Words like "legend" and "icon" are thrown around a bit too casually today. My 97-year-old grandmother, however, deserves both titles. The story of Madame Cecilia Chiang, as she's been known for decades, is well-trod territory. You can see three recent examples of her impact here, here, and here, in addition to an awesome mini-series that came out last year. (Full disclosure: I narrated it.)The TL;DR version of my grandmother's life is that in the 1950s, she (unintentionally) immigrated to San Francisco, and then (very unintentionally) opened a restaurant called The Mandarin, which would become iconic for introducing Westerners to high-end, "authentic" Chinese cuisine.
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She earned her status as a badass much earlier, though. After growing up in an aristocratic family in Beijing, with 12 siblings and a matching number of servants, my grandmother's idyllic childhood ended abruptly. The Japanese occupation began when she was in her early twenties, and she and her sister escaped to "free China" by walking for six months across the country. A decade later, after resettling in Shanghai and starting a family, she was forced to flee her home again, this time from Mao and the Cultural Revolution. She resettled with my grandfather, my dad, and my aunt in Tokyo, before moving on her own to San Francisco.
Initially, The Mandarin was a hole in the wall ("in a very bad location," she always recalls). But by dint of my grandmother's grit, luck, and uncanny sense for good food, it would evolve into a glamorous 300-seat restaurant, where she fed everyone from Henry Kissinger to the King of Denmark, Pavarotti to the Beatles. She would then open another outpost of The Mandarin in Beverly Hills, which my father, Philip, would end up taking over. Phil would go on to found P. F. Chang's. Yes, we can directly thank my grandmother for the lettuce wraps we all love, and those addictive crispy banana spring rolls.On top of all of this, as a side venture, my grandmother taught Alice Waters, James Beard, Chuck Williams, and even a young Julia Child how to cook her specialties. Today, she mentors many chefs and restaurateurs, like Corey Lee, who was nominated this year for James Beard awards in three categories, and baker Belinda Leong, who is up for best baker for the third year in a row.
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My grandmother achieved all of this as an outsider: She was an immigrant and hardly spoke English when she first arrived. She had no support system—she spoke Mandarin, not Cantonese, which was the main dialect of the diasporic group of Chinese immigrants living in San Francisco at the time. In an industry that is, to this day, notoriously male-dominated, she succeeded without any business experience—in fact, without having ever worked a day in her life. She was not even a chef—she had literally never cooked before she decided to open a restaurant by herself.Today, 25 years after retiring from running her restaurant empire, my grandmother continues to make her mark, and party like nobody else I know. At 97, she goes out for dinner nearly every night. She's been to the hottest new restaurant in the Bay Area three times before you've had a chance to look it up on Yelp. On my most recent visit, we checked out the incredible omakase at Kinjo (my grandmother's love of sushi is a holdover from her Tokyo years). The woman has an iPhone and orders her own Lyfts, for god's sake.So what can we learn from my grandmother's near-century of bad-assery? There's no single path, but here are six simple lessons and a handful of anecdotes my grandmother has shared with me over the years, that highlight exactly how to live and love your life as a beloved icon.Roughly translated, one of my grandma's favorite Chinese phrases means: "If you can do something, you do it." This "why not?" approach to life is how she wound up opening The Mandarin in the first place. While visiting her recently widowed sister in San Francisco in the mid-1950s, my grandmother ran into two friends from back home. They asked if she would help them negotiate the lease on a restaurant space they wanted to open. She agreed, despite knowing that her broken English was hardly better than theirs. While dealing with the landlord, she was asked to write check for $10,000 as a down payment. She did; immediately after, her two "friends" vanished. Saddled with a lease, my grandmother always recalls that there was no way she was going to walk away from the investment without giving it a shot. So she shrugged her shoulders and decided she would just figure it out. The rest is history.
Lesson 1: "If you can, you just do it."
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Lesson 2: "Just treat people like people."
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Lesson 3: "The boss should work harder than anyone else."
Lesson 4: "Stay informed."
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