Cecilia Chiang, pioneering restaurateur, learned freedom on a bicycle.
'To 14-year-old Cecilia Chiang, a bicycle meant freedom. Freedom from being enclosed in a rickshaw, pulled by a servant who was an extension of her mother's watchful eye. Freedom to ride fast, legs pumping, hair flying in the wind. With the resourcefulness that would allow her to reinvent herself repeatedly over the next century, Chiang managed to learn how to ride in secret before asking her parents for a bicycle of her own. After all, they had very specific ideas about what was proper for the kind of well-bred girls born to 52-room palaces in Beijing that once housed Ming dynasty officials. Impressed, her softhearted father agreed, and her mother reluctantly allowed it. China was modernizing, but a wife still followed her husband's lead.'
