Buwei Yang Chao

Yang Buwei at a young age (Nanjing Daily) c 1910?

Buwei Yang Chao (née Buwei Yang; Chinese Traditional: 楊步偉, Simplified: 杨步伟, Pinyin: Yáng Bùwěi) (1889–1981) was an American Chinese physician and writer of recipes and was married to linguist Yuen Ren Chao. She was one of the first women to practice Western medicine in China

Life

She was born in Nanjing into the Yang family, but was raised by her aunt and uncle. She was sent to Japan to attend the Tokyo Women's Medical College. After graduating as a medical doctor, she returned to China where she met her future husband. They married on June 1, 1921. They had four daughters; the eldest, Rulan Chao (趙如蘭), helped in the writing of her book of recipes.

Education

At very young age, she was sent to a school in Nanjing. The entry exam of the school asked her to write about the benefits of a girl been educated. She wrote: " Women are the mother of all the citizens". Later she went to a single sex Roman Catholic school in Shanghai.

Medicine

She was sent to Tokyo to study to become a medical doctor. Later, she claimed that she only became interested in cooking after finding that Japanese food was inedible.^[1] She was annoyed at the arrogance of the Japanese and they made her studies difficult in Tokyo. In 1919 she returned home at the request of her father who died before she saw him. She and Li Guanzhong established the Sen Ren Hospital. This specialising in gynaecology and she was amongst the first women doctors practising western style medicine.^[2]

Marriage and cooking

In 1920, she met and subsequently married the linguist Y.R. Chao. The witnesses were Hu Shi and one other friend. Hu's account of this simple ceremony in the newspapers the next day described the couple as a model of modern marriage for China's New Culture generation.^[3]

Work

Yang's family pose for a picture during their 25th wedding anniversary

Buwei Yang Chao wrote two notable books: How to Cook and Eat in Chinese and An Autobiography of a Chinese Woman. How to Cook and Eat in Chinese was written when Buwei and Yuen Ren lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts during World War II. Yuen Ren was conducting language training for the US Army and Buwei would prepare meals for the instructors using local ingredients. ^[4] With the help of her daughter Rulan, she prepared over two hundred and thirty recipes. Some came from her travels with her husband as he collected dialect data from across China and often they lived with the subjects of Yuen Ren's language research. Though the recipes from those days were not written down, she often recreated them from her memory of their taste. ^[5][6] Buwei opens the book by saying "I didn’t write the book”:

The way I didn’t was like this. You know I speak little English and write less. So I cooked my dishes in Chinese, my daughter Rulan put my Chinese into English, and my husband finding the English dull, put much of it back into Chinese again. ^[7]

Yuen Ren coined the terms "pot sticker" and "stir fry" for the book, terms which are now widely accepted.^[8] Jason Epstein of The New York Times, who later met the couple as publisher of a reprint of the book, observed that Mrs. Chao admitted that she could hardly speak, much less write, English, so it must have been her husband who wrote in her name.^[8] However, Yuen Ren told an interviewer that Rulan did the translation: "She would complain sometimes, 'Daddy, you have so many footnotes. Somebody will think that you translated the book,' not that she was the translator."^[9]

Her second book, An Autobiography of a Chinese Woman: Put Into English By Her Husband Yuenren Chao, recounted the eventful life she led prior to her meeting her future husband, and their travels together. Both books were first published by The John Day Company, New York.

She also wrote a third book: How to Order and Eat in Chinese to Get the Best Meal in a Chinese Restaurant (1974).

Notes

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