An American Dreamer
Ethel Moy Chan, co-founder of landmark Chan’s Fine Oriental Dining, dies at age 91
WOONSOCKET – John Chan is known around the world as the man who put together the unlikely combination plate of eggrolls and jazz, but the proprietor of Chan’s Fine Oriental Dining says it might have never happened were it not for another person in his life.
Ethel Moy Chan, his mother, emigrated to the United States from China when she was 36 years old and cofounded the restaurant originally called the New Shanghai – the future Chan’s – four years later.
The mother of three died in the Hope Hospice and Palliative Inpatient Center in Providence on Tuesday. She was 91 years old.
“I was only 15 years old when they bought the restaurant, but it was definitely a family affair,” Chan told The Call. “She was there every day with my dad. She was his second pair of eyes to make sure everything was running smoothly.”
She was married to the late Ben Chan, who died in 1980. Like his wife, he was born in the Chinese village of Canton, but he arrived in the United States many years before her.
The two married when Ben, holding fast to an old Chinese tradition, returned to his hometown village to pick out a bride. Traveling by ship, it was then that Ben met Tommy Ark, another native of Canton who ran a restaurant in a place Ben had never heard of – Woonsocket – known as the Shanghai.
Ironically, Ark was also traveling to Canton to look for a bride, and he ended up tying the knot with Ethel’s cousin, Jeanne.
Ark and his new bride returned to the city to run the Shanghai, but Mr. and Mrs. Chan weren’t so quick about leaving China. They found their way to Hong Kong to start a family. John and his older brother William, of Lincoln, were both born in Hong Kong, where John lived until he was 10 years old.
In 1961 the family relocated to New
York, but four years later Ark called his old friend Ben Chan and told him he wanted to retire. He offered to sell him the Shanghai.
“With my encouragement Ben and I purchased the Shanghai Restaurant in 1965,” Mrs. Chan told author and photographer Judith Potter several years ago. “It was hard work but we were a good team. I enjoyed being the hostess and greeting our guests as they came to dinner in my home.”
A city resident, Potter included Mrs. Chan’s mini-autobiography in a collection of profiles of local women titled, “Women Working in Woonsocket – A Feminine Touch” – published in 2010.
Mrs. Chan, who was 80 when she wrote the piece for the book, said she had lived through some of the most challenging and frightening events of the 20th century – World War II, “the brutal Japanese occupation of China and Hong Kong,” the Great Depression. Yet she looked back on her life – especially her journey to Woonsocket – as idyllic.
“My journey from the Far East to Woonsocket is truly an American Dream story,” she wrote.
John said his mother had been living in her own house in the North End, with the assistance of a caretaker, until recently. For the last several years, she had been struggling with dementia and more recently had suffered a stroke.
“It’s been a rough journey, but she’s at peace now,” he said.
Despite the loss, Chan was still at his usual post around lunchtime yesterday, albeit looking somewhat downcast as he greeted customers in the lobby of the restaurant. The ornately carved, muscular wood doors at the entryway and the pair of canines that guard it – foo dogs as they’re known – are lasting legacies of his mother, decorative objects she brought back from China with her after one of her regular visits to the homeland.
John, his brother, Bill and sister Linda, all worked at the Shanghai after their parents bought the longstanding restaurant from Ark. The family renamed the restaurant New Shanghai after the takeover, but the transformation to Chan’s Fine Oriental Dining – and the hotbed of jazz and blues that it would become – began in earnest in the early 1970s.
By then, Chan was already studying toward a business degree at Providence College and he knew that he was going into the family food trade. When he graduated in 1974 and began managing the restaurant, the name was changed again to House of Chan.
It was during those college years that Chan developed a passion for jazz and blues. In those days, Chan says he used to frequent a restaurant known as Joe’s Upstairs in Providence, where an up-andcoming saxophonist named Scott Hamilton led the house band.
“Now he’s known as one of the best saxophone players in the world,” says Chan.
Chan soon developed an abiding passion for all kinds of blues and jazz music.
By 1977, under John’s management, Chan’s officially added live music to the menu of the 267 Main St. restaurant, a tradition that’s now known as Chan’s Eggrolls & Jazz. From Dizzy Gillespie and Duke Robillard to Rebecca Parris, some of the biggest names in jazz and blues have performed at Chan’s. Some have recorded live albums there, performing in the onetime Industrial National Bank that was annexed by the restaurant around 1986.
In 2011, The Blues Foundation honored Chan with its prestigious Keeping Blues Alive award and in 2015 Chan was honored with a Pell Award for lifetime achievement in the arts.
“We’re unique in that respect,” Chan says with a signature note of understatement. “We are a traditional Chinese restaurant, Cantonese style, with a contemporary twist. There’s a network of music fans out there because we bring in a lot of world class, national and regional artists.”
Would it have ever happened without his mother?
“Probably not,” he says.