天津阅读表达 Rx015・2023_03 阅读表达

Growing up in San Francisco, Grace Young used to watch her father shop daily in Chinatown for whatever he needed to make traditional Chinese meals at home. As an award-winning cookbook author, Ms. Young, now 66, has spent decades shopping the same way in New York’s Chinatown.

Ms. Young developed a passion for cooking at an early age. At 13, she started to sit in on cooking classes. After college, Ms. Young moved to New York and worked in a book-packaging company. In her 30s, she realized that while she had helped create more than 40 cookbooks, she didn’t know how to make the dishes that tasted of home. “I knew if I recorded all of my parents’ recipes, it would be a great gift that I could give my family and the next generation,” she says.

Yet what began as a recipe book became a kind of memoir. Talking about food encouraged her parents to finally open up about their past, like the fact that her father had owned a Chinatown restaurant in the 1940s. “It was really an amazing way to learn not only my family’s recipes, but also my family’s story,” she says. The Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen (1999) launched Ms. Young’s work in preserving and sustaining Chinese culinary traditions.

Ms. Young has also devoted herself to supporting the restaurants in Chinatown. Since early 2020, Ms. Young has raised money to buy meals from Chinatown restaurants and deliver them to those in need. This year, instead of cooking at home for her husband and friends, she celebrated the Chinese New Year with various dishes from local restaurants in Chinatown. “If these restaurants don’t survive, Chinese culinary traditions in our city won’t survive,” she says.