E4 MG EE THE WASHINGTON POST.WEDNESDAY, MAY 25 , 2022
ED MAKER/DENVER POST/GETTY IMAGES
In addition to her television show, Joyce Chen helped popularize
Chinese cooking in the U.S. with restaurants and cookware.footage together and blending
the homecoming aspects with
balanced political analysis.
He said he was intrigued by
Chen's a bility “to kind of surrepti-
tiously sneak in under the guise of
a family visit because nobody was
really quite sure how open China
was going to be.”
Most of the film takes viewers
across the country to visit facto-
ries, busy cities, farms, parades
and the family village. But it
finishes on a WGBH studio set
with Chen serving dinner to two
special guests: Harvard eco-
nomics professor John Kenneth
Galbraith and Newsweek foreign
editor Edward Klein.
The scene feels a bit like “Good
Morning America” and “Meet the
Press” over dinner, with Klein
asking the family if they suspect
the Chinese government harbors
a secret class of high-ranking
bureaucrats who live better than
anyone else. More fish, anyone?A master translator
After her time on TV, Chen
poured herself into her restau-
rants (she would eventually open
four), her children, her cookware
and food line. You can still buy her
sauces, dumplings and cookware
online or in regional markets.
Through the 1970 s, she was a
constant presence in her restau-
rants, the final being a modernist
shrine to Chinese cooking on Cam-
bridge’s Rindge Avenue, where her
guests included Henry Kissinger,
Danny Kaye, Shirley Temple and,
of course, Julia Child.
Barzyk recalled attending an
early ’70s dinner where Chen
presented slides from her China
trip and introduced guests to a
new chef who specialized in
hand-pulled Chinese noodles.
“I ended up sitting next to Julia
Child,” he said, “and when the
noodle master came out she
jumped up on her chair to get a
better look. I had to hold on to her
[by the waist] so she wouldn’t
fall.”
In the early 1980 s, Chen was
carrying a jug of sauce down the
stairs, and it broke and cut her
hand, severing a nerve. She need-
ed microsurgery, Stephen said,
and after being under general
anesthesia, she started to have
memory difficulties. “She felt it
started with that surgery on her
hand,” he said. By the mid-’80s
Chen started to withdraw from
public appearances as she dealt
with the onset of dementia.
The last Joyce Chen Restaurant
closed in 1998, four years after
she died, but her legacy carries on
in her food and cookware line and
even a children’s book, 20 17’s
“Dumpling Dreams.”
Helen manages the cookware
line while Stephen manages the
sauces, dumplings and archives
of this fearless mid-century trans-
lator of Chinese culture.
“My mother was a pioneer
when it came to just about every-
thing, and she had this probing
mind,” Helen said. “It wasn’t just
the restaurant, the TV show, the
cookware or the food products. It
morphed into all kinds of aspects
of Chinese food and culture. At
that time people thought of Chi-
nese food as chow mein and chop
suey because they couldn’t travel,
and she opened up a whole new
world.”Eng is the Chicago reporter for Axios
and co-host of the food and health
podcast “Chewing.”New York University cinema
studies professor Dana Polan not-
ed their very different TV perso-
nas.
On one hand you had “Julia
Child, who is wacky, eccentric,
boisterous and larger than life,
both metaphorically and literal-
ly,” h e said in an interview. “And it
was just like good television.”
“In contrast, Chen is much
more pragmatic, like, let’s get
down to business. She’s n ot fun in
the same way.”
Chen did joke and smile on her
show, but she lacked Child’s
charming nuttiness and certainly
the hyperactive style of the first
breakthrough Chinese TV chef,
Martin Yan.Sneaking into China
Despite the cancellation of her
cooking show, Chen found an in-
genious way to return to public
television. The rare opportunity
emerged when Nixon unexpected-
ly opened up U. S.-China relations.
Even after his historic trip, most
Americans could not secure a visa
to China. But Chen had a plan.
“She took me up to the Chinese
Embassy in Ottawa,” Stephen re-
called. “A nd she explained what we
wanted to do and who we wanted
to visit. And two weeks after we got
back to Boston, they called to say,
‘Yes, you have permission to go to
China.’”
Chen had secured visas for Hel-
en, Stephen and herself, then
reached out to WGBH, whose pro-
ducers agreed to give Stephen a
crash course in cinematography.
“She paid for all the equipment
and film because they had no idea
what we would bring back,” said
Stephen, who was 19 at the time.
It paid off. They came back
with 16 -millimeter footage of
train travel, Chinese streets, fam-
ily life and celebrations. Ironical-
ly, the footage didn’t include
much food.
Executive producer Fred
Barzyk had the job of pulling theegg roll recipe with “^1 / 2 lb of Good
Hamburger.”
This drive to make Chinese
food and culture more accessible
to Americans would last through-
out her career. She coined the
term “Peking ravioli” to introduce
New Englanders to northern style
pot stickers and boiled Chinese
dumplings. She also designed
and patented a flat-bottomed
wok that worked on American
stoves with their lower heat lev-
els.
She numbered all the items on
her menu and introduced Chinese
buffets to New England so diners
could easily sample new, non-Can-
tonese dishes that reflected the
cuisine of her native regions.
Shortly after her egg roll suc-
cess, Chen started teaching cook-
ing classes to home cooks, which
eventually led her to open Joyce
Chen Restaurant in Cambridge in- Along with the expected
chop suey, she served soup dump-
lings, moo shoo pork and Peking
duck with pancakes.
In 1962, she self-published her
cookbook.
“Publishers told her that no
one wanted to see color pictures
of food,” Stephen remembers
with a laugh, adding that after the
book’s initial success J.B. Lippin-
cott Co. picked up the title and
reprinted it many times.
Like Julia, but with wind
chimes
In 1 966, after Chen divorced her
husband, she got an intriguing
offer.
“A lot of the people from WGBH
ate at our restaurant,” Stephen
recalled. “A nd they were working
on a show with Julia Child, and
they asked my mom if she would
consider doing a show, too.”
Stephen says his mom threw
herself into the project, preparing
TV-friendly recipes, taking les-
sons from a voice coach and
rehearsing like crazy.
“They would have to plan out
exactly when the water was g oing
to boil because back then you
couldn’t edit it that easily,” he
said. “So you had to do long
sections just straight.”
Chen cranked out 26 half-hour
episodes, showing viewers how to
grow and cook bean sprouts, pre-
pare Peking duck and egg foo
young, and make boiled dump-
lings and pot stickers from
scratch. But she also taught such
basics as using chopsticks, mak-
ing good tea and preparing the
perfect pot of rice.
Chen filmed on the same set as
“The French Chef ” but with Asian
touches, including screens and
wind chimes. Her recipes deliv-
ered close approximations of Chi-
nese food that American house-
wives could make using mostly
ingredients they could find at the
grocery store.
But there was an issue.
“One of the criticisms was that
her Chinese accent was too
strong,” S tephen said. “Some peo-
ple just couldn’t u nderstand what
she was saying.”
The producers came up with a
workaround, where she would
spell out words that were hard to
pronounce. Still, her popularity
didn’t b alloon like Child’s. It w asn’t
for any lack of talent, “but it was
just the time and age, and people
were not ready yet,” Stephen said.
So when the station was renew-
ing its cooking shows in 1967 and
launching into the wonderful but
expensive world of color TV, the
executives chose “The French
Chef ” and not “Joyce Chen Cooks.”admit those egg rolls — with their
thick skins, cabbage and pork —
were nothing like the delicate
spring rolls that Chinese eat dur-
ing the spring festival. But they
served as a symbol of Chen’s
willingness to meet American
taste buds where they were and
coax them along.
In f act, in her 1962 “Joyce Chen
Cook Book,” the author starts her“Her first thought was that
they must have been too horrible
for the others to eat and they had
to hide them under the table,”
recalled her daughter, Helen, in a
Zoom call from her home in
Massachusetts. “But then the
truth came out that they sold out
like hot cakes and they asked my
mother if she would make more.”
Her kids, now in their 70 s,program. The fact that Chen was
able to essentially smuggle a film
crew into 197 2 China is a testa-
ment to her chutzpah and pio-
neering foresight.
“My mother had this philoso-
phy,” her son Stephen Chen re-
called in a phone interview from
his home in Massachusetts, “‘If
you see a door, don’t a sk if you can
go through it. Just open the
door.’ ”
That kind of initiative led the
single mom to open multiple Bos-
ton-area restaurants, patent an
Americanized wok, self- p ublish a
popular cookbook and star in a
nationally broadcast TV cooking
show at a t ime when America was
much less accepting of independ-
ent women, Chinese immigrants
and international foods than it is
today.
Even if Chen’s cooking show
didn’t take off like “The French
Chef,” h er legacy is deeper than her
name recognition may convey.
And her hard work paved the way
for many Asian American chefs.
“I have always admired Joyce
Chen not only for her cooking,
but her business acumen as well,”
Ming Ts ai, a fellow New England-
er, TV chef, entrepreneur and
restaurateur, said in an email. “I
would see her line of woks and
stuff, and that would inspire me
to one day have my own line. Xie
xie [Thank you] Chef Chen for
leading the way!”
‘They sold out like hot cakes’
Born in Beijing in 1917 and
raised just outside of Shanghai,
Chen learned cooking by watch-
ing the family’s c hef, a ccording to
Stephen.
As the Communist regime was
taking over China in 1949, she
fled with her husband, Thomas,
and eldest children, Henry and
Helen. They landed in Cam-
bridge, Mass., just outside Bos-
ton, “because my mom’s friends
in China who went to Harvard
and MIT said if you go t o America,
you have to live in Cambridge,”
Stephen recalled.
In 1 955, according to family
lore, Chen got her first taste of
culinary success when she made
egg rolls for her children’s school
fair and dropped them off at the
goodie table. When she returned
soon after, they had disappeared.
JOYCE CHEN FROM E1
Joyce Chen was a celebrity chef ahead of her time
COURTESY OF STEPHEN CHEN
Joyce Chen harvests radishes with children during a trip to Beijing in 1971.“My mother had this philosophy: ‘Ifyou see a door, don’t ask if you can gothrough it. Just open the door.’ ”Stephen Chen, Joyce Chen’s sonD.C. WINE SPECIALS
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