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Grace Zia
Chu
How did a woman born in Shanghai in 1899, whose Wellesley major was biology and who received the certificate of the Department of Hygiene and Physical Education in 1925 evolve into a renowned cooking teacher? The path was anything but direct. The "bossy big sister" in a family of nine children, Chu graduated from Shanghai’s McTyeire School for Girls and won a scholarship that enabled her to attend Wellesley. She was 21 years old and an orphan when she arrived at college.
In the 1920s, the variety of foods available in the entire Boston area was only a fraction of what can be found in the town of Wellesley now. Chu’s staples were rice, cooking oil, salt, sugar, and vinegar, all of which she could easily obtain. She bought soy sauce and dried shrimp in Boston’s then minuscule Chinatown. "I had three major limitations," she remembered in 1982. "I had very little money to spend; I had no means of refrigeration and had to buy everything just before I cooked it; and I couldn’t create exotic odors that would offend the girls in the dormitory whose idea of a foreign spice was an onion." Following her graduate work for the HPE certificate, Chu returned to China and taught physical education at the McTyeire School and at Ginling College in Nanjing. In 1928, she married Chu Shi-ming, an army officer and official in the Nationalist Government, who eventually became a general in the Nationalist army. (She had met him when he was studying military science at M.I.T. ) From 1935 to 1947, she was a vice president of the world Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), and she was adviser to the women athletes of China in the 1936 Olympics.
Based in Manhattan, Grace Zia Chu taught cooking for the next thirty years in an array of venues that included radio, television, and appearances in cities around the United States and Europe. While her cookbooks include some recipes for complex dishes, she is best known for her ability to encourage beginners. For example:
Chinese Stir-Fry Spinach 1 pound fresh spinach, or 1 10-ounce package prewashed spinach 2 tablespoons vegetable oil 1 teaspoon salt ½ teaspoon sugar
Alongside her love for Chinese cooking, Chu developed an abiding interest in Asian arts and crafts. In 1953, she operated a shop, Madam Chu Gifts, north of Sarasota, Florida. Later, she co-authored three books on the subject: Oriental Antiques and Collectibles: A Guide" (1973); Oriental Cloisonné and Other Enamels" (1978); and The Collector’s Book of Jade" (1978). Chu moved to Columbus, Ohio in 1986, to be near her sister and her son. She lived to be 99 years old. Written by Sally Linden
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Grace
Zia Chu ’24 has been called the Julia Child of Chinese cooking.
In the 1950s, when very few Americans thought they could prepare
Chinese food in their own kitchens, she became a successful teacher
of Chinese home cooking. In 1962, she published The Pleasures
of Chinese Cooking; food critic Craig Claiborne wrote in The
New York Times " Book Review that it "may
well be the finest, most lucid volume on Chinese cooking ever written."
By 1976, Chu had published Madam Chu’s Cooking School and
had been named a member of Les Dames d’Escoffier, an independent
New York chapter of Les Amies d’Escoffier, an international society
of culinary professionals.
In the
winter 1982 issue of Wellesley magazine, Chu reminisced about
her early months at the College, "far from home, in a world
full of tall strangers and inedible food." Although she "loved
the ice cream," she was able to tolerate little else that was
served. Salads, for example, had never been on the table in China,
and cheese was "all but unknown . . . . "The proportion
[of a Chinese meal] was exactly opposite from that in an American
meal," she explained in the Wellesley article. "Instead
of eating meat, a little starch and fewer vegetables, . . . our
meals were mostly starch, in the form of rice, with a good helping
of vegetables and very little meat. Since we had no ovens in China,
everything was cooked on top of the stove. " Although Chu had
never cooked before, she began trying to replicate Chinese home
cooking on a hot plate in Pomeroy in an effort to cure her unrelenting
homesickness. 
Chu’s
husband was posted as a military attaché to the Chinese Embassy
in Washington, D.C. in 1941. There, according to her obituary in
The New York Times, "Mrs. Chu took on the entertaining
duties that transformed her into an ambassador for Chinese food."
She returned to China after World War II but in 1950 began permanent
residency in the United States. She became a US citizen in 1955.
