So what can we learn from my grandmother's near-century of bad-assery? There's no single path, but here are six simple lessons and a handful of anecdotes my grandmother has shared with me over the years, that highlight exactly how to live and love your life as a beloved icon.

Roughly translated, one of my grandma's favorite Chinese phrases means: "If you can do something, you do it." This "why not?" approach to life is how she wound up opening The Mandarin in the first place. While visiting her recently widowed sister in San Francisco in the mid-1950s, my grandmother ran into two friends from back home. They asked if she would help them negotiate the lease on a restaurant space they wanted to open. She agreed, despite knowing that her broken English was hardly better than theirs. While dealing with the landlord, she was asked to write check for $10,000 as a down payment. She did; immediately after, her two "friends" vanished. Saddled with a lease, my grandmother always recalls that there was no way she was going to walk away from the investment without giving it a shot. So she shrugged her shoulders and decided she would just figure it out. The rest is history.