a child, my mother was curious about food and cooking, but her mother didn’t want her to learn how to cook—that was a job for the hired help. My mother would sneak into the kitchen and follow the family cook around with wide-eyed fascination. She’d watch as the cook’s cleaver danced across the wooden chopping block, gracefully mincing garlic; she enjoyed the sight of smoking ginger-infused peanut oil with green onion threads being poured over a freshly steamed sea bass, and the sizzling sound the oil made as it hit the fish.
At the age of seventeen, she escaped the Cultural Revolution and moved to Hong Kong, where a matchmaker paired her with my father, Tony. My parents and my paternal grandmother lived in a modest apartment where my mother adjusted to the bustling streets and bright lights of the city. Although she had followed the family cook around, she had little experience actually cooking on her own; however, she was expected to prepare my father’s favorite dishes immediately upon becoming his bride. She started experimenting with the succulent seafood and plump ducks that Hong Kong had to offer, and her love affair with cooking began.
My late mother Leeann and I on the set of our PBS cooking series, Double Happiness.
In 1956, my parents and grandmother were given the opportunity to immigrate to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where my aunt “Goo Ma” and uncle “Bue Jang” operated the Kwong Tong Noodle Company. It was a culture and climate shock. My mother did her best to cook her favorite Cantonese dishes, but it was difficult for her to even find fresh ginger at the grocery store. She learned to improvise, and started growing bok choy, Chinese long beans and Asian eggplant in our tiny garden.
In addition to my two sisters who immigrated with my parents from Hong Kong, my mother gave birth to my brother and my other sisters in the mid-1950s through the mid-‘60s. Knowing it was hard for her children to assimilate as Chinese-Americans, my mother did everything she could to help us fit in, like bringing us to Sons of Norway events, but every night she made us Chinese food. We didn’t fully appreciate the gourmet Chinese meals we were served, and secretly wished we were eating Hamburger Helper like all the other kids. Foolish, I know.
Me as a spiky-haired baby with my family.
My mom with Hillary Clinton.
My mom with her “bestie,” Martin Yan.
My mom teaching Chinese cooking classes in the 1970s.
My mother had a talent for sewing (which explains her expert dumpling pleating), and became a seamstress, making fifty cents an hour. A few years on, my mother threw a thank-you luncheon for her sewing clients, thoughtfully crafting a menu of crispy Cantonese egg rolls, silky egg-drop soup, lemon chicken and three-flavor lo mein with homemade egg noodles. As always when she was cooking, she put her affection and gratitude into the food she made. Her customers had never tasted anything like it in their lives, and they encouraged her to start teaching classes and catering.
In those early days, my mother couldn’t drive a car, much less afford one, so she had to take the bus to her cooking classes. She couldn’t carry everything at once, so she’d leave some of the groceries at the bus stop, get to her destination and turn around and take another bus back to pick up the remaining groceries. And she did this in the wintertime, too! No wonder she gave us that puzzled look whenever any of us complained about anything.
By the mid-1970s, our basement had become a bustling catering kitchen producing tray after tray of shu mai, crab wontons, sesame noodles and sweet-and-sour pork. In the Chinese-American tradition of child labor, we’d come home from school, put down our backpacks and start frying. While other kids were ice skating or hanging out at the mall, we were usually making wontons or stringing snow peas, but we didn’t mind. We sensed that our mother was serving a greater purpose, and we felt like we were assisting a master performing magic in our kitchen.
One day, she had the opportunity to cater a party attended by Sean Connery and Robert Redford—famous movie stars! We all knew something special was happening to our mother. Soon after, she was given a chance to open her first restaurant. The deal was clinched once investors, including Sean Connery (he was hooked after tasting her food), came on board, and the restaurant was an immediate success. She had introduced authentic Chinese cooking to Minnesotans and they couldn’t get enough. Before long, more restaurants followed.
Although she sold the chain to General Mills at one point, she ended up buying it back a few years later. While building her empire, she was full of surprises at every turn. My sister Laura, who worked for the company, told me how my mother would make a calculation in her head and come out with it before the bankers could pull out their calculators; once they checked, they’d say, “Wow, she’s right.”
At the height of her career, when she was running more than thirty restaurants, she remained focused on the quality of the food. I remember one of her managers telling me about the time she came in after a board meeting during the lunch rush. She saw the kitchen was overwhelmed, so she rolled up the sleeves of her Chanel bouclé jacket and started stir-frying. As much as she was a mother to us, she had over a thousand employees who also considered her to be their mother, with her strict, yet nurturing, style of training and management.
My mom with Robert Redford at her restaurant in Minnetonka, Minnesota.
My mom at one of her restaurants helming the stir-fry line.
My mom, me and my sister Jeannie preparing for Chinese New Year celebration.
The basic stir-fry technique demonstrated on page 18.
My mother left the company in the late 1990s, but the Leeann Chin restaurant chain is still alive and well, with over forty-five locations spread across the Twin Cities area.
This is where I come in.
About fifteen years ago, I was in living in Los Angeles working as a film and television marketing executive, and I had completely forgotten how to cook (I could still make 5,000 pieces of shrimp toast, no problem, but a dinner party was something else entirely). My favorite thing to make for dinner was reservations. I was so busy trying to make my mother proud by succeeding in my marketing career that I had actually done the opposite by forgetting how to cook.
I invited some clients over for dinner, and had a panic attack because I didn’t know what I was doing. I called my mother for advice, and instead of telling me what to do she jumped on a plane with a box of frozen lemon chicken on dry ice. Once she arrived on my doorstep, she not only cooked the entire dinner, but kept everyone believing that I had cooked the whole thing by myself. That’s just the kind of mom she was. But when she opened my refrigerator to find only champagne and yogurt, she was mortified, and set out
