Wok with Yan’s return: Hong Kong-Canadian TV chef Stephen Yan resurfaces decades after disappearing
For more than 15 years, the television chef used his quirky sense of humour to bridge the cultural gap between Hong Kong immigrants and the wider Canadian population – then he disappeared. PostMag goes in search of the elusive king of the apron pun and discovers he was a hard man to please
“When Marco Polo went to China, you know what he did? We showed him how to make chow mein noodles, we showed him how to make wontons.”
An energetic Chinese man with a high forehead and gregarious smile is standing in a studio kitchen, dishing out as many puns as he is plates of wok-fried rice for a studio audience at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), in Vancouver.
From 1978 to 1995, Stephen Yan garnered legions of fans in Canada, the United States and beyond, largely thanks to half-hour episodes of Wok with Yan, each seeing a dish prepared from start to finish in real time. The chef would cook up Cantonese classics such as beef and broccoli, garlic spare ribs and stir-fried prawns while dressed in aprons emblazoned with witticisms such as “Wok’s New, Pussycat?”, “Wok up a Storm” or, in this early episode, “Wok-a-Doodle-Doo”.
“When [Polo] went back to Italy, he learned how to make it all right,” says Yan to the camera, in his Cantonese-inflected English, “but he changed the name chow mein to spaghetti and changed wonton to ravioli. Wok the heck, I’m going to make one thing perfectly clear: I want to make this thing right and correct. I don’t want to make it the wrong way. I want to make it the Yan way.”
Once Yan had plated a dish, he’d invite someone from the audience to dine with him, and, this being Canada in the 1980s, they would not all be proficient with chopsticks. Yan would open a fortune cookie, translate the Chinese message inside and then, as the credits rolled, the rest of the studio audience would make sure no food went to waste.
With the coast-to-coast-to-coast reach of the CBC, Yan became a national figure and arguably the first Asian celebrity television chef in the West.