The award-winning cookbook author is rallying against pandemic-related discrimination and anti-Asian American and Pacific Islander hate.
Here’s how you’ve got the option to join her.
Figuring out why wasn’t hard.
Anti-Chinese American sentiment was rising.
Tourists who normally flocked to Manhattan’s Chinatown stayed away.
The same thing was happening inSan Francisco,Oakland,Bostonand other cities with dense Chinese American communities.
“He knew all the merchants in Chinatown,” she says.
Young moved to New York as an adult, becoming test kitchen director for Time-Life Books.
Both her work and her own appetite brought her to Manhattan’s Chinatown thousands of times.
But she was called to do something for the neighborhood she loved.
National magazineswrote features about Chinatown’s struggles.Local and national TV stationsaired stories.
Publications and celebrity chefs alikefrom J. Kenji Lopez-Alt to Andrew Zimmernpicked up on Young’s#SaveChineseRestaurantsInstagram campaign.
“Long-term change requires political power.
Grace is not political,” Chau says.
“But she wanted to do something immediate to help, bringing people to Chinatown to support small businesses.
She did a wonderful job.
We needed that immediate assistance.”
More than two years after pandemic-related discrimination harmed Chinatowns, Young’s work isn’t finished.
The ripples from Young’s advocacy continue to spread.
“I have come to appreciate that Chinatown is the story of America,” she says.
