IMG_5537

Wok this Way

Celebrity chef and food author Katie Chin prepares to step out of the kitchen and onto the Mānoa Valley Theatre stage for her one-woman show. Photo courtesy Katie Chin

Everything changed for Katie Chin the day her mom showed up on her Los Angeles doorstep with lemon chicken in her carry-on.

At the time, Chin was an executive at Fox News and frantically looking for cooking help when she phoned her mom, the founder and namesake of Leeann Chin restaurant chain. But instead of simply offering advice, her mother boarded a plane out of Minneapolis with frozen lemon chicken preserved on dry ice, all in an effort to save her daughter’s dinner party.

Of course, Chin couldn’t be saved from her mom’s mortification. After all, not only was her own refrigerator devoid of contents except for yogurt and Champagne, but much to Mom’s chagrin, Chin had apparently forgotten how to cook a proper meal.

“I felt like I had to work that much harder to prove to them that I would be OK and make them proud,” recalls Chin, a Minnesota native, when explaining her Chinese parent’s views on her nontraditional career path into film and TV marketing.

“It was like I spent all those years trying to do that — getting the corner office, having the title … But then it ended up, as a result, disappointing my mother because I had forgotten how to cook.”

Whipping up a delicious meal is no longer a problem for Chin. In fact, cooking has become her life.

From serving as a guest judge on Iron Chef America to — prior to Leeann Chin’s passing in 2010 — co-hosting shows with her mother for the national PBS cooking series Double Happiness in Hawaiʻi and a Food Network special in China, and making appearances on The Today Show, Chin has carved a path forward as a celebrity chef. Her culinary career has also involved authoring books such as 300 Best Rice Cooker Recipes, Everyday Thai Cooking: Quick and Easy Family Style Recipes and Everyday Chinese Cookbook: 101 Delicious Recipes from My Mother’s Kitchen.

“Cooking for me is an expression of love,” Chin says. “Cooking for me is creating a bridge from the past to the present to the future. Cooking for me is honoring my mother’s story every time I cook one of her dishes.”

Recently, though, she’s stepped out of the kitchen and onto the stage for her upcoming one-woman show, Holy Shiitake! A Wok Star is Born!, scheduled for Feb. 6 at Mānoa Valley Theatre.

And, while her late mother was not a huge fan of wordplay, Chin and her family, on the other hand, are a “house of puns and cannot be stopped.”

Holy Shiitake! tells the story of her mom’s origins as a Chinese immigrant who became a seamstress to a renowned restaurateur credited for bringing Chinese cuisine to the Midwest. In the show, Chin embodies her mom, siblings and other people who influenced her life.

“I always felt this innate desire to tell my mother’s story and honor her legacy,” Chin says. “I love being on stage. I love being a performer. I’m not a trained actor nor playwright, so it was really taking a huge leap and risk to do this, but it just felt right.”

Raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Chin didn’t always have a close connection to cooking or her Chinese heritage.

She and her siblings were the only Asians in a school of mostly Norwegian and Swedish students. At the time, she admits to feeling embarrassed about being Asian and struggling with cultural shame.

“Growing up, we always felt like our parents wanted us to be totally Chinese inside the household, but outside of the household they wanted us to assimilate and be American,” she says. “So sometimes those worlds would collide, and it’s not easy navigating that as a child.”

Throughout high school, while other kids were out ice-skating or going to dances, Chin and her siblings helped in the kitchen at her mom’s first restaurant (which, fun fact, was invested in by the original James Bond, actor Sean Connery).

In her youth, Chin admits to barely knowing her mom because Leeann was always busy. It was only when Chin was in her late 30s that they finally developed a close-knit relationship. As Chin fostered a love of cooking, this became a gateway for her to really love and understand her heritage.

When Leeann opened her first restaurant in the early 1980s, many Minnesotans had never tasted authentic Chinese cuisine beyond chop suey and chow mein. She then ended up training 1,200 Scandinavian employees on how to cook Chinese food.

Chin hopes to carry on her mom’s torch of demystifying the art of Chinese cooking and making it accessible to the everyday home cook.

Through her business Wok Star Catering, she often does fusion foods that pay homage to her mom’s authentic recipes but with new spin — for example, edamame hummus and miso butter shiitake mushrooms with udon noodles. Another popular specialty is raspberry Nutella wontons served over ice cream with raspberries and powdered sugar.
Chin currently hosts an Instagram show called Small Bites with Chef Katie Chin, held every Monday at 5 p.m. PST. It’s 30 minutes and features chefs, actors, authors and more.

She also hopes to turn her one-woman show into a TV series or a film, expand the production to other cities, and adapt it into a memoir or a collection of essays.
“Many people have said, ‘You don’t have to be Asian American. You don’t have to be a woman to relate to the show,’” she says of Holy Shiitake!. “There’s so many universal themes in the show that people can relate to. I think especially if you’re Asian American and/or a child of immigrants, you will definitely relate to a lot of the themes.”

One of these themes is mental health.

According to Chin, in Asian American and Pacific Islander culture, people are taught not to complain or burden their children with their hardships.

Her own mother went through many struggles, but just moved forward with a smile.
“We’re (AAPI community) taught to live with shame. I feel like that’s not a healthy way to live, and I certainly don’t want my children feeling like they have to hide things from other people,” says Chin about breaking the cycle of generational trauma with her twins, Dylan and Becca. “It’s very important to teach our children (that) it’s OK to talk about what you’re going through. It’s OK to ask for help. It’s OK to lean on others for support because all of those things make you a whole person.”

Chin says her mom really saved her during a difficult divorce from her first husband.
“It’s not like she would come out and directly want to talk about my feelings. It’s more like ʻI’m going to heal you through cooking instruction,’” Chin explains. “But, when she was teaching me how to make a new kind of dumpling or whatever, she started to open up about her life in China.”

And, there isn’t a day that goes by in which Chin doesn’t think of her mom. She describes Leeann as a soft-spoken but powerful woman, and the type of person to treat a janitor with the same regard as a CEO.

Leeann was also a constant student and teacher of food. She could taste any cuisine and know exactly what went into it, according to Chin. And, as soon as they would get home, Leeann would immediately want to remake the dish.

“She was always hungry for knowledge. She was always wanting to learn. She was always wanting to improve her techniques. She was constantly mastering her craft, even when she was in the last chapter of her life,” Chin says. “I want to be remembered as a person that loved my heritage and that gave back to the community. I feel like these are lessons I learned from my mom and if I can just be a tenth of who she was, I will feel proud that I lived a good life.

“I feel like her memory comes alive again (through cooking),” she adds. “I feel like it’s a way for my children to learn about my mom because she passed away when they were 2 years old. But, each time I make one of her special dishes, her memory lives on through me, and then, through them.”