1. Cecilia Sun Yun Chiang was a Chinese-American restaurateur and chef, best known for founding and managing the Mandarin restaurant in San Francisco, California.
23 Facts About Cecilia Chiang
1. 2.
Cecilia Chiang's father, Sun Long Guang, was a railway engineer who was educated in France and her mother, Sun Shueh Yun Hui, was from a wealthy family that owned textile mills and flour mills.
3.
Cecilia Chiang's mother had bound feet, but her parents refused to follow the tradition with their children.
4.
Cecilia Chiang escaped with a sister from the Japanese occupation of China in 1942 by walking for nearly six months to Chongqing, where they settled with a relative.
5.
Cecilia Chiang met Chiang Liang, a former economics professor at Fu Jen Catholic University, and by then a successful local businessman whom she married, establishing a comfortable life in Shanghai.
6.
Cecilia Chiang settled in Tokyo, Japan, with her husband and children in 1949.
7.
Cecilia Chiang opened a Chinese restaurant, Forbidden City, which was successful with expatriates and local diners.
8.
Cecilia Chiang later visited San Francisco to visit her sister, whose husband had died.
9.
Cecilia Chiang wrote a deposit check for $10,000 to secure their rent, which the landlord refused to return after her friends backed out of the venture.
10.
The location had no parking, which Cecilia Chiang cites as a difficulty, and she could not get an ABC license to serve cocktails because she was not a permanent resident.
11.
Cecilia Chiang was the first non-white resident of the neighborhood, and was admitted by the homeowner association only after they learned that she was from an upper-class background in China.
12.
Cecilia Chiang was known for entertaining VIP guests in the dining room, wearing fancy gowns and expensive jewelry.
13.
The San Francisco Culinary Workers' Union called the location a "sweatshop", which prompted Cecilia Chiang to sue them for libel.
14.
Cecilia Chiang opened a second Mandarin in Beverly Hills, California, in 1975.
15.
Cecilia Chiang handed over control of that restaurant to her son Philip in the 1980s.
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Cecilia Chiang sold The Mandarin in 1991, and it closed in 2006.
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Cecilia Chiang is often credited with having introduced San Francisco, and the United States, to a more authentic version of Mandarin cuisine.
18.
Waters said that what Cecilia Chiang did to popularize Chinese cuisine in America is what Julia Child did for French cuisine.
19.
In 2013, Cecilia Chiang won a James Beard Foundation Award for lifetime achievement.
20.
In July 2016, a six part cooking series, The Kitchen Wisdom of Cecilia Chiang was released on PBS.
21.
Cecilia Chiang was married to Cecilia Chiang Liang, a professor of economics and later a successful local businessman, whom she married in Shanghai.
22.
Cecilia Chiang moved back to San Francisco in 2011 where her daughter May and grandchild Alisa Ongbhaibulya live.
23.
Cecilia Chiang died on October 28,2020, in San Francisco at the age of 100.