Meet Genevieve Wong and Rose Cheung

Today we’d like to introduce you to Genevieve Wong and Rose Cheung.

Genevieve Wong and Rose Cheung, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
Rose: I moved to the U.S. at 17 as a financially struggling college student, juggling five or six part-time jobs to support myself through school. In time, I married and started my own family. Raised in a traditional household in Hong Kong, I grew up learning the foundations of healing through natural herbs and food from my mother and grandmother.

Later, my work with a medical charity introduced me to renowned Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) practitioners from across Asia. From them, I gained deep insight into preventive recipes and body maintenance through herbal cooking. As a mother, whenever my children fell ill, I used these remedies to restore their strength and build up their long-term immunity. During the pandemic lockdown, I realized it was time to share this knowledge with others— writing a book to demystify TCM and clear up common misconceptions about natural healing.

Genevieve: Coincidentally during the pandemic, I got into a car accident that totaled my car and gave me a concussion. When I recovered, Los Angeles was still very much closed. I wasn’t on a project at the time and it seemed like the shutdown was going to last for awhile, so it dawned on me that it’d be a good time to help my mom (Rose) write the book she has always wanted to write, a cookbook about Chinese herbal soups that catered to the West, with recipes to protect the immune system for every season.

As a Chinese-American, I know lots of other Chinese-Americans (we call them ABC’s, American-born Chinese) who want to make these soups but find the process to be overwhelming. They often don’t know how to read Chinese and aren’t familiar with how the Chinese herbs look, which makes shopping for ingredients hard. So my mom and I wanted to write a book in English that listed out the ingredients in English and Chinese, and showed pictures of the herbs so you could take the book to the Chinese herbal pharmacy and buy the correct items without confusion.

After we turned in our book to Simon & Schuster, we began to work on building a website. We wanted the website to be a place where our readers could not only buy the book but also be able to read blogs about what we were up to. Then it occurred to us that we should also start an online store to sell soup packets for all the recipes in our books, because not all our readers live near a Chinatown. That’s when we partnered up with an amazing Chinese pharmacy in the San Gabriel Valley, Wing Hop Fung, to help with that process. That also led to us selling teas and other specialty herbs.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Genevieve: It has been a relatively smooth road in terms of selling the book. Our publisher told us we are in our sixth printing now so we are quite proud of this. In terms of promoting the book, it’s been hard to get mainstream TV shows to have us on to do cooking demonstrations because there is a view that Chinese medicine is not real medicine. Also financially, we pretty much do this work for free because the overhead cost of the operation is so high.

Rose; Thanks to Genevieve”s connections, it has been smooth. We are fortunate that we are financially able to support our interests.

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
Rose: I am a CPA by profession. I later started many businesses from scratch including a bank, a real estate construction and development company, health care facility and solar energy projects and recently went into biochar production. I feel proud of myself when I put my vision into reality and action to benefit others.

Genevieve: I am actually a TV producer. I’m best known for shows like America’s Most Wanted, Access Hollywood, and in recent years, The Proof Is Out There on the History Channel. I became interested in TCM after developing asthma as a teenager and I’ve been studying it ever since. That’s where my passion for the book stems from.

What was your favorite childhood memory?
Genevieve: My mom truly does make the best Chinese herbal broths! I loved coming home from school, having dinner and starting off those meals with one of her soups. It was a great way to stay healthy in the winter months.

Rose: My first experience with Chinese herbs wasn’t great but I came from a family that was really into TCM. My grandmother made strange black cakes for me which I turned around and threw away. It turned out that that herb in them can immensely improve diabetes type II illness. I later donated the formula and funds to do two clinical trials with those herbs successfully with the University in Macau.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.healingherbalsoups.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/herbalsoups/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/herbalsoups
• Twitter: https://x.com/HerbalSoups
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@healingherbalsoups
• Other: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Healing-Herbal-Soups/Rose-Cheung/9781982176112

Image Credits

The book cover, official author photo, and soup photo are by DYLAN + JENI.

Other behind-the-scenes photos are by Brendan Minto and Henrietta Wong.