A 73-year-old grandma from Taishan in the southern coastal province of Guangdong has gained fame online after her daughter posted videos of her cooking traditional Chinese dishes on social media.
Lin Lan was recently visiting her daughter Lisa’s house in New York where she spent time cooking for her family every day.
Lisa filmed her mother’s work in the kitchen and uploaded the results onto Instagram. The pair did not expect that the posts would soon enjoy great popularity, particularly among Chinese immigrants in the U.S.
The Washington Post published a report about Lin’s story. “Lin never relies on exact measurements or precise cooking times, so Lisa retests her mother’s recipes before posting a simplified version to her blog. As she cooks, she explains the recipe in Taishanese, the dialect she grew up speaking,” the report noted.
“There are certain dishes that, if my mom doesn’t pass them, over to the next generation, will just disappear,” stated Lisa.
To enable more people to follow her mother’s recipes, which often contain dozens of different spices and hard-to-find ingredients, Lisa sometimes provides substitutes or simplifies the instructions.
Her videos have all been watched hundreds of thousands of times. One has even racked up 4.4 million views.
They [immigrants] watch Lin’s videos for a sense of belonging, remind them of their grandmothers still in China, the dishes they haven’t eaten since their childhood and recipes they never thought of learning before moving across the world, according to the Washington Post.
Jiar Fong, 29, who moved to New York from Malaysia, said watching Lin’s videos last year made her miss her hometown. “When you live in your home country, all this food that you love is so easy to find that you never learn how to make it. The minute you move, you wish you remember how your mom made it, or how your grandma made it,” she said.
Local Americans have also enjoyed watching the videos and left many comments.
@TwinsRUs:
What a great idea, taking videos of mom cooking family recipes! This is a wonderful way to capture mom and her recipes in one fell swoop.
@er1967:
Very sweet! I watched my grandmother cook when video cameras were too expensive to own. But we wrote down her recipes and tried to measure exactly what she put in the bowl. Everything was done by sight, feeling and taste. Reading this article brings back great memories.