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Biographies
2007 2006 2004
Cecilia Sun Yun Chiang
2003 2002 2001 2000
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HOME > SCHOLARSHIPS AND AWARDS > LOCAL LEADERS IN PHILANTHROPY > BIOGRAPHIES
Cecilia Sun Yun Chiang
[Note: The following biography was prepared and presented at the 8th Annual Asian Pacific Fund Gala by Board member and journalist Emerald Yeh.] Our first honoree’s name is synonymous with The Mandarin... the name of the restaurant that awakened Americans’ senses and appreciation for true Chinese food. Alice Waters says what Julia Child did for French cooking in the United States, Cecilia Chiang did for Chinese cuisine in America. In the heyday of the Mandarin’s success, Cecilia presided over an elegant restaurant that achieved a national reputation. Visitors from all over the country came to seek authentic and fine Chinese dining. She held cooking classes that saw students the likes of Julia Child, James Beard, Alice Waters, Marion Cunningham, Jeremiah Tower and Danny Kaye come through. Despite her retirement in 1991, she is a sought-after restaurant consultant all over the U.S. today, with Betelnut and Shanghai 1930 among the many restaurants she helped others create. While the spotlight always shines brightest on one’s biggest claim to fame, it’s the bumpy road on the way to that success that is sometimes far more illuminating. Such is the case with Cecilia Chiang. In listening to Cecilia Chiang tell her life story, the hours glide by like minutes... and even then, you sense you’ve only just begun to delve into the rich tapestry of her life. And on top of that, you get a craving for Chinese food as she conjures up images of smoked tea duck, dumplings and sizzling rice soup. So, between the two most revealing, life-changing episodes in her life, I’ll start with the accidental beginning of Cecilia’s now-legendary Mandarin Restaurant. It began in 1958. Cecilia was living in Tokyo with her husband and two children at the time, but came to San Francisco to spend time with her sister who had just been widowed after only two years of marriage. During her visit, she would often walk into Chinatown. One day, she ran into two friends from Japan who were planning to open a restaurant on Polk Street. Because of her restaurant experience (Cecilia had started and was running a large and successful Chinese restaurant in Tokyo called Forbidden City) and because of her English skills, her two friends asked her to help negotiate the lease. Help them she did. She even put down a $10,000 deposit with the landlord. But then, Cecilia recounts, “They backed out and I got stuck.” The friends had already returned to Japan when Cecilia found out she couldn’t get her $10,000 deposit back. “What am I going to do?” She bemoaned. “I’m new here. I don’t know anybody. This is awful... pretty awful.” But she decided to see it through and open a restaurant. Mind you, her husband and two children, ages eight and ten, were still in Japan. I asked her why she didn’t just go back to her family rather than risk losing more money opening a restaurant. She replied “I came to the U.S. to visit my sister and ended up losing $10,000. How was I going to explain that to my husband? Besides,” she added, “when you’re young and naïve, you don’t think you’re going to lose even more money. I just thought I have to try my best.” Also, having taken those recent walks into Chinatown, Cecilia saw what so-called Chinese food in America was like at the time. “Egg drop soup everywhere,” she said. “Soup that tasted like the water that’s left after you wash your wok. If people can make money with chop suey and egg foo yung, then I can do better with the real dishes from my homeland,” she thought. (Cecilia was from the north, having grown up in Beijing and lived in Shanghai. And in truth, the Chinese food being served in America’s Chinatowns then wasn’t even true to the Cantonese food served in Southern China.) So off to City Hall she went to get a permit to renovate the property she was stuck with. Then came the next rude awakening. The city clerk asked her for the address of the business. When she told him 2209 Polk, he looked up its history and informed her that seven businesses had opened and folded in that location within six years. “You are brave, young lady! Good luck to you,” he said. Cecilia left City Hall thinking to herself, “This is pretty scary. But I must concentrate on doing a good job.” When the Mandarin first opened in 1960, despite advice from friends who cautioned her against serving the unfamiliar northern Chinese cuisine, Cecilia had 300 items on the menu, including many childhood dishes she believed people would find delicious. Hers was the first Chinese restaurant to serve lamb and eggplant. She also introduced sizzling rice soup, smoked tea duck and beggar’s chicken. Back then, many of the ingredients she used, even sesame oil and sesame paste, were not available here and had to be brought in special from Taiwan. For the first year and a half, there was no foot traffic and she lost money. Cecilia’s sister told her she should just close the restaurant. Johnny Kan of the famous Kan’s restaurant paid a visit and gave her some friendly advice. “Change your cooking style,” he said. “People are happy with chop suey and pressed duck. Besides,” he added, “nobody’s even heard of potstickers.” But Cecilia kept telling herself to be patient and believed that she could make it. Little did she know that her luck was about to change overnight. That luck changed when Herb Caen walked in to the Mandarin, having been brought there by a friend. After a Chinese dinner that was a revelation, Herb Caen wrote up the restaurant in his San Francisco Chronicle column, declaring it “a new discovery, a hole in the wall on Polk Street behind a little red door. Here you will find real Chinese food.” The morning Herb Caen’s column ran, the phone started to ring at the Mandarin. More than 100 calls came in to make reservations. “It was magic, my big break,” Cecilia said. Eight years after opening on Polk Street, The Mandarin moved to Ghirardelli Square in 1968 where it was to play out its most glorious years as a 300-seat restaurant that beckoned celebrities from near and afar. On opening night, a $250-a-person banquet was served, a sold-out evening despite it being unheard of to charge so much for Chinese food. Having stirred up such an interest and a following in northern Chinese food, Cecilia Chiang shared her life’s story and her knowledge of the glories and secrets of Chinese cuisine in a book called “The Mandarin Way.” It was published in 1974 and opens with these evocative words: “How does one bring back the past, without letters or documents, remembering in an alien land? The way of life I have set out to recapture no longer exists. The last ten years have completed its destruction.” She wrote of vivid memories of a bygone era, the days of old pre-war China with summer boat parties on lakes, jazz clubs, bound feet and opium smoking. Cecilia was the tenth of 12 children in her family, all from one mother, unusual in those days of multiple wives and concubines. She was born into a wealthy, property-owning family in Wu-hsi near Shanghai, but largely grew up in what was then called Peking, in a home that was an old palace. Her childhood memories include skating on frozen lakes in winter, rowing on the same lakes in the summer, jumping rope and playing a game with a toy made up of coins tied to string. While binding feet was still customary at the time (one of Cecilia’s aunt had feet just three inches in length and could barely walk), Cecilia’s father rebelled against tradition. When Cecilia’s mother (whose own feet were bound) said their daughters’ feet must go through the same painful torture if they are to marry, her father said “Then I’ll support them. I don’t want our daughters to suffer as you did.” True to his word, none of the nine sisters in the family had their feet bound. Cecilia did not learn how to cook growing up. She says, “It may seem surprising to Western ears to hear that Chinese gourmets seldom if ever cook. But their knowledge is acquired by watching and eating.” Chefs were highly prized and society sought their secret recipes almost as eagerly as they did paintings and calligraphy. Cecilia recalls warm memories of Chinese New Year feasts in winter, the way her mother prepared chicken with sweet chestnuts for drop-in visitors, and casual family dinners that centered on a bowl of soup. This life in China came to an end with the Japanese occupation of China beginning in 1940, “a turning point in our lives,” Cecilia said. And thus began the other life-changing episode in Cecilia’s life. She was a teenager at the time. Japanese soldiers would ransack her family’s home and terrify the servants so much they became speechless. “Life in Peking became more alarming day by day,” she says in her book. “No longer did the trains pour the delicacies of every province into the capital. There was no rice, no wheat flour, only rice husks and husks of green peas.” The family’s properties, stores, movie houses, country palace and possessions were confiscated or damaged by bombing. “At school we noticed some of our friends were disappearing and we did not dare to ask where they had gone,” she said. So it was in the winter of 1942-43, that Cecilia and her #5 sister set out to make their way to Free China. The border was 500 miles but they wanted to go much further, all way to Chunking, to find an uncle. “I do not believe we had any conception of the dangers or reality of difficulties we might face,” she recalled. “At that time, one did not plan ahead or one might lose courage; one had to face each moment as it came.” Cecilia’s mother was horrified and wept, but made thick layered, cotton-soled shoes for the two daughters to wear on their journey. They donned peasant garb to conceal fur-lined clothing which would keep them warm. Small pieces of gold to pay their way were sewn into their underwear. The first leg of the journey was a week-and-a-half trip on a train with no food. When they got off to change trains, Japanese soldiers robbed them of their luggage. Now all they had was what they were wearing, plus a washcloth and a toothbrush. And yet, the worst part of the journey was still ahead in a land infested with bandits, and roads lined with Japanese and Chinese machine gun posts. “Afraid is perhaps not the right word,” she wrote. “One cannot live in constant fear and take action; one could not stop to think; each move, each step, needed a decision on the spot and we could not think beyond the immediate moment.” So they trudged through frozen yellow mud, hearing gunfire everyday and bombs exploding in distance. For six months, the two sisters made their harrowing escape. Twenty-five hundred miles later, they finally made it into Free China, but only after being carried over a deep ditch by rope. As they walked into the small border town, Cecilia saw pictures of Chiang Kai-Shek and Madame Chiang kai-shek painted on a big wall, proclaiming, “Welcome to Free China.” At that sight, the two girls burst into tears, and wept with exhaustion, gratitude and sadness at their family left behind. Even as she recalls this moment 60 years later, Cecilia’s voice still becomes paralyzed with emotion and her eyes moisten from the intense feelings that well up to this day. As Cecilia and her sister faced their new life of freedom, their hair was so matted down from months of no washing that they had to be shampooed with gasoline. Their bodies were so flea-ridden that they had long ago given up scratching, and they could finally peel off the fur-lined clothing that they wore into the hot summer months because they dared not remove their overlying disguise of peasant coats. Their perilous journey was still not over. They were to lose a brother in prison and another sister would commit suicide during the Cultural Revolution that followed. And years later, when Cecilia had married, she and her husband were to make another escape, this time from the Chinese Communists. They made it onto the last plane to fly out of Shanghai in 1949. But with three seats left on the plane, they could only take one of their two children with them. The decision fell to Cecilia’s husband, who chose to take their two-year-old daughter. Their son Philip, only a few months old, was left behind in the care of Cecilia’s sister who managed to get him out of China and into Taiwan. When I asked Cecilia what it was like to leave a child behind, she quietly and simply said, “I have gone through a lot in my life.” She did not see Philip again until a year or so later when Cecilia’s husband was able to bring him from Taiwan to Japan to reunite him with the rest of the family. And it was there in Japan, where Cecilia’s husband was posted as a commercial attaché at the Chinese mission, that Cecilia would start her restaurant Forbidden City because she missed Chinese food so much. Then she went to San Francisco to help her bereaved sister and our story now comes full circle. Looking back, Cecilia says she is grateful to have known the best of that vanished world in China before the wars intruded, a world of banquet parties on boats with fish for the dinner caught from lake, and opera singers and musicians among the revelers on board as the moon rose serenely into the clear sky. “That life is gone forever. But if I remember the past with gratitude," she said, "it is also without regret. But for the war, I would have never known that I could work, and support two children and carve a career for myself in a new country. My eyes had been opened to other ways and other freedoms." Today, both her children have followed her footsteps by opening their own restaurants. Her daughter May had a Chinese-Thai restaurant in San Francisco called Kites and her son Philip hooked up with a friend to open up a successful chain of restaurants called P.F. Chang’s Bistro. Over the years and to this day Cecilia continues to share her ways with people even beyond her family. She has sponsored some 30 relatives and their friends and THEIR friends to come to the U.S., taking care of everything from providing basic kitchen utensils to schooling that included educations at Yale and UC Berkeley. And about seven years ago, Cecilia turned her helpful efforts toward the Chinese-American International School in San Francisco, known as CAIS, the nation’s first Mandarin immersion K-8 school. She became passionate about the school after witnessing the way students learn Chinese at the school. It is what she wished had been available in San Francisco to her children May and Philip when they were young. “My kids never had the chance to learn Chinese in this way, “she said. “Our culture is so old and rich and there is so much to pass on.” And it’s not just Chinese children learning at CAIS. During one of her visits to the school, an African-American boy went up to her and said, “Chiang PoPo, ni hao ma?” "That’s when I was really sold," she said. Cecilia has since started a merit scholarship program at the school where she continues to be instrumental in raising money so that it now stands at $80,000. Just as Cecilia has found a way to educate Americans about what real Chinese food is, she is now helping to preserve and pass on Chinese heritage in this country in the most indelible way, through the written and spoken word. Four students at CAIS are benefiting from the Cecilia Chiang scholarship program. So to help me introduce you now to our first honoree tonight, Cecilia Chiang, a woman who has demonstrated time and again her courage, graciousness and generosity, we bring up to the podium Sarah Tang, one of the students studying at CAIS through the generosity of a Cecilia Chiang scholarship.
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