Cooking Across Cultures, Classes, and Sexes in the 1930s: The Extraordinary Career of Mary Sia
When I taught at the University of Hawai‘i in the 1980s, I often wandered into the university bookstore during the lunch hour. Always on the shelf of local cookbooks was an unassuming volume with a bright yellow cover and a red spiral binder that bore the title, Mary Sia’s Chinese Cookbook. My copy appeared in 1984, the seventh reprint of the third edition (the first having come out in 1956).
Mary Sia’s Chinese Cookbook
Only later did I realize that Mary Sia’s Chinese Cookbook was not just finely crafted. It was also the entry point to the story of a fascinating woman whose life sheds light on the history of the Chinese in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century.
Act One: From South China to Yale and Cornell
This story of Chinese migration to the United States begins with war-torn south China at the turn of the twentieth century, medical missionaries, eloping parents, dreams of modern western society, a big Chinese family, handling plague in Hawaii’s Chinatown, and daughter Mary who became expert in tennis, playing the organ, and domestic science.
Act Two: Publishing an English Language Chinese Cookbook in Beijing (1935)
This sees Mary Sia going to elite colleges on the east coast, then with her immigrant Chinese husband to the Rockefeller funded Medical College in Beijing, teaching cooking classes to the foreigners there, and leading them on restaurant and grocery-shopping tours.
There she created a Chinese cookbook and food guide from scratch. In 1935 the Peiping Chronicle, the English-language newspaper, published Mary Sia’s Chinese Chopsticks, a slim blue hardback cookbook and restaurant guide.
Title page of Chinese Chopsticks by Mary Li Sia, Beijing, 1935
Recipes for stuffed mushrooms, soup stock, and bean curd, eggs and chicken blood soup from Mary Li Sia’s Chinese Chopsticks, Beijing, 1935
English-language Chinese cookbooks were few and far between, only a dozen or so having been published in the United States. With no one to borrow from, Mary Sia created recipes and names for techniques and ingredients from scratch.
Hataman Street which housed many of the regional Chinese grocery stores to which Mary Sia led her classes
Addresses from Cantonese, Szechuanese, Duck, Mutton, and Vegetarian Restaurants from Mary Li Sia’s Chinese Chopsticks (Beijing 1935).
Fukienese (partial) and Honan Restaurant Menus from Mary Li Sia’s Chinese Chopsticks (Beijing, 1935)
Act Three: Publishing Mary Sia’s Chinese Cookbook in Hawaii
This saw the Japanese invasion, the couple’s return to Hawaii, the raising of a family, more classes at the YWCA and the University of Hawaii, the updating of her cookbook as Mary Sia’s Chinese Cookbook that experts who know it regard as one of the most refined of introductions to the cuisine of Canton, and cooking with Julia Child.
Presumptuous it may sound but I suggest there are parallels with Julia Child. She never had the huge audience, of course. But she sold 20,000 copies of her book in Hawaii over the years and taught hundreds of men and women Chinese cooking. And she made the tricky job of negotiating race-bound Hawaii, the even more race-bound foreign community in Beijing, the pursuing of her own avocation while raising a family, the shifts back and forth between China and the United States look effortless, a feat much greater than bridging French and American cuisine.
So, OK, I’m partisan but it’s the kind of story that makes my heart beat faster. I wrote it up in an introduction to a re-issue of Mary Sia’s Chinese Cookbook so please go there if you want the full account. The book itself will be out in January for Chinese New Year.
Just one more thing. In the introduction, I said little about later generations of the family since I wanted Mary Sia to take center stage. Forty five members of the family have attended Punahou, Hawaii’s elite prep school and Barack Obama’s alma mater, in the last century, as well as endowing a major building on campus. They have contributed beyond measure to life in Hawaii (and thus the United States) in medicine, real estate, airlines, and philanthropy.
Here’s a copy of the order form from the University of Hawaii Press.
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When I was cooking Chinese food fulltime and had built my large English-language Chinese cookbook collection—now part of the Pond-Hertzmann Collection at UC Davis—Mary Sia’s books were an early addition to my collection. (I had a 1975 printing of the 3rd edition of “Mary Si’a Chinese Cookbook” and a 1938 printing of “Chinese Chopsticks”.) I have to admit, however, they never really stood out, and I never cooked a single recipe out of either one. They both always came across as vanity-press books with little substance. The Hawaii edition, if I remember correctly, was greatly simplified and used ingredients that were readily available at the time. By the time I started cooking Chinese food in the 1970s there wasn’t hardly any Chinese ingredient that I could locate here in the San Francisco Bay Area. Maybe I have to purchase this new edition and peruse it with new eyes.
Hi Peter, yes that was my first reaction too. But what was available in the mid-1930s? Not a whole lot. I admire anyone who can do the preliminary work of interpreting a cuisine for a new audience, especially at a time when it was not fashionable to embrace foreign cuisines. And obviously this is not the cooking of the elite (unlike many of the later, famous pioneering Chinese cookbooks) or of fine restaurants. Mary did not come from that kind of family or that kind of ambience. I take it as a record of everyday cooking in Canton interpreted for Europeans in Beijing and then for a mix of Hawaii Chinese who had left the plantations and people in the US military. So I value it’s simplicity and straightforwardness. I’d really like to talk to someone who (a) knew something about oridinary Cantonese food in the early 1930s and (b) who could compare the adjustments made to those made to Chinese food on the mainland. It is striking that it avoids both the chop suey/chow mein route and the let’s throw a luau route.
Hi Rachel,
I came across your blog and this particular post by chance as I was looking around for anything to do with pre-WWII Cantonese cuisine. You mentioned in your post that you would like to talk to someone about early 1930s Cantonese food. Pearl Kong could be just the person for you. I have been buying her cook books, published in HK and written in Chinese, for the last couple of years and she talks a lot about 1920s onwards Cantonese food in her books because she is the granddaughter of a then famous Cantonese gourmand. I think she was born in the 1930s, and spent her formative years living with her grandparents in Guangzhou. Her “honorary father” (loosely similar to a godfather) was also a well known gourmand and food critic, who wrote several volumes on Cantonese gastronomy in the 1950s after WWII, reminiscing also on pre-war food culture in China. Pearl spent the 60s living in California and also co-authored a Chinese cook book (a fairly boring affair) which was published by Barron i.e. she is fluent in English. She moved back to HK some time ago. She might be still around as her last book was published after 2010. Her publisher is Wanli Books, Room 1305, Eastern Centre, 1065 King’s Road, Quarry Bay, Hong Kong. Tel +852 2564 7511; Fax +852 2565 5539. I do hope you will find this useful. Kind regards, Louise.
Dear Louise, Thank you so much for taking the trouble to write about such an interesting contact and for beginning to fill in the holes in my knowledge of Cantonese cuisine of the 20s and 30s. Too bad I don’t read Chinese but I will see if I can contact her. Mary Sia’s mother, raised in a European orphanage, would have been a world away from the world of gourmands. Her father might have been closer. But surely both Pearl Kong and her “honorary father” would have known much about everyday food as well as the refined food of the highly cultured. I will keep you abreast of what I find out.
Love the new format, Rachel.
Working on it. But I am on a very steep learning curve so expect all kinds of horros as I experiment.
I don’t think the comparison with Julia is apposite. The cuisine that Julia took up when she was middle-aged was one foreign to her and her focus was on the cuisine of restaurants and the techniques of professional cooks. I have made a note to look for Mary Sia’s book in January.
Marcella, I appreciate your taking the time to comment on my post. I am sure that translating cuisines across cultures is something you have reflected on at length.
I am not sure what would be the apposite comparison for Mary Sia. Although of Chinese parentage, she grew up in a society that was already multiracial. I am not sure that going to Peking was not just as foreign for her as going to France was foreign for Julia. I’d have to check with those who know more about Chinese cooking than I do, but I suspect that northern Chinese cooking was as strange to a Hawaii-Cantonese young woman as French cooking was to a California woman.
I agree that Mary Sia did not try to replicate restaurant cooking (and I’m so glad that you point this out because I think it’s still not widely appreciated in the United States that her cooking was not home cooking).
What I wanted to stress was that creating Chinese recipes for Americans in the 1930s was a tremendous creative leap. When Julia wrote her recipes, she could count on at least a couple of hundred years of culinary interaction between the United States and France. That was not true of China and France.
Anyway I find the whole question of who acts (as you have done) as a culinary interpreter between two different cultures and how they go about doing it endlessly fascinating and I hope we can continue this conversation.
Once more you give me food for thought. I always took cookbooks, shall we say, on an “as is” basis, even though I own Rex Stout’s “Nero Wolfe Cookbook” and Henry Hill’s “Wiseguy Cookbook” (the former written from the perspective of a fictional character, the latter written by a criminal who learned cooking in the course of his activities).
Putting attention to the character of the author and the circumstances under which a cookbook is compiled is an interesting angle. Some may be less mundane than they appear.
An amazing number of them have fascinating back stories. Glad you enjoyed this.
Hi Rachel – I like the new blog layout. I’ll make sure to get this one for my collection.
Very unassuming, very interesting if you can read between the lines.
Hey Rachel,
Not sure if you would still be responding to this post, but I was using this book just today, and I was wondering if you knew what “Yennin fruit” is. A couple of google searches only leads back to Sia’s book, and while I realize this isn’t exactly a discussion about the recipes themselves, perhaps you can shed some light on this fruit or any other associated names that would help me identify the fruit.
Yes, I’m replying. I don’t have a clue what Yennin fruit is. I love these little mysteries and if I come up with anything I will be sure to tell you.