Monday Magazine: Stopping for Chow:food as the meeting place between cultures

Memories and meals with Janice Wong
"Towards the end of his life," Vancouver artist Janice Wong tells me,
"my father suffered a number of strokes and lost his speech. It was very difficult for him to communicate." When he died in 1999, she tried to capture something of what her father had gone through.

Canadian Living Magazine: Chow Time

It was through an artist's eyes, and with an artist's deft touch, that Vancouver native Janice Wong delved into her family's rich history—which straddled the Canadian West in the 1920s, as well as the political quagmire that was China in the 1930s—to share their fascinating story in the pages of CHOW, From China to Canada: Memories of Food and Family (Whitecap, 2005, $24.95).

In this multilayered book, for which Wong was awarded the 2006 Cuisine Canada Culinary Book Award for Canadian Food Culture, the artist-author weaves together a charming—and revealing—blend of photographs, memories, artifacts, family lore, and of course, recipes.

In crafting CHOW, Wong pays homage to both her rich Chinese heritage and her colourful family in one stroke. Her father's Lotus Café in Prince Albert, Sask.—one of Dennis Wong's two restaurants—was an institution, and it's this man who inspired many of the recipes that fill the pages of CHOW.

-Canadian Living Magazine, Food, p. 163, March 2007

The article includes recipes for Chinese Barbequed Duck, Dungeness Crab with Dow See, Pineapple Chicken and Peanut Butter Cookies