Los Angeles, CA (09-12-2025) – In Rome during February 2020, Chiang Ching began choreographing Puccini’s Turandot at the Teatro dell’ Opera di Roma. Within a matter of days, the COVID-19 pandemic had shut down the production and put her back home in Stockholm and on her small, private Swedish island.
“Worrying about the safety of my son and his family made it very hard to get through each day,” she says. “I was like an ant going around and around in a hot frying pan.”
What came out of those fraught times was Finding Joy Through Food, A Culinary Memoir With Recipes, published by Berlin-based New Song Media and released last month in the U.S.
Chiang, whose illustrious career as a dancer, choreographer, and actress began in Beijing more than six decades ago, shares her motivation for authoring the book: “to provide a safe harbor in which to find calm.”
Alongside her delectable Chinese food recipes, she affectionately recounts childhood memories; celebrated artistic highlights; friendships with globally renowned Chinese writer Geling Yan, celebrated artist Ai Weiwei, and Nobel Literature Laureate Gao Xingjian; and cherished moments with her now-deceased Swedish husband, prominent medical researcher Dr. Birger Blombäck. She also writes about her physician son dealing with the crisis of COVID in Sweden and the simple joys of finding fruits vegetables in the woods outside her kitchen.
Her co-author, the respected Chinese photographer, Yanan, who lives and works in Sweden, provided stunning photos of Chiang’s dishes as well as of her and her family and friends in this unique cookbook-memoir.
Finding Joy Through Food is already receiving praise from the world of dance, art, and film. Here’re some of their testimonials:
“A unique book about Chinese food and life, itself a work of art,” says Anne Kisselgoff, former chief dance critic of the New York Times.
“This extraordinary work is not just a collection of recipes and photos but a testament of how to live life by enthusiastically embracing delicious taste and good feeling,” says artist Ai Weiwei.
“I cannot escape the delightful and generous spirit that is as natural to Ching as breathing. If you are so fortunate as to be a guest at Ching’s home, you will leave with more knowledge, more vision, new friends and, most of all, new revelations of tastes. That is Ching’s joy and the reason for this book,” says Academy Award winning production designer, Patrizia von Brandenstein.
Readers looking to enjoy cooking plenty of good food and learning wise life lessons will be able to purchase softcover or eBook editions of Chiang Ching’s Finding Joy Through Food , A Culinary Memoir With Recipes by visiting www.amazon.com.
