The Forgotten Chinese Chef Who Taught America to Stir-Fry
It was May 1945 when what would become one of America’s most ubiquitous home-cooking techniques first entered the English lexicon. In her cookbook, How to Cook and Eat in Chinese, 55-year-old Chinese immigrant Chao Yang Buwei described a process common in her homeland, wherein cooks would cut meat and vegetables into small bites and tumble them rapidly together over heat. The Mandarin term for the technique, ch’ao, “with its aspiration, low-rising tone and all, cannot be accurately translated into English,” Chao lamented. For short, she decided, “We shall call it ‘stir-fry.’”
The term soon burrowed its way into the American vernacular and has since taken on a life of its own. Nowadays, stir-frying isn’t just a method—“stir-fry” has become its own category of recipes. Yet most home cooks have never heard of Chao, despite her lasting impression on the way Americans talk about food.
Chao came to cooking unexpectedly. A doctor by profession, she gave up her medical career to move to the United States in 1921 after her husband, the famed linguist Chao Yuenren, was offered a job at Harvard. Bored at home and speaking little English, she turned to cooking dishes that reminded her of China: fleecy rice boiled as soft as it was in Zhangzhou; soups with mushrooms and pork flavored with soy sauce.
She eventually relented when a friend pleaded with her to write a cookbook. Chao’s eldest daughter helped her translate recipes from Chinese to English, before her husband, finding the prose inert, put his own gloss on the language, often adding phrasing that even Chao recognized as clumsy. This stylistic clash resulted in a cookbook that Chao was “ashamed to have written,” as she declared in an author’s note.
https://www.motherjones.com/food/2021/11/chao-yang-buwei-forgotten-chinese-chef-who-taught-america-to-stir-fry-taste-makers/
= new reply since forum marked as read
"The low rising tone"
I speak fairly fluent Mandarin and never saw "low rising tone" before. 
