Lau came up with the idea to make videos of his dad cooking different Cantonese dishes while he was on a retreat with his wife at the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
“[The pandemic] really forced me to re-evaluate my career, and also to just think about where I wanted to spend my time, because my parents weren’t getting younger, and I wanted to have something to pass down to my kids,” he says.
“This desire to understand more about what it means to be Chinese and to understand more about our heritage has been an undertone throughout my life. And a part of these videos, part of the process of making these videos, is reconnecting with that.”
Epicurious on YouTube needs to show Asian dumplings respect
After coming home, he explained the concept and business aspect of starting a YouTube channel to his dad. While silent at first, his dad soon became enthusiastic about the idea.
“The next day, he was like, ‘Hey, I defrosted some pork! Let’s go film.’ And I was like, ‘Dad, I’m not ready yet’,” Lau says.
It took six months before the first video was released but, once they began uploading videos for dishes like mapo tofu, ginger egg fried rice and egg drop soup, it didn’t take long for them to gain traction. The growth in traffic was helped by their circulation in Facebook groups – Lau would post the videos in active communities like Subtle Asian Cooking, Subtle Asian Eats and other Cantonese and Taishanese cooking groups.
On Lau’s 33rd birthday, he and his father were rewarded with the fruits of their labour – they crossed the threshold for monetisation (1,000 subscribers and 4,000 viewing hours). The day after, they received US$3.57 from YouTube – a small sum, but one that felt like a significant accomplishment.
By December of that year, Made with Lau had over 10,000 subscribers. By February 2021, they were averaging a million views per month.
Now the pair get recognised on the street and the channel’s team has expanded to include nine people. They’re even working on a cookware line.
“I thought [I’d] share my knowledge with everyone, teach them how to cook – that’s what I thought at first,” says Lau’s father, who was born in Taishan, in Guangdong province, and attended cooking school in Guangzhou before immigrating to the US.
“Another thing was that I wanted to share my knowledge and leave it for my son, daughter and future generations, and record it for them. I never thought that we would have 700,000 fans.”
Lau hopes that non-Chinese people can enjoy the recipes and learn more about his culture. That’s part of the reason he chose to include Chinese and English subtitles, while ensuring there was still a good amount of spoken Cantonese – a Chinese dialect that is under threat of disappearing, he says.How YouTuber Pony looks to revitalise the Korean beauty industry
“I didn’t want to dub over my dad the entire time because you lose some of the magic if you don’t let [him] talk in the videos,” he says. “One of the broader goals is hopefully that we help spread a sense of empathy and common humanity.”
After all, while people may return to the channel because of the recipes, the endearing nature of the relationship between Lau and his father (as well the rest of their family) is equally compelling.
“We were already close, but I think getting to share this experience with them has been really fulfilling. And just getting to celebrate who they are, all their sacrifices, everything they did to raise us and start from zero in America, I just want to celebrate that,” Lau says.
Elsewhere in the US is another father-son cooking duo, the Pangs. Unlike the Laus, Kevin Pang didn’t have a close relationship with his father, Jeffrey.
Having immigrated to Canada from Hong Kong at a young age, Pang found himself – and the Western values he had grown accustomed to – frequently clashing with those of his Chinese dad.
After becoming an adult, that dynamic didn’t change much. The father and son eventually settled into a perfunctory and dutiful routine of quick, two- to three-minute calls, where they’d talk about “nothing at all”, as Pang describes them.
Her videos teaching foreigners how to cook Chinese food made her a star
But something changed when he became a food writer for the Chicago Tribune, a daily newspaper. “When I started writing about food, that’s when we actually talked for half an hour, talking about food,” Pang says.
Now the Pangs are the hosts of the aptly named Hunger Pangs, a show on the YouTube channel of America’s Test Kitchen that launched in 2021. Pang is the editorial director for digital content at America’s Test Kitchen. Hunger Pangs, which currently has four episodes, features the father-son duo making Cantonese and Chinese-American dishes like siu mai, braised eggplant and crispy orange beef, recipes that they picked from the Test Kitchen archive together.
Nine more episodes filmed by the pair will start airing in early July, and future recipes include roast pork, General Tso’s chicken and cumin beef stir-fry.
Pang gained a greater appreciation for the Chinese food on the dinner table when he was growing up, such as his parents’ congee and white-poached chicken, once he stopped living with them.“When you grow up eating that three times a week, you really don’t appreciate it,” Pang says. “To a kid, it’s just dinner. And even when I was in high school, in college, I never learned one of these recipes, because again … I had the food so often that I really didn’t even think much about it.”
Eventually, he left his restaurant-critic job and began to explore cooking at home in a more meaningful way. Over the course of filming Hunger Pangs episodes, the younger Pang has been able to learn more about his dad than ever before.
“Our relationship was not always the strongest,” Pang says. It was only because of the show that he was able to engage in certain conversations with his dad.
“When we’re in private, we would feel uncomfortable talking about these things. But when there’s TV cameras on and there’s hundreds of thousands people watching, that is when [we] open up and share. So it’s kind of a funny dynamic.”
From girls making out to working out: Singapore YouTuber’s evolution
For his retired 71-year-old father, achieving such success and fandom from starring on YouTube certainly wasn’t unprecedented. As it turns out, Hunger Pangs was just a natural progression for the food-loving pair – 10 years ago, the older Pang had already ventured into YouTube of his own volition.
On his channel, Jeffrey Pang, there are dozens of cooking videos. Set to classical music, the home-made videos have traditional Chinese and English subtitles, and do not feature his face or voice. His most popular recipe – fried spare ribs in Chinkiang style – has over half a million views to date.
“Imagine if you found out that your father was putting videos up on YouTube and getting millions of views,” says Pang. “You would be like, what is going on right now?”
Though his father still stumbles and gets nervous in front of the camera, and every 10-minute episode of Hunger Pangs takes three to four hours to film, it’s all been worth it, the younger Pang says.
“Anytime we get to share the food of our culture, I think that’s a really exciting thing for me and for my family and my people.”
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tK%2FMqWWcp51kuaqyxKyrsqSVZLOwu8Nmm6uhnqB8or7TopqlnV9ofnl9lnBqaJuYnrumv8RmmKadop6worqMn5itoJWnerS7zWaaqKebqHq6u9StrJudXZi1orrNnqOsZZ2WsaZ5y5qs