Papers of Pin Pin T'an, 1937-2020 (inclusive), 1940-1990 (bulk)

Pin Pin T'an (also known as T'an Pin Pin, Pin Pin Liu, and Pin Pin T'an Liu ) was the only child of Walter Way and Lily T'an. Her parents lived in Peking (now Beijing, China) before Walter Way, a banker, was assigned work in Manila, in the Philippines. T'an was born there in 1916 and the family returned to Peking not long thereafter. T'an's maternal grandfather, Chang Yin T'ang, was a career diplomat and served as the Chinese ambassador to the United States from 1909 to 1913 before retiring to Peking at the age of 50. Other family members included her aunt by marriage, Isabel T'ang, who was the daughter of T'ang Shao-Yi, first Prime Minister of the Republic of China; and T'an's first cousins Millicent and Eileen, who married Henry Yuan (son of Yuan Shih-K'ai, President of China 1912-16) and architect I. M. Pei, respectively.

T'an grew up in a wealthy family and studied at the Peking American School, graduating at the age of 16, before earning a B.A. in European Languages at Yenching University. Her parents were eager for her to continue her education and have a career, which was an unusual attitude in China at the time. She left China in 1936, having received a Rockefeller Fellowship for graduate study at Radcliffe College, and received her M.A. in English Literature in 1938. She intended to return to China after completing her studies but the Second Sino-Japanese War made this impossible. During World War II, she taught C. K. Ogden's Basic English method to South Americans over short-wave radio while based in Boston, Massachusetts; Chinese to American officers in Chicago; and English to the first group of Chinese naval officers being trained in the United States, in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. She also translated tank manuals from English to Chinese. In addition, she assisted Harvard University professor I. A. Richards with his work on Basic English, an aid for teaching English as a second language. Richards may have had a Rockefeller Foundation grant to do this work.

In 1945, she married David C. T. Liu (also known as Liu Ching Tung, Ching Tung Liu, C. T. Liu, and Hung Dong Lau), a doctor she had first met while studying at Yenching University. Due to her upbringing, she had never been in a kitchen before arriving in the United States; she did not learn how to cook until after her marriage. The couple had four children: Linda, David, Gordon (who died when only a few days old), and Arthur. The family had hoped to return to China in the late 1940s but decided against this due to the rise of the Chinese Communist Party. They eventually settled in California, where Liu became chief surgeon for the Kaiser Foundation hospitals in Oakland and Walnut Creek before establishing a private practice in Walnut Creek.

After Liu's death in 1971, T'an began teaching Chinese cooking classes to benefit the local medical association's nursing scholarships. Initially she did cooking demonstrations at a supermarket and gave private lessons; eventually she taught at a local community center. It was ironic that a woman who had never been in a kitchen until she was in her twenties acquired the expertise to introduce the art of Chinese cooking to her community. T'an was an active member of the American Association of University Women, the Yenching University Alumni Association, and the Women's Auxiliary of the Alameda-Contra Costa Medical Association. She died in 1995.