ViewTube

Quick question for y'all, wanted to get an general sense re wok ownership. I think I've got a pretty good sense where you guys are at, but did want to confirm.

Do you own a wok? And... if so, what type? 

(Would also be interested to see dimensions/styles people tend to opt for - or reasons why you don't own a wok - if you care to expand in a comment) 

Eight months ago, me and Steph packed up our life in a (relative) hurry, and moved from China to Thailand. 

It’s been… an emotionally exhausting eight months. The other day, me and Steph were contemplating over a beer whether we would do it all again - knowing *everything* that we know now. 

I’m not sure if any of you actually care about any of this, but the answer is… probably? Maybe? We’ve got a… complicated array of feelings, if you’ve got a hot minute for a read:

1. At the time of the move, things in China were looking increasingly dire, re when and if they were ever going up again. The way the world ends up always looks inevitable with the benefit of hindsight, but it’s worth highlighting that it took an almost unprecedented social movement within China to finally force the government’s hand to end the Zero-COVID policy (though I’m sure some particularly dire looking economic data didn’t hurt). Could we have simply waited seven months for the borders to have opened? Definitely – if we had known for *certainty* that it’d have been just another “seven months of suckiness”, we wouldn’t have pulled that trigger. I mean… we were quite happy in China.

2. One of the great uncertainties of the move was whether Steph would be allowed to leave at all. During Zero-COVID, Chinese citizens were barred from non-essential international travel – whether the wife of an American moving to Thailand long term counted as ‘essential’ was definitely a grey area. It’s difficult to describe the roller coaster that was (1) waiting alone for a half an hour outside the Shekou border, as border authorities were figuring whether she could leave (2) hopping on a flight to Bangkok, wondering if and when we’d ever be able to go back to China again, followed by (3) landing, getting our life in order, and finally being free of all the Zero-COVID restrictions. No getting tested every 72 hours, no showing codes to get into places, no tirelessly explaining to people that ‘I know, I’m a foreigner, but I haven’t left the country since 2019…’  

3. But at times, it was definitely a little difficult to edit some of our videos last year. Our ‘secret sauce’ has always sort of been to travel to some smaller city in China, find some fantastic food that hasn’t made much of a footprint abroad, and attempt to recreate it to the best of our ability. We rely on some of the pictures/videos we take to test the recipes, and we try to splice them into the videos whenever possible (always iPhone footage, but hey). During that time, scrubbing through Shunde footage, Guiyang footage, travel footage… it was kind of rough. Because while you know that you’d *likely* be able to swing back in someday (even if you had to quarantine), there’s always that nagging feeling that… maybe this was it? Maybe you won’t be able to return? From a global perspective, it’s not like that’s unheard of…

4. During that time, a continual source of comfort for us was the Chinese community in Bangkok – particularly in Huai Khwang (i.e. the newer ‘Flushing-esque’ Chinese neighborhood here in Bangkok). Now, we’ve always been big believers in trying to get out there and experience the local culture wherever you are, to the best of your ability – whether it’s in China, or Thailand. So while the Chinese comfort food offered up here was never a priority per se, on a rough day going over to the Chinese supermarket in Huai Khwang and commiserating with the owners… gave you a sense that you weren’t experiencing this all alone.

5. But, the last couple months of China opening up again? It’s hard to overstate how much it’s been an *enormous* relief to us. I mean, while our respective state apparatuses using our tax dollars on a high stakes game of bloons the last couple weeks doesn’t exactly bode well for geopolitical stability in the future, that’s sort of… ‘same as it ever was’. The borders are open. We’re planning a handful of trips back to China this year, which we’re really looking forward to.

6. So then, obvious question – will we move back? Not in the next couple years, at least. Because while I’ve just dwelled a bit on what made leaving China difficult, coming to Thailand’s also been… incredibly energizing. New country, new language – makes me feel like I’m in my 20s again, ha. There’s a real benefit to being jolted outside of your comfort zone. There’s just… so much to learn. 

7. And for the channel? I think getting your feet down into a different soil can also give you a radically different perspective on your home cuisine. Like, before coming, we had the vague idea that we might be able to cover some of the dishes of the Chinese diaspora here in Thailand – we knew that there’s a ton of Teochew influence, in particular. But once you leave those original borders… the lines aren’t so clear, and things end up getting jumbled in fascinating ways. Like, where does Thai-Chinese food end, and Thai food begin? In Bangkok, there’s often Som Tam and oyster omelet on the same menu! Or perhaps equally interesting is to see how people in modern Thailand interact with Chinese food in the here and now: like, every day in our neighborhood we see people queuing up for “Mala Suki” – Sichuan-ish single-person sized hotpot with ingredients going around by conveyor belt. Or just down the road, you could chase that down with some Tom Yum dumplings from our favorite Taiwan-style restaurant. You can start to see how food travels, adapts, and localizes. It's no longer something distant, something you read about… it's something vibrant and vivid and happening right in front of your eyes – and you can taste it.

So yeah. Here is home for now. If you want to know more about that aforementioned ‘newer Chinese neighborhood’ here in Bangkok, recently we did a video on the topic together with our good friend Adam. Not going to link it here because the algorithm seems to nerf posts with videos, but it’s the most recent video if you swing over to their channel:  https://www.youtube.com/@OTRontheroad 

And as an aside, Adam was actually in a similar position as us, actually – left China after spending the last decade there (we crashed at his place when we first got in). He was a bar owner and restauranteur in China – I got to know him quite well because he was one of a handful of close friends that’d always be down to try out X new restaurant or Y regional cuisine. After moving here, he decided to try his hand at making videos instead of jumping right back into the F&B meat grinder. And while I’m pretty much the definition of biased, I do quite like what they’re doing over there. While in Chinese there’s the formidable A Xing, I’ve always felt that English language YouTube’s always been lacking smart food+travel content. Food geekiness-wise, think of their content as something of the mid-point in between us and Mark Wiens, I’d say. So if you’re in the market, definitely check them out. @OTRontheroad , in case you got lost there. 

Ok, quick little poll so that we can better balance clarity/information density in recipe videos in the future.

For our upcoming video (out tomorrow!), in the narration I say to add (1) toasted (or roasted) chopped peanuts and (2) toasted sesame seeds to the dish. In the past, we used to explicitly show you how to toast peanuts/sesame seeds on camera, but recently we've been skipping over it - figured that these are often purchasable pre-toasted anyhow, and that it's an easy enough thing to look up how to do in case.

But I wanted to see how all of you felt though. One possible middle ground is that we could have a quick little video showing how to toast these things and just link it as a card in the video, though I know that a lot of people dislike having to 'jump in between' a bunch of recipes just to make one 'thing'. 

Just a quick heads up that tomorrow’s video is… experimental… and I’m not sure quite how well it all turned out.

So we were in the USA visiting family, and more or less on a whim we decided we wanted to film a video. See, there’s this cooking-related thought experiment that me and Steph often have, a game that we like to play when we want to get creative in the kitchen:

Imagine a chef or an old grandmother from one culture (say, Italian). They’re at their local market, and they bump into a new ingredient from a totally different culture (let’s say… century egg).  How would they end up making use of that ingredient according to their instincts, their cooking system? 

It’s an interesting idea to play around with, and this time in the USA we realized that we could actually act out our ol’ thought experiment for real. Because Steph, after all, is Cantonese. And while we’ve cooked in America before, it was usually in between Chinatown runs – Steph’s never tried to use American produce to make stuff strictly according to her cooking system. So we felt like it’d all be a fun idea for a little quick-hit of a video.

We felt like it was important to not really to any actual testing – to just go to the supermarket, see what Steph found interesting, and go from there. Our DSLR and fancy microphone were back in Thailand, but we had Steph’s iPhone and we usually travel with a lav mic just in case. We made three dishes using three vegetables that you don’t find in Guangdong – Dandelion greens, Zucchini, and Brussel Sprouts. 

And while all the dishes were reasonably tasty, after cutting the video, to me at least the end result winded up feeling pretty… amateurish.  Video and audio were what they were, but the big thing that we probably should have done is actually test the dishes that we wound up making, or at least doing a few practice runs refining them. 

I don’t know. Maybe you’ll enjoy the off the cuff nature of it all? It was a fun video to make regardless. And we'll be back with a proper recipe video next week, promise.

But I was also curious, I guess, to see if any of you liked to do the same or a similar thought experiment? When was the last time you used an ingredient from one culture, and used it in a completely different context in a completely different cuisine? (fish sauce doesn’t count) 

This is a story about how difficult it can be to make recipes for international replication, and why – when in doubt – you should always trust your judgement and your senses over a written recipe, even if you otherwise like the source. 

As many of you know, we recently moved from China to Thailand. Whenever you move, it always takes a bit of getting used to where and how to buy the ingredients you need – and that goes double for international moves. Luckily, Bangkok is probably the best place for us to do what we do outside of China – there’s a fantastic Chinatown, a lot of the produce is quite similar to south China, and when in doubt we can send stuff from Taobao here. Basically, we’ve been able to cook here without many snags, which is awesome.

Now, for our recent video on how to use Dried Shiitakes (out a couple days ago), one of the recipes we wanted to include in the video was stuffed shiitake mushrooms. Awesome dish, totally in our wheelhouse – we barely even left any time to test the recipe because we were just that confident in it. After all, Chinese meat mixtures are something we’ve made practically a million times – they were one of the very first things me and Steph ever learned how to make really *well*, and a recipe featuring a meat mix was even, like, the second video ever on this channel.

So we settled into our first test… hand mincing and vigorously stirring the meat filling like we always do. It’s always a little bit of work going that extra mile, but hey, you’re rewarded with a juicy, bouncy filling in the end. And stuffed shiitakes are one of my absolute favorite dishes in the world, so you can’t help but get a little excited for them. 

But after steaming? They… sucked. We forgot to marinate the mushrooms (gah, easy thing to forget), but the biggest issue was the pork filling. The filling wasn’t bouncy and juicy – it was dry and kind of… mealy. Stuck to your teeth when you bit into it. 

In a word, wrong.

So thinking about where things might have gone awry, I thought back to all the musts when it comes to meat emulsions – fresh meat, cool environment, vigorous mixing. I was a little lazy with the mixing (we’ve gotten less obsessive over the years on that front), but I should’ve still been in the same rough ballpark. Regarding temperature, while Bangkok is hot, it’s basically the same as summer in Guangdong, and we usually run the A/C while we’re cooking anyway. That left the pork.

Looking at the bag, it dawned on me that the meat that we’d purchased had probably been previously frozen pork. In China, frozen meat stalls are popular at local markets too (cheap meat from USA and Brazil!), but thinking back to our walks through the Khlong Toei wholesale market here… in Bangkok they seem to like to thaw out the frozen stuff before purchase. Not to mention, the pork that we used was actually from our freezer, so this was actually pork that’d been frozen twice! No wonder!

So this time, I decided to go to the supermarket to pick up some pork. Down the road from us is a Big C, which’s a Thai hypermart that’s owned by Carrefour. And while I *hated* going to Carrefours in China (they’re designed like a maze, worse than an Ikea), in fairness they always had some quality pork. So I went to Big C (a more pleasant experience by and large), grabbed some of our trusty ham/leg cut of pork, and we tested it again… confident that the filling would come out bouncy and juicy like usual. 

Nope. Same problem – dry, soft, mealy.

Ok. Now we were starting to get a little worried – Big C pork definitely wasn’t the answer. That said, generally speaking, in China at least it’s markets where you get the good stuff, not supermarkets (Carrefour pork and beef aside). So who knows? Maybe the supermarket stuff was actually previously frozen too, and with our beginner-level Thai we just didn’t see it on the label? 

So we resolved to go back to the market, but this time I didn’t do it blindly. I scouted out our local market, and if you get there early there definitely *are* shops that sell freshly slaughtered pork – you can tell from the bottles of fresh blood that they sell on the counters. But to really make sure no stone was left unturned, I decided to enlist the help of our neighbor here, who’s a vendor at the local night market. Thai cooking also has a similar concept for these meat mixtures – they call it “bouncy pork” (‘หมูเด้ง’). So between my painfully rudimentary Thai, her slightly better English, and a healthy assist from Google Translate’s ‘conversation’ feature… I described to her our problem.

She immediately understood. Waved her hand and told me in English “yes, many market pork is not good”. She walked with me one morning to the market (as she has to go anyway), and led me to a specific vendor. This was one of the fresh pork vendors that I’d seen earlier – perfect. The vendor grabbed a cut of the pork and told me that this was the cut that you use to make หมูเด้ง, the bouncy pork. That cut? The ham/leg, same as we’d always used in China. Effusively thanked them all, went back to test. *This time* I was confident.

But… while it was *better*, at its core it still had the same textural issues.

My mind was spinning. This pork was gaslighting me. Tried to search YouTube for Thai bouncy pork recipes… they all used food processors as a base. Maybe that was my problem? Or maybe the Thai bouncy pork just… isn’t as bouncy sans additives? I seemed to remember some of the snacks here didn’t seem to have *that* juicy of a filling. Or maybe this was why all those classic Teochew dishes like Guorou – in China stuffed with pork – were stuffed with seafood here? Or maybe it’s a breed thing? Or maybe it’s a time-from-slaughter-to-market thing? Maybe we should just throw our hands in the air, and accept that we just… *can’t* make juicy Chinese meat fillings here in Thailand?

There was one route left before giving up though.

(continued in pinned comment below) 

So I have a question you all that’s a little awkward to execute in poll form: which cuisines do you consider your kitchen ‘set up’ for?

Let me explain what I mean. The other day I was perusing /r/cooking, and there was a thread there asking what’s become a pretty common question on the forum: which things, in your opinion, are never worth to make at home? And after the usual answers of ‘puff pasty’ (agree) and ‘deep fried anything’ (disagree, but understand), there were a few commenters chiming in with the answer of “Stir fries”.

It’s something that we’ve definitely heard before – people trying to follow one of our recipes, bemoaning the fact that they’d need to purchase like fifteen new ingredients from their local Asian supermarket (and potentially even have to fiddle with a portable burner), then throwing their hands up in the air and saying ‘yeah, not worth making at home’.

But like, millions of people *do* obviously make Chinese food at home all the time – the difficulty isn’t something intrinsic to the cuisine, it’s because said commenter’s kitchen just wasn’t ‘set up’ for making Chinese food.

And that’s obviously ok, right? A channel that I like binging now and then is Obi and Salma’s MiddleEats – despite the fact that our kitchen is *completely* not set up to make Egyptian food and the like. I was chit chatting with him a bit over on Reddit, and I sort of felt like that stereotypical AllRecipes commenter that changes literally everything about a recipe before giving it five stars:

“Hey man, loved your Yellow Rice recipe, it turned out absolutely fantastic. Ended up swapping the Loumi for Cantonese preserved lemons”
“Awesome to hear, seems like a sensible substitution”
“I also swapped the butter for lard, cut the tomatoes because I forgot to buy them, swapped the lemon juice for some homemade preserved lemons, hit it with a slug of fish sauce, and added a whole can of chopped up Cantonese fried dace with black beans because I thought it’d be delicious. Awesome recipe.”
“…”

Because our kitchen isn’t set up for Middle Eastern food, I primarily watch their channel for inspiration, tips on technique, and to just… learn stuff. Ditto with something like the always illustrious De mi Rancho a Tu Cocina – unless we start nixtamalizing our own corn, our kitchen just can’t quite fit in Mexican food (even though we obviously adore the cuisine).

Generally speaking, I think that if you want to make something properly authentic, most people’s kitchens can probably fit in… two cuisines. Maybe three. For us, our kitchen is set up for (1) Cantonese (2) Southwest China and (3) the American south. For *most* dishes within those three cuisines, we can make do without any special sourcing or expensive trips to the supermarket. 

Of course, certain cuisines are also closer to others. If your kitchen’s set up for Cantonese food, you can actually make a number of Japanese dishes provided you grab just a small handful of other ingredients. Ditto with American food and, say, France. And obviously there’s a lot of interoperability between different Chinese cuisines as well.

I’m starting to ramble, but the point is – next week we’re going to have a video on how to ‘set up’ a kitchen to be able to cook Chinese food, so we were curious to see what cuisines y’all were set up to do, and maybe also how many of you might watch us in a similar way that I watch some other international cooking channels (i.e. for inspiration a bit more than instruction). 

So after watching the esteemed Tom Nicholas (rightly) lay into a couple creators we otherwise quite enjoy regarding unethical sponsorships and integrations a few months back, we’ve been thinking a little bit about ethics of the whole space – and how we want to deal with conflicts of interest moving forward.

Maybe I can be a little more concrete. One of Steph’s friends from Guangxi comes from a village that makes high quality bamboo baskets for food and cooking. As tends to happen the world over, this sort of artisanship is slowly fading away – income’s low, so young people don’t get into the trade. So Steph’s friend came to her with an idea: they could export the baskets, the artisans can get a higher income, we let you all know that these cool baskets are available to purchase on Amazon or Etsy or whatever.

I have no idea if this specific idea will come through or not – there’s always a ton of hurdles to this kind of stuff – but this is exactly the type of thing that we’d be excited to use our platform for. Helping artisans get a better wage? Doing our small, minuscule part in helping to preserve traditions? Introducing people to cool kitchen stuff from China they can buy? Awesome... right?

But we were thinking about this quite a bit, and I do think there’s a bit of a hitch. You see, we make a LOT of product recommendations in our videos: get Juanchengpai’s chili bean paste, don’t get Lee Kum Kee’s black bean sauce, Donggu soy sauce is the best cheap soy sauce that you can’t (usually) buy abroad, the entire Lao Gan Ma product line is fantastic except for their sour soup hotpot base… etc etc. It’s sort of the nature of doing the kind of cooking videos that we do.  And I think it’s critically important you can *trust* these recommendations, and not worry about whether there’s some ulterior motive (which is unfortunately endemic on a few other platforms…)

Because on a fundamental level, I think that praise – and by extension recommendation – is ultimately limited by the ability to give true, unfiltered criticism. I feel *very* comfortable recommending Lee Kum Kee’s Hoisin sauce, because in the very same breath I can say unequivocally that their black pepper sauce is complete garbage. But if there was, say, a bad batch of bamboo baskets from Guangxi… how comfortable would we be, really, to criticize those artisans? And if I’m uncomfortable criticizing them if they screw up, how could you ever trust our recommendation in the first place?

So… this is what we’ve come up with. I think on YouTube, everyone’s gotten comfortable with (or at least used to) sponsored segments by this point. Adam Ragusea can extol you to buy SkillShare in a sponsored segment, and there’s no ambiguity there – it’s an ad read. So what we think we want to do is this: when there’s a product that we want to support, we will have a very clear, separate sponsored segment (ala the YouTube standard) that we’ll label a “community sponsorship”. Basically, it’ll be a free advert for them – albeit one in our own words. In this way, I think that we can still support people doing stuff we like, without things getting… ambiguous.

(Note that with this idea - or if we ever do sponsorship-sponsorships in the future, the segment'll be at the END of the video. I personally always am irked by sponsored segments that interrupt a recipe, given that you either have to sit through ads or pay for YouTube Premium anyway)

But yeah. We’ll see how this idea goes. We’ll be giving this ‘community sponsor’ thing a whirl in our next video most likely – the same friend that was exporting the Husa knife also had some Chinese-style whetstones that we think are cool. 

One of the ingredients that we use rather extensively on our channel is lard. I've heard some people report that lard is quite difficult to obtain where they live, so we wanted to do a quick poll to see what the overall sourcing situation is like.

Is it easy for you to reach for lard if a recipe called for it? 

A mea culpa, and a quick update.

For the update – we’ve successfully made it to Bangkok! Still getting settled in and such, but we’re really excited to be using this place as a base for the next couple years. It’s incredibly energizing throwing yourself into a new place, a new language. Food is awesome, of course. There’s just… so much to learn.

For the mea culpa? Apologies that this won’t be as quick:

See, the other day our recent Zongzi video got picked up by a couple s***posting accounts on Weibo – the Chinese twitter. There were a few people over there trying their best to lay into so-called ‘inaccuracies’ in the video – basically, attempting their best Uncle Roger impression. Small number of people, didn’t get much spread, but perhaps unique to the genre, their criticisms of our video were actually… just plain wrong.  Like, laughably so.

We didn’t feel much need to ‘defend the honor’ of our video or anything – the best way to handle trolls is to ignore them, after all – but there *was* something about the whole episode that ended up striking a nerve with us.

Let’s call a spade a spade: I am completely, unequivocally tired of that sort of ‘let’s scour the internet for cooking videos that I disagree with, and roast the host’ style of content. It’s played out. It was funny three years ago when Italia Squista (i.e. actual experts) laid into some popular cooking videos on YouTube. It was even funny two years ago when Nigel Ng did his original Uncle Roger reacts video – because Nigel’s a talented comedian and the BBC is sort of infamous for screwing up Asian food. But after being *continuously* inundated with this sort of content since 2020, I’ve just started… not caring anymore. In 2019 if you asked me about pineapple on pizza, I’d have cracked a smile and told you to put it in a different zip code. But now that that dead horse’s been just so thoroughly been beaten into the ground? I almost want to start masochistically ordering Hawaiians as an ideological statement. And I’m sure I’m not the only one.

So against that backdrop, we had an idea for a quick video for right before we left for Bangkok: “Chinese Twitter Uncle Roger’d our video. They were wrong.” It was a beautiful idea: turn the tables, roast the roasters. I couldn’t really sleep one night, so I excitedly scribbled down a script, woke up early the next day, and got to filming.

I’ll leave the whole script attached here for the curious, but the primary critiques of our Zongzi video were (1) that pan-frying Zongzi is incorrect (2) that dipping savory Zongzi into sugar is incorrect and (3) eating the Zongzi into sweet chili sauce was incorrect. Our idea was that, while we were still in Shunde – one of the capitals of Cantonese gastronomy – in our last few hours there I’d ask Zongzi vendors/people on the street their opinion on the topic. Because it’s one thing to disagree with us, but disagreeing with an old Shunde Zongzi vendor would be a… pretty untenable position to hold.

My first stop was a breakfast joint where I’d often go in the mornings to eat pan-fried Zongzi. Asked the woman at the shop if it was acceptable to pan-fry Zongzi, as “some of my non-Cantonese friends say that Zongzi can only be steamed”. The response was… perfect. Without a hitch, she retorted that “of course you can pan fry Zongzi, who’s saying you can’t?” Even a number of the patrons started getting in on it, talking about how delicious pan-fried Zongzi is, their favorite methods, etc etc.

Awesome. So then I asked them all about dipping savory Zongzi into granulated sugar, thoroughly expecting a similar “of course! It’s delicious!” sort of reaction. 

And, uh… whoops. Basically to a man everyone that I asked on the street in Shunde said “no, you shouldn’t eat savory zongzi with granulated sugar. You should eat alkaline zongzi with granulated sugar”. This thoroughly confused both me *and* Steph, as it pretty directly counteracted both of our lived experience. So we did a bit of digging.

As it turns out, granulated sugar eaten with savory Zongzi is not a general ‘Cantonese’ practice, but hyper-regional within Guangdong. Dawei (Steph’s Dad) said that it was a Dongjiang (east bank of the Pearl River Delta) tradition, coming from the sugar growing regions of Dongguan, Huizhou, and Bao’an (modern day Shenzhen). Steph’s paternal grandmother was from that area of the delta, which was apparently how the Li family picked up the practice. From our own research, dipping savory Zongzi in granulated sugar also can be seen in Zhanjiang and other points in Guangdong’s coastal west (and of course not to mention Vietnam, where it seems to be quite common).

But in our original video, we said – or at least heavily implied – that dipping savory zongzi into sugar was a ‘Cantonese’ practice in the general sense. That’s not quite correct, because there’s only specific areas *within* the Cantonese world that do that, with others that’d view it almost as weird as the dudes on Weibo found it. So in the end, while I still think it’s a rather minor mistake in the grand scheme of things, we were at the very least wrong *enough* that we definitely wouldn’t feel comfortable releasing a ‘roast-the-roasters’ kind of video. Ah well.

So again, our bad about the sugar thing. Some blind spots are always inevitable with this sort of project, and the things that you grow up with in your own family (like Steph with Zongzi) is always the stuff that’s easy to forget to interrogate or double check. And while that same critique could equally apply to those dudes on Weibo, they’re not the ones trying to teach people on YouTube.

In any event, here’s the script for the curious, still want to find a good time and place to use that Durian Pizza line haha:  https://imgur.com/a/6EIWthV 

EDIT: There seems to be a number of people in these comments accusing me of 'both sides-ing' with this post. While I'm tempted to make a snarky comment about how these people failed their reading comprehension test there, obviously the fault lies with me being overly wordy and not making my point clearer. 

The purpose of sharing this story about the ayi certainly wasn't to engage in some sort of exercise of measuring the societal goods and ills of the United States and China, and comparing the score. The whole point was that the ayi was able to think critically about the information that she was getting from her government and her media ecosystem - and to see the wisdom inherent in that. 

To try to express the same idea a bit differently, let me hand it off to someone who was an actually-competent writer, Michael Crichton:

>“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

>In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.” 

This is often my personal experience with a good bit of reporting on China (particularly COVID-related stories, where sometimes the news can actively contradict my lived experience). Of course, in fairness, it's the opinion columns that tend to be much worse than the news stories, and the titles that are a good bit more loaded than the articles themselves. A good example was the clearly-garbage FT opinion piece that actually spurred this post, Niall Ferguson's "China's Covid Victory Over America Is Pyrrhic". But in a media environment where opinion is fact and no one reads past the headlines, that can definitely be enough to poison the well.

So I just wanted to share a few sources that didn't give me this feeling. And if you actually go in and read those sources, it should be crystal clear that they aren't 'both sides-ing' anything.

____________

Especially with the Olympics coming up, it feels like an increasing number of people are asking us about the political situation here in China. 

It’s one of those things that’s a little tough, because… where do you even begin? How can you even start to express the totality of a society to someone that’s read only the highlight reels in the Times?

So like, the other day I was at the gym, and started chatting a bit with the ayi there - the old cleaning lady. We were talking a bit about this and that – plans for lunar new year, the current situation of the pandemic, so on and so forth – when she asked me a question about something she saw on TV. 

Apparently, she watched a news report about mass shootings in the USA, and in it they showed some gratuitous footage of the incident. She asked if that kind of thing was very common in the USA, as the news was insinuating it was.

So I explained that yes, it’s a problem; but no, it’s not exactly an everyday occurrence for most people (as usually it’s only hunters and hobbyists that even own guns). You get this sort of thing quite a bit as an American abroad, but it was her response that really stuck with me – she smacked her hands together in recognition, cracked a large smile, and responded (my translation, obviously):

“That’s what I was thinking must be the case! When you see western media talk about China, it’s only the bad things – never the good things. So I figured that if I was seeing media here talk about the west, it’d probably be the same type of situation.”

It was… a bit of critical thinking about the media that I think you usually don’t see too much – on either side of the Pacific. 

When talking about the political situation here in China to friends and family back in the States, the biggest difficulty I have is communicating a sense of scale. I do see eye to eye with the average Good American Liberal regarding the familiar litany of complaints that they have about the government here, I do. But with the Olympics coming up, you’re starting to see increasingly charged rhetoric coming from the media about the ‘dystopian’ ‘authoritarian’ ‘regime’ here and such, as if the skies are always grey and the telescreens are always watching. But when it comes to day to day living, this country’s a lot more… normal… than most commenters seem to imply as of late.

So the natural question that follows is, then, “well ok… what *should* I read then?”, which’s also a bit tough to answer. Do you tell people to, I dunno, read both the Washington Post *and* the China Daily then tell them to split the difference? Feels like a great way to get doubly misinformed. Do you tell people to just give up, retreat from consuming any sort of China related news, as the information tends to be irreparably biased all the way down, on both sides? While that tends to be my personal solution to the problem, it’s not exactly a satisfying answer to give to the average hyper-political always-connected American news junkie.

All that said, COVID, however, introduced some cracks into my “let’s just stop paying attention to the news altogether” lifestyle strategy, and I started to pick up my old podcast habit. I should probably kick it again when I get the chance, but… in the meantime I started listening once again to the Sinica Podcast (apparently our channel’d been recommended there, which was enough to pique the narcissistic side of my curiosity). It’s hosted by the eminent Kaiser Kuo – a Chinese American and a former long-term - and legendary – expatriate in Beijing (he was also the bassist for Tang Dynasty, but my first exposure to Kaiser was his articles in the Beijinger). And really? It’s just… so damn refreshing to listen to a smart a podcast where people can talk seriously about both the problems here without tripping over themselves to paint things like it’s a Black Mirror episode.

And honestly… their whole organization’s stuff is fantastic and fact-based – they also do news/opinion over on the website SupChina.com (probably not the *best* name for one of the most serious news organizations about China, but hey, who’s “Chinese Cooking Demystified” to talk?). Fair warning that it is one of those paywall sort of affairs, so Kaiser’s Twitter is also a fantastic and well-balanced feed in and of itself:  https://twitter.com/KaiserKuo  

In any event, that’s probably the last I’ll talk about politics here for a long while, promise. So if you’re ever wondering what I personally think about whatever given China-related news du jour, just check Kaiser’s Twitter and that’s probably *pretty* close to my view (though I might see things with a touch more of a lefty bent).