Hsiao-Ching Chou Discusses 'Chinese Soul Food'
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Hsiao-Ching Chou discusses 'Chinese Soul Food' [00:00:05] Welcome to The Seattle Public Library’s podcasts of author readings and library events. Library podcasts are brought to you by The Seattle Public Library and Foundation. To learn more about our programs and podcasts, visit our web site at w w w dot SPL dot org. To learn how you can help the library foundation support The Seattle Public Library go to foundation dot SPL dot org [00:00:36] Anything. Hi everybody. I'm Stesha Brandon I'm the literature and humanities program manager here at The Seattle Public Library. Welcome to this evening's event with shouting Chow presented in partnership with Elliott Bay Book Company and Sasquatch books. [00:00:52] Thank you to our authors series sponsor Gary Kunis and to Seattle Times for generous promotional support of library programs. Finally we are grateful to the Seattle Public Library Foundation. Private gifts to the foundation from thousands of donors helped the library provide free programs and services that touch the lives of everyone in our community. So if any of you are library foundation donors here with us tonight thank you so much for your support. Now I am delighted to introduce shout Ching Chao cha ching is the former food editor at The Seattle Post Intelligencer newspaper. And that's actually how we first met back in the day. [00:01:30] I think that was a good I don't now 10 years ago maybe 15 18 years ago. Like yesterday. [00:01:39] Anyway shushing has appeared on national television and radio including Anthony Bourdain No Reservations and on my favorite The Splendid Table she's won the coveted Bert Green Award for the International Association for Professionals for Excellence in Feature Writing and she has started a public relations firm that focused on restaurants including clients from some of the fanciest and best restaurants here in Seattle including tilth maps and the market Kalis and Polya pizza. That was back in 2007 she started that firm and then for several years until 2017 she was the director of communications at the Institute for Systems Biology a nonprofit Biomedical Research Association. As if that is not enough she keeps one foot in the food world as an instructor at a hot stove society which has chef Tom Douglass's cooking school at the hotel Ondra. She's also a member of the James Beard Foundation's cookbook committee and also a member of the dommes Esko Seattle and also volunteers on the communications committee for Fair Start dot org. What have you guys done today. I don't know. Without further ado please help me welcome shouting Chao here to talk about her new book Chinese soul food [00:02:59] Thank you guys so much for coming. www.spl.org/podcasts l 206-386-4636 [00:03:02] I'm going to read a little bit from the book today and then I've selected a few pieces and if we have some time I have an essay that is not in the book but is about the book that I would like to read as well. So let's start from the beginning because apparently that's a very good place to start. [00:03:21] Cornish Julie Andrews and I wanted to read the foreword to you because I invited my mother to write the foreword and it's you know just to give her a piece of this book and a voice because she has a very strong voice. She's a writer herself. And all of these stories in this cookbook come from family stories and her wanted to give her a piece of that. So this is the from the forward in the primrose path in 1936. [00:04:01] Ogden Nash writes her pictures in the papers now and life's a piece of cake. While reading my daughter's searchings cookbook I thought about this quote because her message ultimately is that cooking Chinese food in a western kitchen is not as hard as it may seem. Most Chinese people go into their kitchens without ever consulting a cookbook. I don't. My mother certainly didn't. The very first dish I ever cooked for myself was a bowl of rice noodle soup with daikon radish strips and a few pieces of dried shrimp for flavor. It was only because my mother was not home that day that I had to feed myself. The kitchen was normally off limits to me. The walk was there. The stove was there but my mother never let me touch them. Her biggest regret was that her circumstances prevented her from attending school so her dream was for me to complete my formal education. She didn't want me wasting my time in the kitchen. So even though I had no ambition for becoming an academic I reached graduate school and earned a master's degree from the University of Missouri School of Journalism for her. [00:05:15] My father was a military man with unlimited income. Luckily our family received a small stipend for bill for military dependents. That helped. I was born during the Sino Japanese war and I didn't even have a single photo to prove my existence. Thus my character was built on the value of not asking for too much in life and appreciating whatever I may receive after I fulfilled my mother's dream. I married a man I met in college. We both had steady jobs and fair incomes so we started a family and had Shao Ching first then her brother Hong. Then when my husband decided to pursue his master's degree also at the University of Missouri we set forth on our future life in the United States. With my husband in school and two young children in tow I eventually gave up my career as a journalist. That was when I started taking cooking more seriously. We were in a campus apartment with some hand-me-down cookware but no walk but I tried every way to feed my family including making dumplings skins with a sawed off broomstick as a rolling pin and it was blue. [00:06:27] By the way our third child David Jr. was born at University Hospital near campus. [00:06:34] The only cookbook I always had was my memory of good eating soy I joked that I was an impressionist cook. It wasn't until we opened a small carry out restaurant that I even bought a Chinese cookbook to double check some details related to technique. Searching explains that the purpose of this book is to encourage people to get into the kitchen and start cooking. 2 [00:07:00] That's what we did. And so can you. I am mostly touched by the Food excuse me by the fond family memories she has brought back with her stories. A warm kitchen is the heart of the family and that is sweeter than cake. [00:07:17] So my mother wrote that I said you know would you I really want you to write the foreword to this and I gave her the manuscript and she read it and wrote this piece and it's in Mandarin in the front of the book. And I said you write it in Mandarin because she's she's such a good writer in Chinese. And I thought and I said I'll help you with the translation. Not only did she write it in Chinese. She wrote the translation as well and I had only to refine some of the transitions. So that's just it was just so great that she took this with such enthusiasm and she's sitting right here in purple in the great hat. [00:08:00] So she's here. [00:08:06] She was a journalist back in the 60s in Taipei. So if you can imagine a female journalist at that time and in Asia. [00:08:14] I mean that's pretty incredible achievement. [00:08:18] All right so I'm going to read from the introduction just to kind of set the set the scene a little bit. Growing up in my family's Chinese restaurant and then becoming a professional food writer did not give me license to write a cookbook. I had the ingredients so to speak an immigrant story restaurant credibility journalism degree a food column in The Seattle Post Intelligencer newspaper a fan base and agent even polite interest from a couple of New York publishers. But I had nothing to say. It wasn't until after I had gotten married had two children quit the newspaper and changed career paths a couple of times that the cookbook declared to me its need to exist. Life had taken me on the scenic route toward this end and it began with the Chinese soul food blog in 2007 which I had started in hopes of maintaining my weekly practice of writing and providing a hub for my fans. I also wanted to create a space to share a straightforward but comforting Recipes Inspired by foods I ate growing up. [00:09:27] The ingredients wouldn't break the bank and the recipes could be made possibly with a small child literally wrapped around your leg or while wearing a baby in a sling. That scenario was a reality for me at the time.