Born: 1889, China
Died: 1981
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Yang Buwei, 杨步伟, 楊步偉, Yáng Bùwěi
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40. For more on her story, check out Mayukh Sen’s Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America.
(Grace Zia) Chu was not the first to publish a popular and influential Chinese cookbook in the U.S. In 1945, her fellow Chinese immigrant, 55-year-old Chao Yang Buwei, published How to Cook and Eat in Chinese. It introduced both the term and technique now ubiquitous in many American kitchens: stir-fry, where meat and vegetables are cut into small pieces and cooked together with constant motion over heat.
A doctor by trade, she’d given up her career when the family moved to the United States in 1921 for her husband to take a job at Harvard. Bored and isolated by the language barrier, she focused on cooking dishes that reminded her of home. More than two decades later at the urging of a friend, she wrote How to Cook and Eat in Chinese with translation help from her oldest daughter and clunky meddling from her linguist husband, who edited her words such that Chao proclaimed in an author’s note that she was “ashamed to have written” the book.
While Chu wrote for her audiences, Chao was steadfast in maintaining the authenticity of her dishes. As noted by Mayukh Sen, author of Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America, “It might have been easier for immigrants in the culinary arena to please the American palate with substitutions. But Chao didn’t budge.” English-language Chinese cookbooks had existed in the U.S. for decades, but hers was the first that did not allow for alterations, like using sea crabs instead of freshwater, which she considered “a caricature of the Chinese dish.” As Sen writes, “Chao understood that assimilation wasn’t the only path forward for immigrant cooks in America long before such a notion was popular. She may have given America a well-worn phrase, but she knew that some aspects of immigrant experiences defy translation … She wore her Chinese heritage with pride and shunned the impulse to compromise it.”