Katie Chin: Honoring Her Mother’s Legacy While Paving Her Own

 

During a February weekend, chef Katie Chin offered four performances of her one-woman show Holy Shiitake!: A Wok Star is Born at the Minnesota History Center in Saint Paul. 

Chin is known for accomplishments in the food world, appearing on Food Network programs and talk show segments, cooking for the Obama administration, and offering cookbooks and catering through her company Wok Star Cuisine. 

Chin also is involved in philanthropic endeavors, including as culinary ambassador to the National Pediatric Cancer Foundation, co-chair for the Teach AAPI board (an Asian American movement), and as a commissioner for the city of Los Angeles Tourism. She’s a busy woman. 

Readers may know of her mother, Leann Chin, who made waves in Minnesota in the 1970s for authentic Chinese cooking. Twins owner Carl Pohlad and actor Sean Connery invested in her restaurant franchise. Connery had become familiar with the restaurant while in town to visit Robert Redford, who was filming Ordinary People, written by Minnesota author Judith Guest.

 

 

Leeann Chin is now a fast-casual chain of restaurants with over 39 locations across the Midwest, but it started as an elegant, sit-down restaurant. It was so successful, General Mills bought the franchise — before eventually selling it back to her years later.

Minnesota Women’s Press sat down with Katie Chin to discuss her life, her mother’s life, and what led Chin to take a playwriting course. This eventually culminated in Holy Shiitake — a tribute to her mother, her career as a chef, and food as a symbol of healing, belonging and pride in one’s heritage. 

Tracing the Chin Legacy

Growing up on 46th and Bryant in South Minneapolis, Chin and her siblings were consistently cooking in their basement — which became the initial home base of Leann’s catering company in the 1970s. 

Before her catering company took off, Leeann worked as a seamstress for 50 cents an hour. Locals who bought her dresses were impressed by her cooking — shrimp toast, lemon chicken, shumai  (steamed dumplings). Previously they had only ever been exposed to eating chop suey — according to Katie, a bastardization of Chinese food that was “completely foreign to our mom.” These influential women helped spread the word, leading to Leeann’s catering business. 

Katie rebelled against the concept of cooking when she was a child. While other kids were at the mall or ice skating, “we were trapped in this basement, like Chinese child labor, frying chicken pieces and making dumplings,” said Katie. “Later in high school, I worked at the restaurants in the kitchen and as a hostess. It’s expected and understood in Chinese-American culture that you serve your family.” 

Leeann was a woman of few words, according to her daughter, only speaking when she had something to say. “A lot of the communication — and this is commonplace in Asian-American culture — is not spoken. It is looks that are given and understood,” said Katie. 

Food was part of that unspoken communication. “When my brother got all A’s, he got a whole fish and black bean sauce. When I got all B’s, I got pork chow mein. Food was sort of a double-edged sword,” Katie explained, “because it was an expression of her love, approval, or disapproval.”

Wanting to escape what felt like “a dumpling prison,” Chin went to college in Boston, eventually moving to Los Angeles to become a marketing executive in the film and television industry for 14 years. But cooking crept back into her life. 

When Chin needed to cook food for a work dinner party, she called her mother in a panic. Naturally, Leeann “got on a plane with frozen lemon chicken. She showed up at my doorstep, cooked the entire meal, and she let everyone think I had cooked it, because she was just that kind of mom.”

This gesture from Leeann spurred a major life change for Katie, who subsequently quit her marketing job, left her husband, and began pursuing a career as a chef alongside her mother. Katie re-learned how to cook the foods she grew up with, under her mother’s precise guidance — a process that allowed them both to reconnect with each other.

“It was a meditative time together, just cooking, and her patience. During this really magical time, she opened up about her life in China and all these things she endured: being in an arranged marriage, being an immigrant, discrimination and sexism she faced as an immigrant businesswoman in Minnesota in the ‘80s,” says Katie. 

Leeann even opened up about the death of Katie’s older sister, Pattie — a subject previouslybrushed under the rug. “Not only did I become extremely close to her, but I began to really appreciate all the sacrifices she made. I found love in being an Asian American, where I had a lot of cultural shame growing up.”

At first, Katie took charge of the marketing side of the catering business while Leeann stuck to the cooking. Eventually, Leeann left for a European getaway before a major catering event, realizing Katie would not learn how to make the recipes unless she was on her own. 

A Wok Star is Born: Coming Home to Minneapolis

Katie performed her one-woman show in a few different cities, but coming home to the Twin Cities in February was special. “It was magical. I know the impact my mother had on the Twin Cities community. I’ve lived in LA for over 30 years, but anytime I meet anyone from Minnesota, and they find out who my mom was, they start screaming.” 

Despite four successfully attended shows in the Twin Cities, Chin acknowledges that it felt heavy with the recent events of Operation Metro Surge. “I felt a little awkward doing it, because of what’s going on in the community. My heart was very heavy. I thought the shows would get canceled.” 

Minnesota History Center decided the show must go on. Explains Katie, “The community needs this. They need stories of hope. They need stories of successful immigrant families. They need joy. They need love.”. She expected low-level anxiety in the Twin Cities, but at the venue, she says everyone checked their stress at the door; the show was a success. 

Prior to her mother’s passing in 2010, Katie decided to write about her mom. After COVID shut the world down, Chin took a master class on writing a solo show. “I did a staged reading at Theater Mu a few years ago. Then I wanted to do it for my friends in L.A., so I rented a theater. Then someone recommended a director, then a dramaturg, and the whole thing was shaped, economized, and became a one-hour show. I’ve done it 15 times.” 

The show traces Chin’s childhood in Minnesota, her mother’s entrepreneurial journey, and their relationship blossoming later as they cooked together. “It’s a love letter to her and how we, much later in life, joined forces. Everything I do now is to honor her culinary legacy,” Katie says.

Katie and her mother had a show on PBS called “Double Happiness,” as well as a Food Network segment in Hong Kong. They opened an L.A.-based catering business prior to Leeann’s passing. 

“My mother seemed immortal,” Chin narrates in her show. “A kitchen warrior, who conquered every hardship with grace and determination, always at the ready to stir fry in case of emergency.” 

In cooking, Leeann escaped the pain and traumas she endured in life. “Cooking is healing,” says Katie. “I think the sheer meditative exercise of cooking or baking can be very therapeutic, mentally and emotionally. You pour yourself into it.”

Katie also believes in the capacity of cooking to open space for difficult conversations, as also exhibited with a connection with her own daughter. 

“My mom lives on. I tell my kids stories when we cook together. They learn what her passion was. My daughter, Becca and I started an online virtual cooking series during COVID. t comes full circle.”

Chin admits it took her many years to love her heritage. It took getting to know her mom better to embrace it. “I think I’m a much better mother as a result of it, and I became a much better daughter as well.”

Resources

Katie Chin’s TEDxTalk 

Cooped up Cooking With Katie and Becca

 

ChefKatieChin.com