What Communist China Meant to Her

By oksana.perkins @ Shutterstock.com

In The Wall Street Journal, James R. Hagerty tells the story of Cecilia Chiang. He writes (abridged):

Born in 1920 in Wuxi, near Shanghai, she was named Sun Yun, one of 12 children. She was later given the name Cecilia by a teacher at a Roman Catholic school. The family moved to Beijing when she was 4. Her mother, hobbled by bound feet, supervised the household servants. Her father, a French-educated engineer, decided that his daughters’ feet wouldn’t be bound.

That decision was particularly fortunate because, in the early 1940s, the young Cecilia and one of her sisters spent months walking across China to flee Japanese-occupied Beijing. With a few gold coins sewn inside their clothing, the sisters reached Chongqing, where they had relatives. There she married Chiang Liang, who had taught economics at her Roman Catholic university in Beijing.

The Chiangs fled to Tokyo in 1949, just before Communist forces won control of mainland China. With friends in Tokyo, Cecilia Chiang opened a Chinese restaurant, the Forbidden City.

In the late 1950s, she traveled to San Francisco to help a recently widowed sister. While there, she found two acquaintances who were trying to open a restaurant on Polk Street in San Francisco. Ms. Chiang wrote a check for $10,000 as a deposit for the premises. The other two women then backed out of the restaurant plan and left Ms. Chiang on the hook for the nonrefundable deposit. She decided to open the restaurant on her own.

She sometimes pitched in with the dirty work, including scrubbing the floor. Once the restaurant was established, she moved it to a larger space on Ghirardelli Square. In 1975, she opened another restaurant in Beverly Hills, later run by her son Philip.

In the mid-1970s, she returned to China to see her dying father. She found that her parents had been “broomed out the door” during the Cultural Revolution and for a time were street beggars. Her father spent his final days living in a hut with a dirt floor.

She is survived by two children, three grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

With Lisa Weiss, she wrote “The Seventh Daughter: My Culinary Journey from Beijing to San Francisco.” A documentary about her life, “Soul of a Banquet,” was released in 2014.

In the 2013 interview, she recalled striving to educate squeamish Americans. “When I served fish with the head on, they said, ‘Please take that back to the kitchen and chop the head off. We don’t want to see it.’ But I still served it the original way.”

The following two tabs change content below.

• Bio
• Latest Posts

E.J. Smith - Your Survival Guy

E.J. Smith is Founder of YourSurvivalGuy.com, Managing Director at Richard C. Young & Co., Ltd., a Managing Editor of Richardcyoung.com, and Editor-in-Chief of Youngresearch.com. His focus at all times is on preparing clients and readers for “Times Like These.” E.J. graduated from Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, with a B.S. in finance and investments. In 1995, E.J. began his investment career at Fidelity Investments in Boston before joining Richard C. Young & Co., Ltd. in 1998. E.J. has trained at Sig Sauer Academy in Epping, NH. His first drum set was a 5-piece Slingerland with Zildjians. He grew-up worshiping Neil Peart (RIP) of the band Rush, and loves the song Tom Sawyer—the name of his family’s boat, a Grady-White Canyon 306. He grew up in Mattapoisett, MA, an idyllic small town on the water near Cape Cod. He spends time in Newport, RI and Bartlett, NH—both as far away from Wall Street as one could mentally get. The Newport office is on a quiet, tree lined street not far from the harbor and the log cabin in Bartlett, NH, the “Live Free or Die” state, sits on the edge of the White Mountain National Forest. He enjoys spending time in Key West (RIP JB) and Paris. Please get in touch with E.J. at ejsmith@yoursurvivalguy.com To sign up for my free monthly Survive & Thrive letter, click here.

Latest posts by E.J. Smith - Your Survival Guy (see all)

• Do You Look Marvelous? See My Friend Marc - September 13, 2024
• Kitten Update This Week - September 13, 2024
• Dershowitz Decries “Hard Left” Hijacking of Democratic Party - September 13, 2024
• September RAGE Gauge: Win Friends and Influence People - September 12, 2024
• Stay Diversified My Friends - September 12, 2024