For a whole generation of Canadians, Stephen Yan taught them how to cook.
Yan’s cooking show Wok With Yan aired from 1970 to 1982 before heading into syndication until 1995. In each episode, Hong Kong-born Yan demonstrated cooking a Cantonese dish in front of a live studio audience. He would have fun carving up an ingredient and share the finished dish with an audience member. Notably, there was a running gag on the show of Yan wearing an apron featuring a different “wok” pun each episode; “Wok and roll,” “Wok the heck” and “Over wok under pay” are just a few of the puns that eventually became Yan’s signature.
Paired with his infectiously boisterous delivery on the show, Yan became a beloved mainstay for Canadian audiences and endeared himself to the Asian Canadian community as one of the very few Asians on screen at the time: for many, his thick Cantonese accent and enthusiasm over ingredients was reminiscent of their parents and grandparents. Yan was the middle ground between Chinese immigrants and their Canadian-raised kids—a program that all generations tuned in for.
For over 500 episodes, the now-85 year-old Yan calmly walked the audience through classic Cantonese recipes like broccoli and beef. At the time, Chinese immigration was soaring in Canada, and with it, more people were becoming curious about Chinese food and culture. Yan’s humour and steady teachings demystified both wok cooking and Chinese culture. “I’m using jokes they understand, in a language they understand and I’m showing them that cooking is easy to do,” says Yan.
But then, he disappeared.
For nearly three decades, Yan stayed out of the limelight. He’d been famous for so long that he relished privacy. He spent time with his loved ones, ate at restaurants incognito and worked towards other goals he had: he summited Mount Everest and ran four marathons. “I go swimming everyday, I do karate, I hike mountains,” Yan says. “I enjoy my private life, when I walk down the street now, no one recognizes me.”
It wasn’t until Steve Gaskin, the founder of Toronto-based apparel company RetroKid, tracked him down about six years ago for a potential collaboration that Yan began to consider returning to public life. Growing up in the ’80s and ’90s, Gaskin grew up watching Wok With Yan with his gong gong (maternal grandfather) who babysat him as his immigrant parents worked. “My gong gong didn’t speak English, so I didn’t talk to him. He just knew he had to feed me breakfast and lunch,” Gaskin says. “So the only thing that brought us together, where I felt we had a connection, was watching Wok With Yan. There was an unspoken connection with humour and food.”
Like other Asian Canadians of his generation, Gaskin has a lot of nostalgic love for Wok With Yan—and was extremely curious about where the TV chef went after his show went off the air. For years, Gaskin pitched Yan on doing a collaboration with RetroKid, a throwback series that reminded people his age of their love of Wok With Yan and reintroduced Yan to the new generation. And while Yan was content with never returning to the spotlight, Gaskin’s perseverance and story won him over. “He’d been looking for me, because he believed in what I was doing,” Yan says. “He spent time researching and showed me his sincerity. So I gave him a chance.”
The resulting collection, and talk with fellow TV personality Pay Chen on August 10, is a testament to Yan’s legacy and the deep fondness for the show. The shirts in the collection all feature one of Yan’s iconic puns and Gaskin says that he went for bold, bright colours to evoke that same joy and humour that Wok With Yan did. A standout in the collection is the good fortune hoodie, a bright yellow garment with an illustration of a fortune cookie and “it’s woks inside that counts” embossed onto it.
“If you remember, at the end of the show he would bring an audience member down to have food with him, and they always shared a fortune cookie,” Gaskin says, adding that it was a way for Yan to share customs in a friendly, approachable manner, which was always Yan’s goal.
For Yan, who is more than happy out of the limelight, this collection and retrospective on his legacy, is an honour. “It was an honour for me to have the opportunity to [be that representation back in the day],” Yan says. By using food and cooking, Yan says that he was able to teach Canadian audiences about all the best parts of his culture. “It was an opportunity to teach a lot of people who didn’t know [about Chinese culture]. And just because they didn’t know doesn’t mean that they’ll never know.”
The RetroKid x Wok With Yan collection officially drops on Aug. 15 at 9pm EST on Retrokid.ca.
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