow-fat-continual-stirring-quick-frying of cut-up materials with wet seasoning".

Despite being an insightful observation into Chinese cuisine, it also opened a window to Chinese culture, often delightfully charming and amusing. When discussing the different styles of eating, she compares communal eating to carrying on a conversation and wonders, "if it is because the American way of each eating his own meal is so unsociable that you have to keep on talking to make it more like good manners?"

At other times, she depicts Chinese customs in a comical way that still rings true today: "Table manners begin with a fight over yielding precedence in entering the dining room. … After a properly long deadlock, some elder guest will yield and say, 'Better obedience than deference'." Yang even presents a motto for the battlefield of Chinese banqueting, which is "await, avoid and attack", wise words considering you usually have to wait for the best dishes.

In a 2004 New York Times article, editor and publisher Jason Epstein said he believed that the book was in fact written by Yang's husband in her name because of the wording. It is understandable since Zhao Yuanren (趙元任), Yang's husband, was a renowned linguist and polyglot. He did help her translate the book, putting much of the good English translated by their daughter, Zhao Rulan, back into "Chinglish" because it sounded more interesting.

He occasionally inserted his own voice in the book by adding various footnotes and even wrote a recipe himself, the culinary ABCs of "stirred eggs", deliberately applying an academic writing style to make readers laugh, such as:

"To test whether the cooking has been done properly, observe the person served. If he utters a voiced bilabial nasal consonant with a slow falling intonation, it is good. If he utters the syllable yum in reduplicated form, it is very good." - Zhao Yuanren.

It was a family project of sorts, but Yang was unmistakably the brains behind it. Her life was a series of adventures, in which her wit, curiosity, perseverance and sense of humor always prevailed, something readers find reflected in the book.

Cooking, though, was never Yang's true ambition, destined as she was for greater things. It was the end of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), a turning point from the old to the new, and Yang supported revolution at a young age. Even before she finished her education at the age of 20, she was appointed the principal of a vocational school for women soldiers and did, by all accounts, a fantastic job at managing it. When, at one point, mutinous soldiers threatened to attack the school, she directed the defense preparations by arranging 130 guards using only her knowledge of Sun Tzu and the Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

Like today's students abroad, Yang was forced to develop her cooking skills while studying medicine in Japan because she was not used to the local food. "I had always looked down upon food and things," she says in her book. "But I hated to look down upon a Japanese dinner under my nose." So, by the time she became a doctor and returned home, her family was greatly surprised when they were treated to a feast of 32 dishes with "a little imagination and invention".

Though naturally talented, cooking was still not high on her agenda, as she was busy running a hospital she founded with another female doctor in a traditional hutong in Beijing.

But life is full of surprises. Years later, when Yang's second daughter wanted to study medicine, Yang advised her against it because it was hard for women to run a practice and take care of a family. Yang, in this case, spoke from experience; her career was thrown into a tailspin by her own marriage, though it was an happy one. Yang followed Zhao as he taught at Harvard, Tsinghua and Yale universities, all the while traveling extensively across Europe.

As Zhao did field research on dialects across China, Yang took the time to learn local specialties. But it was decades later, during World War II, that she became engrossed in the culinary arts. When the Zhao family (four daughters in all) lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she cooked for the China Relief lunch once a week, usually for hundreds of people.

She cooked for Zhao's colleagues and students as they trained American soldiers to speak Chinese and translated maps for the Allies. When news came that a certain area had been bombed by the Allies, a translator would shout: "That's my section of the map." To Yang, it was the night of shrimp noodles.

Due to a shortage of supplies in wartime, Yang often had to be quite resourceful. She felt great shame at seeing American markets throw away chicken gizzards, livers and other edible materials, and thus finally decided to write her Chinese cookbook for an American audience.

The book was a success, reprinted more than a dozen times and sold around the world. Yang was constantly approached for lectures and even, eventually, cooking shows on TV, but she always turned them down, saying that if people did not grasp what she wrote in her book, then she obviously did not write it well.

"I am ashamed to have written this book," she states at the start of her book, "because I am a doctor and ought to be practicing instead of cooking." But her supporters would tell her otherwise; Pearl S. Buck wrote in a preface to Yang's work that it was "of inestimable value to the war effort and also to the economy of peace". Buck even wanted to nominate Yang for a Nobel Peace Prize, because nothing in the world brings cultures together like food that warms the body and the soul.

Courtesy of The World of Chinese, www.theworldofchinese.com

The World of Chinese