In the ’90s, William Liu spent his childhood circling the same couple of blocks of Vancouver’s Chinatown. His family lived at 518 Keefer Street, just around the corner from Kam Wai Dim Sum on Gore Avenue, which was the small retail and production space where his father and a business partner had started the dumpling company.
During the day, he attended school at Strathcona Elementary, within two blocks of both his family’s home and their shop. After class, he’d head home to drop his bag, then run over to Kam Wai, where his mother worked in the basement. There, Liu watched as his parents and their crew loaded barbecue pork buns and dumplings into giant stacked bamboo steamers—the little retail storefront doubling as both neighbourhood counter and back-of-house dim sum training ground.
“Dim sum chefs typically work from about 6:30 a.m. up until 3 p.m.,” Liu explains. “From 3 p.m. onward, they would come to Kam Wai, go down to the basement, and that’s where they would learn. Many of the sous chefs would learn how to make dim sum. I remember pumping out barbecue pork buns up until 11 p.m. at night.”
The business, which his father and a partner started in 1991, has been feeding Chinatown residents ever since; Liu figures he was “about five or six” when he was already hauling steaming baskets up those stairs and eating thermoses full of buns for lunch.
While living alongside Kam Wai was a fertile training ground for Liu, taking over the family business was never quite in the plans—he’d actually built his life around choral music and opera, earning a full scholarship to Douglas College and then another to complete his bachelor’s degree at UBC. He was auditioning for a master’s program in New York when his father, undergoing dialysis and facing a kidney transplant, called to say he’d decided to sell the business. Liu phoned back almost immediately and told him not to: he’d come home and help instead.
“I didn’t know how long it was going to take; I didn’t know how long I was going to be here to help him, but that was my decision. I really wanted to help him to my fullest extent with all that I have,” he says.
In 2014, his dad told him it was time to take the reins. “That was 12 years ago, and I still haven’t [left].”
He’s now the CEO and operations manager of the company, which he co-runs with his sister Susan, and the family has recently expanded outside of Chinatown to Hastings–Sunrise, where they run a new café and production facility called Kam Wai Legacy.
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While the Chinatown dim sum counter now operates at 249 E Pender Street, the family-run business continues to keep Chinatown fed, and its most important clientele is still the community.
“We’ve been around for 35 years, and we’re only able to do it because of seniors or people that have been supporting us for that long,” Liu says. “And not just seniors, but also their children, their grandchildren, their great grandchildren.”
