Buwei Yang Chao

Buwei Yang Chao (née Buwei Yang; Chinese Traditional: 楊步偉, Simplified: 杨步伟, Pinyin: Yáng Bùwěi) (1889–1981) was an American Chinese physician and writer of recipes and was married to linguist Yuen Ren Chao. She was one of the first women to practice Western medicine in China

Yang was born in Nanjing into the Yang family, but was raised by her aunt and uncle. At a very young age, she was sent to a school in Nanjing. The entry exam of the school required her to write about the benefits of educating girls. She responded: "Women are the mothers of all citizens". Later she went to an all-girls Roman Catholic school in Shanghai. She later went to Japan to attend the Tokyo Women's Medical College.

Yang moved to Tokyo for studies in medicine. She later claimed that she only became interested in cooking after finding Japanese food to be inedible. She was also annoyed by what she perceived as the arrogance of the Japanese, stating that they made her studies difficult in Tokyo. In 1919 she returned home at the request of her father, who died before she could see him. She and Li Guanzhong established the Sen Ren Hospital, specialising in gynecology. She was amongst the first female doctors practicing Western-style medicine in China.

In 1920, she met and subsequently married the linguist Y.R. Chao on June 1, 1921. The witnesses were Hu Shi and one other friend. Hu's account of this simple ceremony in the next day's newspapers described the couple as a model of modern marriage for China's New Culture generation. The Chaos had four daughters; the eldest, Rulan Chao (趙如蘭), helped with the writing of her book of recipes.

Buwei Yang Chao wrote two notable books: How to Cook and Eat in Chinese and An Autobiography of a Chinese Woman. How to Cook and Eat in Chinese was written when Buwei and Yuen Ren lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts during World War II. Yuen Ren was conducting language training for the US Army and Buwei would prepare meals for the instructors using local ingredients. With the help of her daughter Rulan, she prepared over two hundred and thirty recipes. Some came from her travels with her husband as he collected dialect data from across China and often they lived with the subjects of Yuen Ren's language research. Though the recipes from those days were not written down, she often recreated them from her memory of their taste. Buwei opens the book by saying "I didn’t write the book”:

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