JANICE WONG is a visual artist who lives in Vancouver, Canada.
CHOW is her first book.

In 2006, Chow received the Cuisine Canada Gold award for best cookbook in the category of Canadian Food Culture.
In that same year, CBC's Costa Maragos' documentary about Chow, titled "Lotusland Saskatchewan" received an honourable mention at the 54th Columbus International Film and Video Festival.

A cookbook and a fascinating glimpse into Canadian history. Born a two-pound preemie in 1917, Dennis Wong may have begun his love of food after spending the first months of his life keeping warm in his mother's cooking oven.
Miraculously surviving his tenuous beginning, Dennis went on to pursue an ambitious culinary career, opening two Chinese-Canadian cafés in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, to introduce countless adventurous Canadian diners to Chinese food.
In Chow, Dennis's daughter Janice Wong tells her father's tale through heart-rending stories and traditional Chinese village recipes.
A collection of more than 50 simple family fare dishes, Chow contains early photographs, immigration documents, 1940s restaurant menus, and handwritten recipes that trace the history of some of Canada's first ethnic restaurants. Written with refreshing sincerity, Chow is both a terrific cookbook and a detailed record of an intriguing chapter in Canadian history.

Chow chosen as course material for UBC Department of English, Asian Diasporic Literatures, 2016-17

Chow chosen as course material for Professor Glenn Deer's English 480 class, Asian Diasporic Literatures, Department of English, The University of British Columbia, 2016-2017.
"Food, cook and eating are biologically necessary and socially powerful: we cook food to survive, but also to reinforce social bonds, to celebrate tradition, to evoke memories of home, to compete with other cooks, to impress the eater, and even to beguile and seduce. This course will explore food in literature, in cookbook selections, and films across different cultures and nations, including Asian North American and local Vancouver contexts. Readings will include theories of foodways and books by Maxine Hong-Kingston (The Woman Warrior) Gish Jen (Typical American), Fred Wah (Diamond Grill), and Madeleine Thien (Simple Recipes). Tasteful excerpts from local cookbook/memoirs (Chow), by Janice Wong and the renowned Vikram Vij and Meeru Dhalwala will be sampled. Films will include Juzo Itami's Japanese "noodle western" Tampopo, Ang Lee's Eat Drink Man Woman, and the restaurant documentaries of Cheuk Kwan..."

Room Magazine picks Chow

In this beautiful volume, artist Janice Wong weaves together recipes, family stories, photographs, and found artifacts to create a unique and personal portrait of Chinese Canadian history. Wong writes with care and charm about growing up in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan in the 1960s, where her father ran two eateries. She also delves back generations to document how her grandparents (immigrants from China to Vancouver Island in the mid-1800s) and parents built lives in Canada in the face of open anti-Asian racism. By sharing some of his tempting recipes--from chau siu bow to sour cream chocolate cake--Wong pays tribute to a father she clearly admires. Wong deftly blends genres to explore the powerful connection between food and memory in a text that's equally enjoyable as memoir and cookbook.

—from Room Magazine Alissa MacArthur

Chow Events 2009 | 2010

Reading | Mission Public Library
Mission, March 3, 2010
Reading | Burnaby Public Library
Burnaby, November 5, 2009
3 Readings | Edmonton LitFest
Edmonton, October 23-25, 2009

Spezzatino Magazine: Diasporic Dining:Family, History, and Comfort Food

According to the philosopher Rosi Braidotti, travel and memory blur space and time. When traveling, she observes, we are always preoccupied with time (either hurrying or waiting); we exist in a kind of “in-between” moment and place; and we pass through spaces that are both ever-changing and timeless: the airport lounges, train stations, and bus terminals whose physical environments are constantly refreshed with moving bodies yet always seem to remain exactly the same.

Sequential Tart says: A scrumptious and warm book

I love food memoirs, and finding one about my local food culture delights me. The Chinese food scene in Canada is plentiful and vibrant, and although many people would assume that this is due to more recent influxes of immigrants, Janice Wong's book recounts her parents' early lives in Canada and the Chinese history that is often overlooked by Canadian scholars.

Erudit Cuizine: The Journal of Canadian Food Culture: Chow offers a glimpse into the past

My Saskatchewan mother-in-law often ate at Prince Albert’s Lotus Café in the 1960s. She remembers the restaurant as not only the place to go for a good meal at a reasonable price with lemon meringue pie ‘to die for,’ as she described it, but also for re-entry into civilization on her way home from a teaching post even further north. But to the owner, Dennis Wong, Prince Albert must have felt a far cry from his previous home in Vancouver, and farther still from the remote Guangdong province of his ancestors.

Chow Receives Gold Award at Cuisine Canada + University of Guelph Culinary Book Awards Gala

Cuisine Canada the University of Guelph honour winning titles at their 10th Anniversary Celebration for the Canadian Culinary Book Awards, Toronto, November 2007. CHOW received the Gold award in 2006 in the category of Canadian Food Culture.

Chow Wins Gold: a delightful evening at the Cuisine Canada gala culinary book awards dinner, Winnipeg, September 16, 2006: Robert McCullough, Marie Nightingale, Janice Wong

Lotusland Documentary Receives Honourable Mention

Costa Maragos' CBC documentary on Chow and the Wong family
in Saskatchewan receives an honourable mention at the 54th Columbus International Film and Video Festival, also known as the Chris Awards. The Chris Awards is one of the oldest and most prestigious documentary, entertainment, and informational competitions in North America.

Another CBC Documentary

CBC NEWSWORLD aired Halya Kuchmij's documentary The Chan Legacy for the Generations Series during the month of July 2007.
The Chan Legacy documents the story of Dennis Wong's grandfather, Reverand Chan Yu Tan, and his descendents. The film portrays the shared history of many early Chinese-Canadian Pioneers. The story begins in 1896 and continues to present day. Included in the documentary is a segment on Dennis Wong and Chow: From China to Canada: Memories of Food and Family.

Families re-trace their roots through the Generations Series, a six-part series airing in July on CBC NEWSWORLD.
Generations: The Chan Legacy, produced by Halya Kuchmij, narrated by Michele Cheung.

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

"Chow is an utterly authentic memoir,"says Books in Canada

Elegantly presented and delightful is Janice Wong’s Chow, with the subtitle of From Canada to China: Memories of Food + Family. It comes from Vancouver’s Whitecap Books, which specialises in food culture, and has become very good at it. Wong is a sharp observer both in and out of the kitchen, and a writer of real charm. Her memoir is about growing up in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, during the 1960s, where her father Dennis ran a pair of restaurants, one Western, the other Cantonese. On the evidence of the book’s recipes, Wong senior was an excellent chef. He was also an interesting and decent human being, and Ms. Wong is a faithful daughter, sticking strictly to his written recipes and passing on the ones she merely remembers.

Her fastidiousness pays off. Chow is an utterly authentic memoir, and the recipes are excellent—including one for Dungeness crab in black bean sauce I happened to have been looking for since I first had it at Vancouver’s On On, which is where Wong hints that it came from.

-Brian Fawcett, Books in Canada

CBC documentary on Chow and the Wong familyairs on The National

Costa Maragos' CBC documentary on Chow and the Wong family
in Saskatchewan aired on CBC TV's The National on Friday, December 22, 2006 and on local stations in Saskatchewan on Wednesday, November 29, 2006.

"An affectionate bridge...an important glimpse and microhistory into a time that has since disappeared," says Victoria's Monday magazine

Playing Chopsticks
Chinese food must rank as one of the world’s most popular foods. Excluding the Chinese themselves—who naturally would agree—cities like Paris have more than 1,500 Chinese restaurants. Paris?

Janice Wong knows of this love affair with Chinese cooking. Her father Dennis, born in Victoria, moved his young family to Saskatchewan, opening his first Chinese eatery in Prince Albert. Wong writes that Chow: From China to Canada: Memories of Food & Family is both a cookbook and the 80-year-old story of two Chinese-Canadian families (her father’s and her mother’s) who lived and worked in B.C. and Saskatchewan from the early 1900s on.

"Beautiful, touching, award-winning book,"says Marion Kane, Toronto Star Newspaper

Making Lemonade from Lemons
WINNIPEG When it comes to awards, I may have fooled myself into thinking I'd bought that lofty adage about it being "an honour just to be nominated."

I know I dearly wanted to believe this when my book Dish: Memories, Recipes and Delicious Bites (Whitecap; $24.95) was short listed in the Special Interest category of the Canadian Culinary Book Awards held recently in this Prairie city during Cuisine Canada's national conference.

After all, I was up against two top-notch books and I knew it was best to keep expectations low.

Word on the Street in Vancouver + Chow in Winnipeg

CHOW and Ricepaper Magazine at Word on the Street,
and an opportunity to chat with Fred Wah, author of Diamond Grill. Vancouver, September 24, 2006


Habeeb Salloum, author of "Arab Cooking on a Saskatchewan Homestead", C.J. Katz, editor of Savour Life online magazine and Janice Wong. Habeeb's book and CHOW took silver and gold awards in the Canadian Food Culture category at the recent Cuisine Canada and University of Guelph Culinary Book awards, Cuisine Canada national conference, Winnipeg Manitoba, September 17, 2006.

Gremolata chooses CHOW as top pick for the holidays

Gremolata 4-star rating: Gremolata's Dean Tudor made this one of his 2006 top picks for the holidays! Gremolata's is an online newsletter from Toronto...helping readers to eat and drink well, by providing timely information about local, seasonal and specialty ingredients.

This book has just won a Cuisine Canada Gold medal for best English language book celebrating "Canadian Food Culture." It is by Janice Wong. She has written a memoir about her dad’s Chinese-Canadian cafes in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. She presents a collection of 50 or so family recipes, plus early photographs, immigration documents, 1940s restaurant menus, and handwritten recipes that trace the history of some of the Canadian Prairies’ first ethnic restaurants. And there is an index.

CHOW Behind the Scenes: VIEW PHOTOGRAPHS
from various events

FIND COPIES OF CHOW at a library near you.

Chow Receives Gold Award at Cuisine Canada + University of Guelph Culinary Book Awards Gala

GUELPH, ON: The winners of the Cuisine Canada and The University of Guelph's Canadian Culinary Book Awards were announced September 16, 2006, at the Gala Dinner event during Cuisine Canada's national conference in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Some of Canada's top food professionals, chosen as judges, spent the summer testing recipes and evaluating culinary books from more than 50 entered.

The winners are:

ENGLISH-LANGUAGE CULINARY BOOKS
Canadian Food Culture Category: (for books that best illustrate Canada's rich culinary heritage and food culture)

Gold: Janice Wong, Chow: from China to Canada: memories of food + family (Whitecap Books, Vancouver).

Silver: Habeeb Salloum, Arab cooking on a Saskatchewan homestead: recipes + recollections (Canadian Plains Research Center, Regina, SK).
Cookbook Category:
Gold: Michael + Anna Olson, Anna + Michael Olson cook at home
(Whitecap Books, Vancouver).
Silver: Jurgen Gothe, DiscCookery (Whitecap Books, Vancouver).
Special Interest Category: (books about food; non-cookbooks)
Gold: Pam Freir, Laughing with my mouth full (HarperCollins, Toronto).
Silver: Nazneen Sheikh, Tea and pomegranates (Penguin Canada, Toronto).
Honourable mention: Marion Kane, Dish (Whitecap Books, Vancouver)

FRENCH-LANGUAGE CULINARY BOOKS
Canadian Food Culture Category:
Gold: Anton Fercher, Chapeau! Canada (Chapeau Canada Les Grands Chefs Inc., St-Lambert, Quebec).
Silver: Michèle Serre, Les produits du marché au Québec (Editions du Trécarré, Outremont, Quebec).
Cookbook Category:
Gold: J. Dubuc, P. Cornélis, S. Triballi, Le Spa Eastman à votre table (Spa Eastman, Eastman).
Silver: Robert Beauchemin, Huile d'olive (Les Editions de l'Homme, Montréal).
Special Interest Category:
Gold: François Chartier, A table avec François Chartier (Les Editions La Presse, Sainte-Foy, Quebec).
Silver: R. Béliveau, D. Gingras, Les aliments contre le cancer (Editions du Trécarré, Outremont, Quebec).

Cuisine Canada is a national alliance of Canadian culinary professionals who share a common desire to encourage the development, use and recognition of fine Canadian food and beverages. The University of Guelph has for more than 140 years contributed to Canadian cuisine through its programs in agriculture, food science, hospitality and tourism management. It is the home of one of Canada's best cookbook collections.
For more information about the awards visit Cuisine Canada's website.

"Food and family go together,"says Vancouver Province newspaper

Food and Family Go Together
BC author blends memories and 'village food'
When Janice Wong began scribbling down her family's history for her nieces and nephews, she thought of it as a "short and lively intiation into the young lives of their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents."
She had no idea her efforts would eventually lead to national fame—and a top book award.
Wong, whose parents were both born on the West Coast—her dad in Victoria and her mother in Nanaimo—took home the "gold" in the food culture category at last week's Cuisine Canada and The University of Guelph's Canadian Culinary Book Awards.