Toronto Star: “Beautiful touching award winning book” article featuring Janice Wong's book CHOW
My painter/writer cousin Janice Wong was written up in the Toronto Star this weekend.
Janice
is the author of the award winning CHOW – from China to Canada:
Memories of Food and Family. Janice was recently in Winnipeg to
recieve the Gold Award for the category of “Canadian Food
Culture.” Here is an excerpt from Toronto Star writer Marion Kane.
Read the full article here: beautiful touching award winning book
(Whitecap; $24.95) garnered gold in the Canadian Food Culture category… Hers is a tale of growing up in Prince Albert in
north-central Saskatchewan, where her father, Dennis, was in the
restaurant biz.
His second venture in this field was a Chinese
Canadian eatery called Lotus on the town's main drag, which he opened
in 1956 and operated for more than 20 years.
“He never succumbed to
putting red dye in the sweet-and-sour sauce,” recalls Wong, adding that
her dad came from a family of cooks. “We grew up on his food,” she says
fondly of the man who died in 1999.
He left a slew of handwritten
recipes that were the inspiration for her book. “I thought I'd collect
all the recipes and notations, using his handwriting as an abstract
element,” she says, “as a gift to my family and to sum up my loss.”
The
result was heart-warming. “It caused a chain reaction of reunions of
family and friends,” she adds, including a book launch in her hometown.
Writing
the book helped Wong get to know her father better. “He worked six days
a week,” she continues. “When we were little, we were pulled out of bed
to see him at midnight.”