JACKIE KAI ELLIS: A LOVE LETTER TO FOOD, CULTURE & IDENTITY
Image courtesy of Joann Pai
Multi-disciplinary creator Jackie Kai Ellis is many things: an acclaimed designer, best-selling author, renowned pastry chef, entrepreneur, product developer, lifestyle writer, Leo Awards-winning host with docuseries House Special, and now, a podcaster with You & I, a podcast created based on Jackie’s advice column, Ask JKE, that hopes to provide space for people to tell their most vulnerable and powerful stories.
Image courtesy of Nicole Franzen
Vancouver-born and raised, Ellis grew up in a close-knit family, where Chinese culture, food, and creativity were essential in her childhood and into her teens. She was always making and drawing things and found a way to pursue her love for art while satisfying her parents’ want for her to go to university.
After returning from a pastry school stint in Paris, Jackie opened the much-beloved Beaucoup Bakery in 2012 and, shortly after, created The Paris Tours. She later restored her Parisian abode Apartment Lafayette, and penned the national best-selling book The Measure of My Powers: A Memoir of Food, Misery and Paris.
In November 2022, Jackie launched her five-part Telus Originals docuseries House Special, produced by Black Rhino Creative. In it, she explores the Chinese-Canadian experience in BC and Alberta through the lens of small-town Asian food joints and the families that run them. The popular series was nominated for several Leo Awards and Jackie won the award for Best Host: Information Lifestyle or Reality Series.
Image courtesy Black Rhino Creative
Did you grow up in a household where a lot of Chinese culture and tradition was instilled into your upbringing?
It was very Chinese. Everyone spoke Cantonese at home or a Northern Chinese dialect of Mandarin because my grandparents didn’t speak English. My uncles and aunts immigrated here in their teens and so did my cousins. We ate Chinese food every day, we watched Chinese TV.
And I think the contrast was a bit of a shock when I went out into the world and saw what other families were like. I’d go to my friend’s houses for dinner every once in a while. They would eat things like spaghetti squash, and I’d be like, ‘What the heck is this? There’s a squash that turns into spaghetti?! This is amazing!’ It was this contrast of cultures that I knew I was stepping one foot into and, at the same time, I needed to stay one foot in the other culture because it was almost survival, but it’s also what you know. And so I would save up my allowance and buy things like Wagon Wheels and Twinkies because I had no clue what that tasted like—and I needed to understand that to fit in at school. And also those Lunchables with the stick and spreadable thing. I would beg my mom for Lunchables and she’d be like, ‘No, you’re taking bread with pork floss to school.’
You’re such a creative person. Were you always this creative growing up?
Art was kind of it. I didn’t think I was good at anything else other than art, and that’s why I decided to go to art school. But my parents, being classic Chinese parents, were like, ‘You know what? You can’t go to art school unless you get early acceptance into a science program at UBC.’ I was like, if that’s what I have to do to go to art school, I’ll just do that. I worked really hard and did it, just so I could study art in Toronto.
Image courtesy Joann Pai
From starting Beaucoup Bakery to going to Paris and restoring Apartment Lafayette there—when you think of that chapter now and reflect on it, how does it make you feel?
That chapter was a huge gift to me that I don’t think I could have ever imagined or planned for myself. Because when I think about me, eleven years ago in 2011, when I was just going to Paris for pastry school and someone told me this is what your life will look like in eleven years, I would’ve laughed and just thought it was the most preposterous thing ever. Even someone just having enough interest to interview me, I would’ve said, ‘That’s hilarious.’ It was a huge gift given to me. I mean, I don’t always recognize it from moment to moment, but when you put it that way and I look back, I’m like, wow. Who put that on my doorstep and rang the bell and said ‘Happy eleven years!’ It’s pretty cool.
Image courtesy Black Rhino Creative
What drew you to doing House Special, your Telus Originals docuseries that launched last year?
Around that time, it was during the pandemic when horrific Asian hate crimes were at a high. I was confronted with the reality of racism I had been privileged enough to be ignorant of, prior to that. For the first time, I was scared for the safety of those I love and it challenged me to wonder why it was I had so little knowledge of the history of my own Chinese-Canadian heritage in this country. When Ryan and Danny from Black Rhino Creative proposed this series, I felt it was the perfect opportunity for me to learn alongside the viewer, and to tell the story through the narrative of food, a language I was taught to speak from my upbringing as a Chinese-Canadian.
Image courtesy Black Rhino Creative
In all your travels and conversations during filming, what did you learn most about yourself in relation to culture and community?
I learned about young Chinese men, and boys, immigrating to Canada, knowing they would never see their families again. They sent their starving families the little money they earned from backbreaking work. I thought about how they must have missed home, the smells and foods of home. How they sacrificed their lives to better, not the next generation, but in hopes that their grandchildren might know what it meant to prosper.
I met restaurant owners, the first to open and last to close, sectioning off a corner of the dining room with screens for their children to practice piano and do homework, in between taking orders on the phone and packing up takeout.
I remembered my mom, working multiple jobs and going to school, raising kids, and providing for her parents, just to give us a chance at a life that was not burdened by sacrifice.
I gained an immense appreciation and gratitude for the freedoms I have today. For my freedom to dream.
Congratulations on the launch of your new podcast, You & I. Can you tell us a bit more about why you started it and what listeners can expect?
I started my advice column Ask JKE during the pandemic, when readers of my memoir began messaging me with questions about life and their greatest fears and pains. The more I pondered on the questions being asked and related my own stories, it became so clear that, really, we are all struggling with the same things: love, loss, yearning, yearning for hope, for identity, to be understood and comforted in the grey areas of life.
You & I was born out of this genuine hope that through the telling of our most vulnerable stories, we can empower each other with the bravery woven in them, too. It’s through sharing that we know, in the moments where it matters so much, that we are not alone.
~This interview has been edited for length and clarity.