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The Most Famous Chef You’ve Never Heard Of
I’m one of 17 million obsessed with Li Ziqi; and she’s even cooked for me through her blossoming food empire
A young woman with long braids and modest clothing redolent of the Mao Zedong era roams the Chinese countryside, surveying the land. She harvests purple-skinned sweet potatoes from a muddy field and washes them in an unpolluted river. Out of the tubers, she makes a Chinese version of latkes and a cold savory jelly dish, which she feeds to her grandmother. She roasts other sweet potatoes in a rustic-looking oven until they soften and ooze a caramel glaze. In a time-lapse sequence that shortens months into minutes, she converts them into glass noodles. She folds these chewy, translucent strands into a spicy and sour soup topped with peanuts, spring onions, and pickled radishes.
Ever since I first watched the Chinese internet sensation Li Ziqi on YouTube, I’ve been captivated by the beauty of her videos and food. My children, aged 5 and 7, are hypnotized, too. Yet the videos she posts contain almost no information about her. She barely speaks, relying more on the ambient sounds of cooking, the squawking of birds in her garden, and overlaid melodies from a bamboo flute.
Aside from the media presence she’s developed there’s very little else about her online, and she doesn’t accept interviews (for reasons I’ll explain shortly). But the more I learned, the more I was intrigued. She’s 29 and from Mianyang, a mountainous area in Sichuan famous for its culinary traditions and for being the site of nuclear bomb testing during China’s Maoist era.
This blossoming celebrity chef — a millennial, pre-scandal Martha Stewart in the Chinese countryside — had a rough childhood. After her mother left the family and her father passed away, her grandparents raised her. Her grandfather, a cook, died when she was young. After finishing school, she left her rural home and sought a better life in urban China, like most poor, young Chinese. She worked as a…
