Known by many for her regular appearances on Good Morning Australia with Bert Newton during the 1990s, Elizabeth Chong is a doyenne of Chinese cooking who has promoted Asian cuisine and its cultural notes to generations of Australians through her cooking school, cookbooks, and tireless efforts of cultural promotion.
Despite her work over many decades in forging ahead as a Chinese-Australian businesswoman, her success was never guaranteed.
The settlement of Chong’s family in Australia dates back to her grandfather, who came as an indentured labourer during the 1850s.
The Chen family Melbourne, 1928. Elizabeth Chong's father, William Chen Wing Young, standing second from the right at rear. Photo courtesy of Mabel Wang Source: Culture Victoria
Chong was only three when she migrated to Australia with her family during the 1930s.
Despite growing up in Melbourne’s close-knit Chinese community, she admits she didn't know much about Lunar New Year until she reached her 20s, and it was partly due to Australia’s immigration policy at the time.
My mother used to keep a Chinese calendar. Every time when I say it’s such a date, she’ll say on the Chinese calendar, it's a different time.
“But at the time we never went to the temple or to the shrine. Nothing like that at all.”
Public celebrations of Chinese culture in Australia can be traced back to the Gold Rush era when Chinese dragons appeared in Castlemaine in 1867 and Beechworth in 1874, for community fundraising events and pagan processions to mark Easter.
In 1901, the Chinese community successfully lobbied to be included in the celebrations to mark Federation, and they created a Chinese Citizens’ Arch across Swanston Street in Melbourne and featured two dragons in the procession.
However, one of the first laws passed by the new Federal Government was the Immigration Restriction Act, better known as the White Australia Policy, which placed restrictions on non-European migration to Australia.
The 1910 song, 'March of the Great White Policy' by W.E Naunton. Source: National Library of Australia
The law ushered in decades of closed-door Lunar New Year celebrations until subsequent governments began to dismantle the policy between 1949 and 1973.
It was only during the late ‘70s that the nation was comfortable promoting multicultural community voices.
With Melbourne’s Chinatown reinstating the dragon procession in 1979 - which now sits at the centre of a revitalised annual Lunar New Year celebrations – and the influx of Asian migrants during the 1980s, Chong was able to learn more about the event and actually take part.
Being an important and respected voice for the food industry in Melbourne’s Chinatown, she spent years celebrating Lunar New Year with her restaurateur friends and family members.
File: A Chinese Lion Dance is a feature of Lunar New Year celebrations. Source: Jin Wu Koon Dragon & Lion Dance Association
Sometimes, she prepared a large table at home and invited family members to capture the holiday joy that she had missed out on for many years.
Princess of the ‘Dim Sim' empire
As a matter of fact, the ability to publicly celebrate Lunar New Year during the first 20 years of her life was not the only thing Elizabeth Chong was deprived of due to the White Australia Policy.
Her family endured separation for years because “the exclusion of Oriental people" forced her mother – who was Chinese-born and heavily pregnant at the time - to be deported despite being married to an Australian citizen and having two Australian-born children.
Her sister was born in Hong Kong on the way back, while Chong was born in China years later.
Due to the policy, her father had to travel back and forth between Australia and China to look after his business interests and see his family.
The family was eventually reunited in Melbourne after their visas were granted five years after they originally left.
Chong’s father William Chen Wing Young owned one of the largest wholesale fruit businesses at the iconic Queen Victoria Market.
He was also credited with creating and popularising the Dim Sim, or ‘dimmie’ as it was known.
The name, Dim Sim, translates to ‘dot heart’ – of little morsels that dots the heart – and are a dumpling-style snack packed with meat and vegetables, inspired by the traditional Chinese siu mai.
While a siu mai in Chinese yum cha restaurants is delicate, steamed and the portion of an appetiser, Wing Young’s adaptation of the recipe increased its size and the thickness of the pastry so that they were “large enough to satisfy Western appetites and strong enough to withstand freezing, reheating and transportation”.
Aussie Dim Sim were invented by Elizabeth Chong's father, William Chen Wing Young. Source: Flickr/Sharon Robards CC BY 2.0
The Dim Sim was served in Wing Young's Melbourne restaurant, Wing Lee, during the 1940s, and gained popularity among other Chinese restauranteurs across Victoria.
Wing Young quickly seized the opportunity by commissioning a German engineer to build a machine to manufacture Dim Sims by the thousands.
The novelty snacks were given to unemployed Chinese gold miners, sold in caravans at football stadiums and racecourses, and served as lunch to workers making weaponry and uniforms during World War II.
During the war, the limited supply of meat saw the ingredients change slightly, with less meat and more cabbage and celery, though Chong recalls that the alterations made it “simply taste better”.
She says if it wasn’t for her older brother Tom, Australia may not have seen the item so widely available in takeaway shops, supermarkets and restaurants.
“One day my father asked Tom to take a box of Dim Sims to a Chinese business in Cheltenham, but the weather was nice and he decided to go out fishing with his Greek friend Joe in Mordialloc instead. Joe owned a fish-and-chip shop, and Tom gave him the box of Dim Sims.
“The shop didn’t have a steamer, so they dropped the Dim Sims into the basket and deep-fried them. Joe rang up a few days later and said his mates all loved them. Soon every fish-and-chip shop in Melbourne wanted to sell Dim Sims.”
A pioneer in promoting Chinese cooking
Despite her father’s success, Chong didn't hold plans to enter the food industry.
While at school, she had “improbable aspirations” of becoming a concert pianist, or a journalist.
However, she ended up becoming a teacher, before she left that field to get married.
With only one year of experience as a primary school teacher, she says she discovered her “love and natural inclination to want to share and teach”, which has sustained her throughout her 57-year career, teaching Australians the art of preparing and appreciating Chinese cuisine.
Chinese cooking wok
Chong says she didn’t start cooking until after she got married because she had a mother who was a “wonderful cook”.
However, her father’s shop offered a glimpse into the culinary world and how chefs develop their dishes and concepts, which were conversations that she says became “an important part of everyday life”.
Since she had her own family, Chong began sharing her culinary knowledge with the wider community, from people in the neighbourhood to the parents whose children went to the same school as her children.
Her skills of articulation and demonstration made her a popular hit during school fund-raisers.
In 1961, she opened her cooking school after several years of teaching at home. It was there that she shared her passion for Chinese food and trained over 37,000 students.
Elizabeth Chong at an workshop organized by Tongji and Fudan university alumni. Source: Jian Yang
In her classes, Chong not only shared techniques and secrets of Chinese cooking but also explained some of the traditions associated, for example, it’s considered courteous to take a modest portion of a whole fish at the centre of the dinner table, instead of your full share.
They loved it, because I brought myself, my family, my cuisine and my culture into their homes, in a personal way.
"I got job satisfaction or job reward immediately because people would tell me that, when they leave the classes, how much they loved it.”
Celebrity chef
The success of the cooking school began to open new doors, and she was encouraged by a student in the publishing industry to create a cookbook.
Her first book, The Heritage of Chinese Cooking, won the prestigious Prix de La Mazille award in 1994 and helped her secure a spot as a TV regular on Good Morning Australia.
Since then she has been active in the public eye, authoring books and hosting monthly walking tours of the historic Chinatown precinct, projecting great influence as a powerful advocate of Chinese cuisine.
Elizabeth Chong at her apartment Source: Greg Gong
In 2019, she was made a Member of the Order of Australia for significant service to the hospitality sector and to the promotion of Chinese cuisine.
Now at age 89, Chong is proud of the work she has put in which not only made Australians more accepting of Chinese food but also helped other migrants from Asia, particularly those from China, to find their place in multicultural Australia.
“In the last 10 years, I have had a new sense of reward, because I have seen migrants and particularly Asian migrants coming from Indonesia, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and mainland China come up and thank me, because when they first arrived in this country, they felt a sense of not belonging, of alienation.
Some of the award highlights of Chong's career. Source: Greg Gong
“And then they see this Chinese woman talking about Chinese culture and Chinese food on television. And what's more, being able to speak and express herself in English, but being a Chinese person.
"That gives them a sense of connection or [a sense of] starting to feel a little bit more at home in a strange country.”
