Tours
The Delicious History of Wok Wiz
Somewhere between the barbecued pork bun at North Hollywood Dim Sum and the roast duckling, which we ate with our fingers on Grant Avenue, it came to me. Marcel Proust has been happily reborn. This time he is not a sickly, bedridden, little Frenchman craving memories of food from fonder times. No, he has been reincarnated as a high-energy act named Shirley Fong-Torres.
She and her team of tour leaders conduct a variety of walking tour programs. The tours are conducted as if it were a bilingual, modernized retelling of “Remembrance of Things Past,” set in Chinatown. The smell of roast suckling pig? That’s the 1950’s when Shirley’s Daddy took her to discover the miracle of custard pie. The smell of dried fish? That is a map to the Mah Jong parlors where big girls have played their tiles for 150 years, and salted fish may be steaming in the back kitchens.
Prepare yourself. These tours are a feeding of the mind by a street poet of America’s most food-obsessed ethnic neighborhood. It is art. It is history. It is fun. But most of all, it’s delicious.
Background
Shirley Fong-Torres is founder and owner of Wok Wiz Chinatown Tours in San Francisco, California. She is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley. Before opening Wok Wiz, she was an operations manager with Levi Strauss & Co. and a middle school and high school Language Arts teacher, starting her teaching career in Texas.
Fong-Torres is an active member of the Les Dames d’Éscoffier, Chinese Culture Center and the Chinese Historical Society, and was one of the California delegates to the White House Conference on Travel & Tourism. She often serves on the board of directors of the San Francisco Convention and Visitors Bureau.
Fong-Torres has written four books, In The Chinese Kitchen, San Francisco Chinatown: A Walking Tour, Wok Wiz Chinese Cookbook, and her latest is titled The Woman Who Ate Chinatown.
Sharing her love and enthusiasm for cooking and travel, Shirley pens a column at postcardsforyou.com, and is a freelance writer for many publications. She can be seen on The Food Channel, History and Discovery Channels, as well as in the air, as she is a personality on inflight videos for Hawaiian Airlines, Qantas Airlines, and JetBlue.
Jim Duncan contributed to this article. He is a food and travel writer in Des Moines, Iowa.
