Chow Time: Janice Wong featured in Canadian Living Magazine
Janice Wong is featured in this month's Canadian Living magazine (March 2007). The article is titled Chow Time: Celebrate Chinese New Year with traditional home-style recipes compliments of the Wong family.
Janice is my second-cousin, once removed. Her father and my maternal grandmother are cousins. Her grandmother Rose, was the younger sister to my great-grandmother Kate (Chan) Lee. We may both be Wongs now... but we are both descended from Rev. Chan Yu Tan - one of the first Chinese ministers ordained in Canada.
After the death of Janice's father Dennis (whom many people say I look like), she made up a memory book of pictures, stories and recipes as a gift to her brother and sisters and mother. It was also a gift to her nieces and nephews so that they would know more about their grandfather. One of Janice's friends saw the book, and suggested that she send it to a publisher.
Earlier this Wednesday, Janice me told the story about how her memory book full of her father's recipes from his Prince Albert SK restaurant made the journey to become a published award winning book. She was guest speaker for our writing workshop, taught by author/editor Brandy Lien Worral, produced for the Chinese Canadian Historical Society of British Columbia. She passed her original gift book around. I was amazed to finally see it, after having become involved in some of the book's promotional events from it's October 2005 book launch to being on panel discussions at the West Vancouver Public Library and Vancouver Public Library. I gazed at the pictures to see pictures of her father Dennis as a child, and grown up with his brothers and sisters, cousins - all relatives that I knew as I grew up.
Janice and me, at her studio during the East Side Culture Crawl
read the story: Eastside Culture Crawl: Visits to Janice Wong studio at 1000 Parker
Here is the script from Canadian Living Magazine:
It
was through an artist's eyes, and with an artist's deft touch, that
Vancouver native Janice Wong delved into her family's rich
history—which straddled the Canadian West in the 1920s, as well as the
political quagmire that was China in the 1930s—to share their
fascinating story in the pages of CHOW, From China to Canada: Memories
of Food and Family (Whitecap, 2005, $24.95).
In this multilayered book, for which Wong was awarded the 2006 Cuisine Canada Culinary Book Award for Canadian Food Culture, the artist-author weaves together a charming—and revealing—blend of photographs, memories, artifacts, family lore, and of course, recipes.
In crafting CHOW, Wong pays homage to both her rich Chinese heritage and her colourful family in one stroke. Her father's Lotus Café in Prince Albert, Sask.—one of Dennis Wong's two restaurants—was an institution, and it's this man who inspired many of the recipes that fill the pages of CHOW.
-Canadian Living Magazine, Food, p. 163, March 2007
In this multilayered book, for which Wong was awarded the 2006 Cuisine Canada Culinary Book Award for Canadian Food Culture, the artist-author weaves together a charming—and revealing—blend of photographs, memories, artifacts, family lore, and of course, recipes.
In crafting CHOW, Wong pays homage to both her rich Chinese heritage and her colourful family in one stroke. Her father's Lotus Café in Prince Albert, Sask.—one of Dennis Wong's two restaurants—was an institution, and it's this man who inspired many of the recipes that fill the pages of CHOW.
-Canadian Living Magazine, Food, p. 163, March 2007
The article includes recipes for Chinese Barbequed Duck, Dungeness Crab with Dow See, Pineapple Chicken and Peanut Butter Cookies
http://www.janicewongstudio.com
