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After her divorce in 1966, Chen sold the original restaurant to her ex-husband, who converted it in 1972 to a Japanese eatery called Osaka. [14] With her divorce from Thomas Chen, she legally reverted to using her maiden name, Joyce Liao, but continued use the Joyce Chen moniker for her business.
- Joyce Chen Learned to Cook from The Family Chef.
- She Starred in A Chinese Opera as A Teen.
- Joyce Chen Cooked For Harvard Heavyweights.
- She Self-Published Her First Cookbook.
- She Shared A Cooking Show Set with Julia Child.
- She Patented Her Own Cookware.
- The USPS Immortalized Joyce Chen on A Stamp.
The daughter of a wealthy railroad administrator and city executive, Joyce Chen had a privileged upbringing in pre-Communist China. She learned to cook by watching her family in the kitchen as well their private chef. By age 18 she had gained enough culinary expertise to host her first professional dinner. When she was forced to flee Shanghai with ...
Joyce Chen was a woman of many talents. Before leaving China, she sang the lead role in the opera White Snake in her late teen years. The show retold the Tang Dynasty-era legendof a snake who transforms into a woman to find love. The role required some serious vocal chops, but Chen decided to pursue a career in front of the stove rather than on sta...
The Chens settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near Harvard and MIT. There they met many students from China who craved the cuisine from their home country. The demand for authentic Chinese food, plus the positive reception to the cooking she’d done for her children’s school events, encouraged Chen to open the Joyce Chen Restaurant in 1958. Her num...
By the early 1960s, Joyce Chen had garnered enough clout to write her first cookbook. Her publisher refused her demands to include full-color images of the recipes, pushing her to publish the book on her own dime. The investment paid off; she sold more than 6000 copies of Joyce Chen Cook Bookto her restaurant patrons before it went to the printers....
Joyce Chen’s career soared to new heights when she landed her own cooking show in 1966. A few years before, The French Chefhad debuted on PBS and created the blueprint for the modern cooking show. Julia Child introduced millions of American viewers to classic French cooking, and PBS hoped Chen would do the same for Chinese cuisine. Joyce Chen Cooks...
After finding success as a restaurateur, cookbook author, and cooking show host, Joyce Chen continued to add achievements to her resume. Launched in the early 1970s, Joyce Chen Products brought Chinese utensils and cookware to the American market. In addition to selling traditional tools, she patented a new type of flat-bottomed wok with a handle, ...
Joyce Chen died in 1994 after being diagnosed with dementia, but her legacy as a pioneering chef has grown. In 2014, her portrait was featured in the USPS’s “Celebrity Chefs Forever” stamp series, which also spotlighted such culinary legends as James Beard and Edna Lewis. A picture book about her life titled Dumpling Dreams: How Joyce Chen Brought ...
- Michele Debczak
Along with her husband Thomas Chen and their two children Henry and Helen, the family left Shanghai, China in 1949 and moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts. While living near Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she frequently met Chinese students that missed the food they’d grown up with.
Born in Beijing, China, in 1918; died in Lexington, Massachusetts, in August 1994; immigrated to the United States in 1949; married; children: Helen Chen; Henry; Stephen. Source for information on Chen, Joyce (1918–1994): Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia dictionary.
Chen and her husband Thomas fled China in 1949 when the Communists took over. They settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1958 Chen opened a Chinese restaurant in Cambridge. The restaurant flourished, and in 1973 a larger Cambridge restaurant was opened.
Immigrating to Cambridge from Beijing in 1949, Joyce Chen is one of Cambridge’s most influential and famous chefs. She changed the way Americans and diners all over the world eat Mandarin Chinese cuisine. We rounded up ten facts about her:
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Entrepreneur. by Stephen Chen, president of Joyce Chen Foods. Reproduced from joycechenfoods.com with permission. Born in Beijing in 1917, my mother Joyce Chen came to this country with my dad, sister and brother in 1949. We moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where friends of the family had settled, and where I was born.
