Buwei Yang Chao

Who was Buwei Yang Chao?

Buwei Yang Chao was an American Chinese physician, writer of recipes, and wife of the eminent linguist Yuen Ren Chao.

She was born in Nanjing into the Yang family but was looked after 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, helped in the writing of her book of recipes.

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. The wives of other prominent academics encouraged her to publish a book which would share these recipes. With the help of her daughter Rulan she prepared over two hundred and thirty recipes. Some came from her travels with her husband. He collected dialect data from across China and often they stayed with their language informants. Though the recipes were not written down, she often recreated them from memory of their taste. When the recipes had been worked out, Yuen Ren wrote the text based on his wife's experience. He coined the terms "pot sticker" and "stir fry" for the book, terms which are now widely accepted. Jason Epstein of The New York Times stated "it is obvious that the professor wrote virtually the entire book in his wife's name." Buwei Yang Chao had admitted that she was almost unable to write or even speak English.