Chen lacked the informal, casual English-language fluency of Julia Child, and spent hours with voice coaches carefully trying to improve her pronunciation. Her programs gained a modest following among viewers, and "Reader’s Digest" gave her an award for educational television. However, the pilot season failed to gain a funding sponsor, and was discontinued after its initial run of 26 episodes. Later critics pointed out that she was one of the few non-white television cooking show hosts to have any American national distribution before the 1980s. After the end of the season, the show was re-run intermittently until 1976.