In this issue: I explore the Chinese understanding of terroir through a monthlong road trip with my parents, tracing the food that shapes a place’s identity and the people who call it home.

Illustration by Yanki Kung

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A WeChat notification lit up on my screen. My mom had tagged me in our family chat of five, demanding immediate attention. It was only the three of us, but both my parents had two accounts, one too many for two retirees with barely any urgent business whatsoever. Five did feel like a more appropriate number for a group chat, though. Three seemed slim.

It was 10 p.m. in China. What could possibly be on my mom’s mind? I tapped the voice message bubble:

“Hey! I think you paid for those pears a couple months ago, when we made that quick stop in Zigui on our road trip. Can you find that transaction in your payment history and maybe the fruit seller’s phone number? The pears were REALLY good. I want to order some more.”

Okay. My dad is okay. No health scares this time, at least. But how good were those pears? I obliged and went through my transaction history one by one in search of the fruit seller.

The fruit shop bore no name and sat next door to our hotel in Zigui, a river town now administered under the city of Yichang in western Hubei province. We drove through the town on a recent road trip. In 1998, the central government relocated the entire town of around 100,000 downstream to accommodate the Three Gorges Dam, then the largest civil engineering project in China and still the most productive hydroelectric dam in the world.

Now the old town of Zigui is submerged entirely under water, countless homes and memories lost to the reservoir. But before I had any idea about its fraught history, I had known that the area produced oranges, lots of them.

An uncle-in-law grew up near Zigui, so every time he traveled home and returned to Wuhan, truckloads of oranges followed. My mom and aunt would examine each specimen with scientific rigor, inspecting the peel’s pigmentation and gently squeezing the fruit to test its firmness. They would then sort them by ripeness, pack them into an assortment of corrugated boxes (saved, naturally, out of survival instinct) on the balcony in the winter cold, and slowly work through the bounty for weeks.

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Oranges are usually a winter fruit in our region. Given how strictly my family observes the fruit calendar, their commanding presence so early in July felt disorienting. Stacked high on wooden street carts and huddled in woven baskets, could these summer interlopers live up to the spell that Zigui oranges have held over us for decades?

If fruit is a religion in China (and it absolutely is), seasonality and provenance are its core tenets. Chinese consumers know by heart the prime season for local fruit, and increasingly for foreign imports too, like cherries from Chile, Australia, and North America.

Chinese shoppers also identify their fruit by where it comes from. Take apples. American buyers might seek out specific varieties like Honeycrisp (yum!) or Red Delicious (which is anything but delicious). Chinese shoppers are more likely to look for apples from certain geographies like Yantai on the maritime hills of Shandong or Aksu in the desert oasis of southern Xinjiang. Both places are blessed with abundant sunlight.

Over time, the place—a city, a town, or some loosely defined area—becomes a brand in its own right. Occasionally, the fruit label becomes more known than its place of origin. Most fruit connoisseurs in China likely know about Yangshan shuǐ mì táo 水蜜桃, a peach so indulgingly sweet, tender and juicy that you have to eat it over a sink. Yet most of them likely would struggle to pinpoint Yangshan on a map. For the record, it’s a small town under Wuxi in southern Jiangsu.

By this logic, Zigui begets Zigui cheng (orange) 秭归橙, which in turn shapes the town’s reputation as a citrus capital. The local orchardists have figured out how to make fresh oranges available year-round. But did we really need oranges in the height of summer, when loquats were in full swing downstream in Dangyang, another town under Yichang, and crisp plums reigned upstream in Wushan, Chongqing, beyond the gorges?

This mapping of a place onto its edible abundance is not limited to the Three Gorges area or fruit. The association is so ingrained that anyone in my family can readily name an ingredient associated with most cities and towns around us. Honghu and Caidian are known for their mellow, sweet and perfectly nine-holed lotus root; Xiaogan for its sticky rice, often fermented into rice wine; Fangxian for its xiāng gū 香菇 (aromatic mushroom in Chinese, often known by its Japanese name, shiitake in the Western world); Enshi for its soft yet chewy mountain potatoes.

A place is inseparable from what it grows. The French concept of terroir—which I first encountered on a high school exchange trip to Paris and, naturally, Bordeaux—focuses heavily on subterranean geology and is typically something to be uncorked and consumed. In recent years, the term has quickly expanded to other gourmet staples like single-origin chocolate, specialty coffee, and whatever else we now assign tasting notes to. Its closest Chinese equivalent, shuǐ tǔ 水土 (literally, water and soil), feels more pervasive. It encompasses not only how produce tastes, but also how people interact with their environment, survive, and, hopefully, thrive.

Yī fāng shuǐ tǔ yǎng yī fāng rén 一方水土养一方人: “A particular soil and water nourish a particular people.” Think of this as a collective, more geographically-rooted vision for the famous “You are what you eat” or for its 19th-century French predecessor by Brillat-Savarin, “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.”

But in the Chinese understanding of shuitu, there is a deep sense of physiological co-evolution with one’s environment. The traditional wisdom goes something like this: If your family has historically called the central plains home, sudden binges on seafood might leave your gut perplexed. Similarly, if your diet consists of peppers of various kinds to deal with the cold and dampness, switching to pizzas and burgers overnight is asking for trouble.

By the same logic, traveler’s stomach is known in Chinese as shuǐ tǔ bù fú 水土不服, literally an inability of one’s body to work with the local water and soil. And by extension, it also describes a person or a company struggling to acclimate to a new land or market.

Perhaps this reflex of mapping places through shuitu explains why, when I first moved to America, I tried to do the same with New York and its immediate surroundings. But the effort did not go far beyond matching the Hudson Valley with apples and ducks and Vermont with maple syrup and cheese. It felt like deliberate labor compared to China, where such associations were already deeply steeped in the collective consciousness.

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Before Zigui was known as an orange hub, tangerines were the local pride. Qu Yuan (c. 340 BCE – 278 BCE), one of ancient China’s foundational poets and easily its closest equivalent to Homer, wrote at length about the local citrus. As proof of Qu’s staying power, he single-handedly spawned the Dragon Boat Festival. Legend goes that locals hurled zòng zǐ 粽子 into the river, where he committed suicide, so the fish wouldn’t eat Qu Yuan’s dead body. Clever, huh?

Qu saw in tangerines a humanistic determination in his poem “In Praise of the Orange-Tree.”

“Fairest of all God’s trees, the orange came and settled here,

Commanded by him not to move, but only grow in the South Country.

Deep-rooted, firm and hard to shift: showing in this its singleness of purpose...”

(Translated by David Hawkes)

Citrus cultivation and trade continued to thrive through the Western and Eastern Han (202 BCE – 220 CE). The obsession with this local citrus even prompted the imperial government to set up an official post, jú guān 橘官, in the adjacent counties, to source and supervise the shipment of tribute tangerines to the capital, another proof that fruit has always been a religion in the Middle Kingdom.

Fast forward to the 1970s, the local red tangerine ran into trouble. Beloved as it was, the fruit was seedy, pulpy, and prone to gluts that rotted in winter storerooms before they could find markets outside the area.

Partially due to its legacy in citrus cultivation, the area was picked and groomed for navel oranges. Researchers from Wuhan and Chongqing arrived with California imports like the Robertson and Newhall navel oranges, looking for a microclimate that could coax out their sweetness without freezing the branches off.

They found it in the Three Gorges. Shielded from chilling winds by the mountains, the valleys trap warm air while the waters of the Yangtze act as a thermal reservoir. The American varieties did not just adapt. They thrived.

Decades later, late cultivars like the Australian Lane Late transformed the valley yet again. Today, oranges hang on the terraced slopes well into spring and summer, solving the mystery of our July sighting. And they sure held up Zigui’s reputation. While the oranges didn’t make the cut for my mom’s repeat order, the freshly pressed juice from the same stall had us gaping at each other in disbelief, followed by an incredulous interrogation of the owner to confirm that no sugar had been added.

Whether tangerines or oranges, citrus has long occupied a central place in the Chinese imagination of terroir, serving as a metaphor for the shaping of agricultural produce as much as human character. The foundational text for this worldview was laid down over two millennia ago in the Annals of Master Yan:

Jú shēng huái nán zé wéi jú, shēng yú huái běi zé wéi zhǐ

橘生淮南则为橘，生于淮北则为枳

“The orange tree grown south of the Huai River is an orange; grown north of the Huai it becomes a trifoliate orange. The leaves are similar, but the taste of the fruit is different. Why is this? The water and soil are different.”

(Translated by Burton Watson)

Botanists have long debunked the premise, proving that the sweet mandarin orange (Citrus reticulata) and the bitter trifoliate orange (Poncirus trifoliata) are completely distinct species. Yet the ancient wisdom survived the scientific truth. People continue to seek out “oranges grown south of the Huai.”

But along the Three Gorges, the successful introduction of oranges to tangerine-land proves the reality of shuitu is far more complicated than immutable. Perhaps shuitu is not so much a fixed destiny but an ongoing negotiation between nature and human innovation, where even imports from “strategic rivals” could take root and transform the landscape.

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Illustration by Yanki Kung

Zigui was just one waypoint on an overly ambitious family road trip earlier this summer.

We set out from our home city of Wuhan (hot dry noodles) in central Hubei, cutting through the province to the west through Jingzhou (fish cakes), Yichang (fatty fish), Zigui (orange!), Enshi (green tea), and Lichuan (black tea) before crossing into Chongqing’s Qianjiang District (chicken giblets). From there, we reached Tongren (mó chá 抹茶/matcha) in Guizhou, then Guiyang (crispy pork lardons) via Kaili (sour broth hotpot). Continuing westward, we made our way to Kunming (rice noodles), then completed the loop by driving north through Panzhihua (mango), Xichang (satellite?), and Ya’an (carp) before reaching Chengdu (sweet water noodles). From there, we stopped in Badong (beef hotpot) and Jingmen (sesame pastries) on the final stretch of the trip.

Yes, it was a lot of towns and cities and lots of driving (thank you, Dad). The expedition also lasted for over a month (arguably a month too long to test the limits of my filial piety), but we all made it back in one piece.

My parents were easy to travel with, apart from their tiny appetites, which meant we could only have two meals a day, practicing intermittent fasting without intent. We could also afford the highway tolls, despite my dad’s running complaint about how expensive they were. Then again, almost the entire trip, barring the few hours through the central plains in Hubei, was a seemingly endless succession of hills and mountains. The engineering costs for these highways must have been staggering, I thought to myself. We were just paying our dues.

In between tunnels stretching for miles and bridges suspended high above river valleys, we occasionally zigzagged through provincial roads and county lanes. The real fun began on the narrow back roads that cut across fields. Rolling down the windows, I could almost reach for the heads of ripening rice. The most frequent question in the car was, without a doubt, “What is that?”, invariably from me in the back seat and my dad in the front. Mom was our resident expert on all things agricultural. This was mostly because my dad grew up entirely in the city, whereas my mom split her childhood between the city and the countryside.

Not far past Zigui, we drove through a section of a river valley, where almost every house had thousands of cut pieces of some fruit or vegetable laid out front, all neatly in halves. They were slightly larger than apples. Their flesh glowed the bright orange of persimmons. The skin was bright green like a Granny Smith, turning purplish-brown as it oxidized in the sun. After much guessing, we pulled over by the road, rolled down the window and caught the eye of a local farmer.

“Hi! Just curious, what are these you’re drying?”

“Mù guā 木瓜!”

“Oh they look different from papayas!”

“Oh, it’s not the fruit papaya. They are for medicinal use.”

It turns out that we were driving through Changyang County, the core growing region of Chinese medicinal quince. The local harvest is among the most reputed, recorded in local gazetteers since at least the late nineteenth century.

Not only sold as raw ingredients to Chinese herbal medicine producers, the fruit is also used by locals, fresh or dried, in salads and to make a medicinal liquor to warm up the body and fight the cool humidity in the valleys.

The harvest is a race against time, according to the local farmer. The fruit is typically picked in peak summertime, when its skin turns yellow from green, lightly aromatic yet not fully ripe. It is the window when its key therapeutic compound, oleanolic acid, is at its peak, hence the miles of drying plots along the road. Once dried, the flesh darkens to a crimson red or dark violet, and its skin wrinkles, earning its name zhòu pí mù guā 皱皮木瓜, or wrinkled Chinese quince.

Both my parents were delighted by this newfound knowledge. For my mom, it was the satisfaction of knowing and adding mugua to her own mental encyclopedia, and for my dad, it reinforced his ever-growing devotion to Traditional Chinese Medicine since herbal broths helped manage and even cure his coronary problems.

For my parents, shuitu is never an abstract combination of latitude, longitude, elevation, or geographic borders, but informed by produce: which valleys grow the sweetest oranges or pears and which hills yield the most potent medicinal quince. This knowledge is not acquired wholesale from reference books, but assembled piecemeal through detours along country roads, conversations in local markets and discoveries made in tiny restaurants.

By the time I dug through my payment history and helped my mom locate the fruit seller, the prime window for those mountain pears had already closed.

But perhaps that is exactly the appeal. A harvest cannot be summoned on demand. There’s always next year, when the cycle repeats itself, or another stop along a county lane, where another obsession awaits.

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About Writer

Xiong Yang is a food and travel writer and journalist from Wuhan, China. He is currently bouncing between places in China with good food (which is practically everywhere) and New York (where he cat-sits for old friends). A genetic test has confirmed his fondness for high-calorie food, which is true, so he’s trying very hard to manage this vice with lots of tennis.

That’s it for this week’s issue! Coming up next, we have a special crossover with Peking Quack: Xinrou Shu visits one of Shanghai’s hardest-to-book restaurants and muses on how the endless chase for novelty has brought overseas reinterpretations of Chinese food back to China, repackaged as exotic, cosmopolitan dining experiences.

Until next time!

Photo & Illustration by Yanki Kung

Tinned fish has gone from a quiet pantry staple to a bona fide lifestyle choice over the past few years. Thanks to aesthetics-driven TikTok food influencers and clever marketing by companies like Fishwife, what was once a cheap, practical way to eat seafood is now a chic superfood, a pantry flex and, somehow, a ritualized experience. After all, it’s a tiny tin box that you can pop open—savory, briny and oily in all the right ways, begging to be scooped onto a cracker or tossed into a bowl of pasta.

As the Western fascination with tinned fish grows increasingly discerning, enthusiasts and tastemakers have begun venturing beyond the Iberian Peninsula in search of more obscure offerings from farther afield. Among the more curious catches attracting the attention of critics and tastemakers is a Chinese pantry staple: dòu chǐ líng yú 豆豉鲮鱼 (hereafter referred to as Douchi Lingyu), or fried dace with fermented black soybeans.

Photo by Yanki Kung

If you put Douchi Lingyu together with all the cans in a Western connoisseur’s collection, it would likely stand out for its size. At about 200g, it is closer to a full meal than a small snack. But, it occupies a different space in the Chinese kitchen: it is rarely served as a final product (though it can be, if heated up), but used to enhance flavor in a new dish—the fish stirred into seasonal vegetables; the oil blended into fried noodles and rice.

The signature flavor of this can is dòu chǐ 豆豉 (hereafter referred to as douchi), an ingredient made from black soybeans—steamed, fermented, salted, then aged. It is nutty, earthy, smooth, and savory (among all fermented bean sauces, it is a lot more reserved than Sichuan classics like dòu bàn jiàng 豆瓣酱 or northern huáng dòu jiàng 黄豆酱). Douchi can take center stage, while it also plays well with others, unique but never overpowering. Like most fermented ingredients in China, douchi has thousands of years of history and countless regional varieties. From Hunanese pork stir-fries to Cantonese steamed spare ribs, douchi quietly backs people’s favorite dishes with vastly different characters. In case you never noticed, the (in)famous Laoganma chili oil also features douchi in most of their products!

Douchi Lingyu is typically known in English as “Fried Dace with Salted Black Beans.” In fact, dace is an overly inclusive term covering numerous species across genera and families. Yet lingyu is a specific fish found exclusively in southern China and Vietnam. In the late 19th century, many Cantonese emigrated to Southeast Asia to make a living. They would fry this local catch and soak it in oil to preserve it, along with douchi for extra flavor. Sealed in clay jars and brought onto the ships sailing away from home, this practical invention helped workers survive the long journey and adjust to a new life in foreign lands.

When Douchi Lingyu was first canned, it was a luxury. But today, the wrinkled fish skin and tender fried bone, chewy fillets drenched in the rich nutty oil have become a staple in Chinese kitchens all over the world.

The most classic way of cooking it, arguably, is using it to elevate your everyday veggies like string beans and lettuce. In Cantonese-speaking regions, Douchi Lingyu to celtuce leaves (also known as A-choy and yóu mài cài 油麦菜) is like anchovies to romaine lettuce in a Caesar salad. The earthy and mildly bitter taste of celtuce leaves and the fatty fried fish complement each other just right.

Not only does it accompany any home-style Chinese dishes well, Douchi Lingyu also blends seamlessly into dairy products like cream and cheese—see Caiwei’s pasta recipe below.

From traditional to innovative, we provide three recipes here that we actually made and loved.

The Classic: Stir-fried Celtuce Leaves with Douchi Lingyu (Yanki’s recipe)

This could be THE Cantonese veggie dish.

As a picky kid who couldn’t appreciate any bitter vegetables or the funky smell of seafood, I would break my rules for this one dish: Douchi Lingyu with celtuce leaves. Douchi softens the fishiness of lingyu and takes the bitterness of celtuce leaves away, leaving the dish with a rich yet mellow taste that’s palatable for diners of all ages. When I make the dish myself, I love to double down on the garlic and douchi for extra flavor!

Here’s my personal recipe for this Cantonese stir-fry classic:

Dace & Schmear: Douchi Lingyu Scallion Cream Cheese Bagel (Yanki’s recipe)

The morning after I made the celtuce leaves stir-fry, I still had half a can of Douchi Lingyu lying in the fridge. I toasted my bagel and made scallion cream cheese as usual—but what if I put the fish on top?!

As it turns out, this may be the easiest way to enjoy Douchi Lingyu, and certainly the closest to the Western tinned-fish tradition of putting something oily and vaguely luxurious on bread. Unlike the dainty little tins favored by artisanal seafood brands, Douchi Lingyu tends to come in generous portions, swimming in enough fragrant oil to dress several meals. The bagel’s dense chewiness, the cool tang of scallion cream cheese and the salty, nutty richness of the fish make for an improbably harmonious combination. No cooking required, unless you count toasting a bagel, which I don’t.

Should we ever open a deli, Douchi Lingyu scallion cream cheese will be on the menu. I am prepared to stake our reputation on it.

The Canto Alfredo: Douchi Lingyu Creamy Pasta (Caiwei’s recipe)

This recipe came after I watched the convenience store challenge in the first season of The Divine Dish, a popular Chinese cooking survival show. In the challenge, about a dozen eliminated chefs were tasked to create a fine dish out of convenience store ingredients, and Douchi Lingyu cans became a popular choice many chefs resorted to. Indeed, when resources are limited, Douchi Lingyu is almost a cheat code for attaining rich, complex flavor with minimal effort. I tried my recipe when I was staying with my friend Yufeng for the first time, when we were craving a late-night snack but had very few things in his pantry.

The result turned out to be surprisingly rich—the nuttiness of douchi meshed really well with the cream, and the Parmesan really tied the flavors together. Since then, I have cooked this recipe many times. I think this might be one of my new favorite pasta recipes.

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***This was actually our first time trying to take recipe photos! Special thanks to our friend Yufeng Zhao for direction and photography support.

About writers：

Yanki Kung is an artist from Shenzhen, China. She is currently based in Toronto, arguably the capital of Chinese food in North America. With a background in cultural anthropology, she now illustrates, tattoos, writes, does stand-up comedy, hosts a podcast, and cooks at a Japanese restaurant.

Caiwei Chen is a writer, journalist and critic from Xiangyang, China. She currently lives in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, where she finds therapy by wandering through the grocery stalls along 8th Avenue. She also reports on tech, AI, internet and thinks about how these things impact society more broadly. She has, at various points, been the designated China woman at an American media organization. She is more online than she likes to admit.

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Illustration by Yanki Kung

Years ago, when I was reporting on Fuzhounese immigrants in Manhattan’s Chinatown, I sat down with the chef of Yung Sun 榕信酒楼. “Order from the other side,” he said, flipping the menu, pointing to Fuzhounese snacks like ròu yàn 肉燕. On the front were Cantonese and Chinese American classics: lo mein, moo shu pork, clay pot casseroles. On the back was where his hometown delicacies lived, under the heading “Foochow style.” He told me it was set up this way because, back then, when people walked into a Chinese restaurant, they expected Cantonese food.

As growing numbers of Fuzhounese immigrants arrived in the U.S. in the 1970s and ’80s, many through New York and by sea, Manhattan’s Chinatown was still dominated by Cantonese culture. For many Americans, that first contact with Cantonese cuisine shaped how Chinese food was represented, giving rise to a canon of Chinese American cuisine. Immigrants who arrived later, from other regions, had to appeal to the popular understanding of what “Chinese food” was, while sneaking in the food native to them almost like contraband.

For many in the Chinese diaspora, leaving home is the first time we realize that “Chinese” is something others see as weird, singular, and fixed—a thing to be encountered rather than simply lived. There is a strange feeling in that discovery: both estrangement and recognition, as if you are looking at yourself in a distorting mirror. I had the banquet-hall dim sum experience for the first time in Maryland, and my first bowl of wonton noodle soup at a stall in Manhattan’s Chinatown. None of these experiences directly remind me of home.

Indeed, the idea of Chinese food has always been plural, nebulous and constantly reinvented across generations of immigrant and cultural contexts. In New York City, Chinese restaurants that cater almost exclusively to the newer generations of Chinese expats now stand alongside restaurants that speak to a much broader audience. Food trends that have already peaked or faded in China find second lives in Flushing. Older-generation chefs compete with new establishments built around pre-made sauce packets and scalable formats. French techniques are folded into Chinese flavors and served in Chinatown wine bars with sommeliers. The restaurants trending on RedNote and reviewed by New York magazine have never overlapped so much.

It is a confusing time to enjoy Chinese food. When someone says they are a lover of Chinese food, you rarely know what to assume. China is enormous. Its regional variations are so vast that any friend from another town could easily name dozens of ingredients and dishes I have never heard of. Outside of China, Chinese cuisines have also evolved along their own paths, adapting to and fusing with local influences. To talk about Chinese food as one thing is almost as ambitious an undertaking as packing Georgian, Italian, and Portuguese food altogether under “European food.”

The context collapses when you try to introduce the vastness of Chinese food into a new setting. Some are meant to be carried in a paper cup as an easy breakfast. Some are meant to be eaten on a hot summer night by the street. A lot should probably never have been plated at all. But hey, we are in North America. What else can you say when seasonality, terroir, and traditions all come out simply as, “It’s good”?

But it is also a golden time to be into Chinese food. After all, we are all Chinamaxxing now. Food pop-ups and private dinner tables seem to happen every week in New York (between the three of us, we have hosted a few ourselves). Chinese restaurant businesses of all kinds are finding their audiences. A TikTok video can summon a never-ending line outside a Chinatown joint or a Flushing cart overnight. ABCs, fobs, global transplants and Dimes Square white hippies now congregate and mingle on the Lower East Side, rediscovering the food that has kept generations of Chinese diaspora fed.

Now back to the motherland, the concept of eight main culinary traditions (bā dà cài xì 八大菜系), largely mapped to the contours of modern provinces, was only created in the 1970s and ‘80s. Today, younger diners and chefs are ready to move away from this pedantic categorization and explore a far messier and expansive view of Chinese food.

Like many nation-states, China’s administrative borders often cut across older cultural continuums, dividing places where language, food, and everyday habits may have more in common than the map suggests.

Take Caiwei’s and my home province of Hubei: the central plain is fed by rice fields and lakes that yield all edible parts of the lotus plant, as well as freshwater fish and crustaceans. Further west in Yichang, the food starts to resemble that of our neighbors, Sichuan and Chongqing. To the north, Xiangyang is known for its bold and spicy beef noodles, with visible influences from northern provinces like Shaanxi and Henan.

These differences within a single province make province-based culinary traditions feel imprecise, if not reductive. But these nuances also provide endless ingredients, flavors and techniques for an increasingly nationalized food scene.

This culinary abundance has proved to be fertile ground for a restaurant industry constantly searching for something “new.” In recent years, Yunnan, Guizhou, Jiangxi, and Guangxi have each cooked up waves of restaurants and dining concepts. The rise of Yunnan- and Guizhou-inspired bistros is one example, as I previously wrote for the South China Morning Post.

Rife with competition, the domestic food landscape in China has become both more diverse and homogeneous. New cuisines are constantly being introduced, but as soon as a few restaurants specializing in a “new” food take off, rapid imitation and expansion follows.

Even the boom of commercial real estate shows up in ways that could easily go unnoticed: as malls become center of gravity for neighborhoods in the past 20 years, large restaurant groups have emerged to take over prime locations with unparallelled efficiency.

Still, beneath the noise, there is a genuine interest in the unique foods, and the stories and traditions that give the dishes meaning beyond tasting good. This new food scene is driven by individual restaurants, entrepreneurs, young diners with a growing appetite for new flavors, as much as by, of course, the internet. The dominance of social media apps such as Rednote (Xiaohongshu) and Dianping has fed an insatiable appetite for novelty, and created its own unique scene of foodie culture, one that is more participatory, playful and creator-driven.

Chinese food culture has an everyday pervasiveness that feels different from the English-language food scene. It is not a niche interest or lifestyle vertical, but closer to a common language shared across class, hometowns, taste, status and age groups. Food is easily the safest topic for small talk (albeit whether small talk culture itself exists in the same way is a question). It is probably no surprise, then, that one of the most common greetings is “chī le ma 吃了吗” (which literally means, “have you eaten yet”)!

That means the average Chinese person (especially if they are an internet user) has a much more granular vocabulary about food. They might not belong to the social class or image traditionally associated with connoisseurs, but they can still argue intensely about whether a noodle texture is right, whether a regional cuisine has been overblown on social media, whether a restaurant is worth a visit, or whether a food is zhì shāng shuì 智商税 (literally, tax on low intellect, or a gullibility tax)—a common internet phrase for something that preys on gullible consumers.

This stands in sharp contrast to the U.S., where the everyday food landscape can feel a little flatter: dominated by familiar industrialized flavors, with less regional distinction, and shaped by a wistful longing for immigrant “authenticity” that too often reduces criticism of immigrant food to well-meaning but generic praise.

In China, with the relative absence of an institutionalized food-media or professional critic class, a different kind of food culture took shape online: one in which every sufficiently opinionated internet user gets a say. Over time, diners developed their own unwritten rules, vocabularies, and standards for evaluating restaurants. There is a whole vernacular of bì léi 避雷 (warning others away), cǎi léi 踩雷 (trying something and regretting it), zhòng cǎo 种草 (being influenced to want something), and dǎ kǎ 打卡 (checking in at a hyped spot), alongside endless unofficial rankings and fiercely debated local lists.

It is a process that is not immune to the common criticism of the internet hype cycle, but also one that is filled with genuine insights, humor and play. It is within this process that old staples get contested and new classics get created.

People also cook at home with the help of screens now. Tutorials from chefs, influencers, and ordinary home cooks pile up across the internet; in the comments, people submit their “homework,” compare results, troubleshoot failures, and sometimes review the reviews themselves. Together, they form a vast, largely organic trend machine that constantly metabolizes new influences, information, techniques, and aesthetics.

It’s no wonder, then, that for many Chinese people abroad, figuring out where to eat in a new city often starts—and sometimes ends—with Rednote. There are no institutions or authority there, just a lot of people arguing, ranking, and tirelessly teaching each other how to eat. For those of us far from home, Chinese social media is still the most trustworthy voice in the room.

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Back in 2020, Alison Roman, then the star recipe columnist for the New York Times, dismissed Chrissy Teigen and Marie Kondo in an interview for building their commercial empires. Meanwhile her own recipes, along with those of many personalities across legacy food media, were built on immigrant flavors without due credit. In the wave of reckoning that followed, established brands like Bon Appétit scrambled to put out apologies, audit their archives and vow to be more sensitive to proper crediting and representation of minority voices.

Yet recipes remain dominated by buzzwords and the familiar miso-tahini-gochujang complex. These ingredients function as passports for unfamiliar dishes to travel through immigration, while inevitably flattening the specific stories and traditions that birthed them.

For better or worse, Chinese food doesn’t even have many buzzwords to claim as its own. And most “Chinese” recipes online are largely internationalized versions of dishes, shaped less by what people eat in various parts of China, but more by what Western editors and readers recognize as Chinese. The fact that Chinese people from different parts of the country sometimes cannot even agree on what to call an ingredient or a dish does not help either.

In a world where food writers and diners are only beginning to recognize the full breadth of Chinese food, it still feels like a distant dream for all the cuisines beneath that umbrella to shine on their own. Discussions of deeply regional Chinese restaurants often amount to little more than mentions—a nod to their existence rather than stories in their own right. Part of the problem is context, an exhausting amount of groundwork that is sometimes deemed as optional or simply unnecessary. A piece about the latest Italian restaurant in New York can draw on regions of Italy and drop words like mafaldine and orecchiette; a profile of a Yunnan noodle shop may still have to begin by explaining where Yunnan is.

That missing context also obscures how foods are meant to work together. On Chinese tables, meals are anchored by zhǔ shí 主食, the essential grains and starches that form the core of the meal. For a hearty everyday dish, xià fàn 下饭 is one of the highest compliments: literally, how well it “sends the rice down,” or how powerfully it makes you want to take another bite.

Chinese and English also practice different approaches to tasting food. The Chinese palate places an emphasis on texture and mouthfeel, but the English language struggles in being more specific about the different chewiness, slipperiness and crunch. If you’re interested in exploring this linguistic gap further, Ligaya Mishan’s 2023 New York Times essay offers a thoughtful cross-cultural perspective, while Fuchsia Dunlop’s Invitation to a Banquet includes a survey of the many Chinese texture descriptors.

There is also, of course, politics. Because of its earlier rise to global prominence, Japan has become the source of many ingredients used throughout East Asia and beyond, such as edamame, shiitake, and gyoza. What is named first often becomes what is seen.

The longer I live away from China, the less coherent and more expansive Chinese food becomes to me. I have lived in the U.S. for six years now, and it is through living in New York as a new Chinese immigrant that I learned about things I never grew up knowing like different styles of rice rolls, the Fuzhounese standard for fish balls, the difference between General Tso’s chicken and orange chicken. Little did I know I would come to crave them all.

I learned to rejoice in finding the “close enough” version of a regional Chinese dish thousands of miles from where it was born. I developed opinions on what does and does not belong in yān dǔ xiān 腌笃鲜, something I never grew up eating. I began going out of my way to gather people around a home-cooked feast for every traditional Chinese holiday.

But what is even tradition? Wuhan staple hot dry noodles (or, rè gān miàn 热干面) were invented in the 1930s; shuǐ zhǔ yú 水煮鱼, or spicy boiled fish, took its modern form in Chongqing in the 70s and 80s; and even tomato and egg, something close to a national home cooked dish in China, has been around for barely a century. If anything, constant reinvention is the tradition.

But that doesn’t mean anything goes. We know what we know, and it’s hard not to say something when everyone else is getting it wrong. We have so many “iykyk” moments—we live with a specific kind of cognitive dissonance that comes from moving between two languages, two food cultures (if these are even quantifiable) and two ways of explaining the world.

I couldn’t have said it better than my friend Ruby Justice Thelot, who wrote in his essay “In Praise of Gatekeeping”:

The Gatekeeper is important because they provide the friction. The Gatekeeper is not truly exclusionary, rather they introduce labor to access the culture, they introduce a rite of passage, of initiation. The gatekeeper creates the fence which the enthusiast happily hops and stops the dilettante.

Numb and Spicy came out of conversations like these. Yanki and I met in New York and became partners in crime in hosting dinner parties; Yang and I met at a media-world social and somehow spent an hour standing in a corner talking about food. The conversations kept going—over meals, over calls, across cities—until it became obvious that we wanted somewhere to put them.

Having written about China for English-language media for my entire career, I know the process almost always starts with “what do I find most interesting and fun?”—but that often gets drowned out by “why should American readers care about this?” and “why is it important?.” And when talking across differences starts to feel like an endless exercise in explanation, translation, and defense—what if we simply talked to each other instead and invited anyone curious enough to listen in?

What if we can contribute to a culture conversation not shaped by authenticity policing or NYT Cooking-style “buzzword burger,” but by a genuine desire to sit at the same table with each other?

What if we didn’t always have to justify ourselves to the world? What if we could simply be, become, and keep becoming—and invite you along for the ride?

We are inspired by early food Substacks like Vittles, indie print projects like Cake Zine, the in-the-know voiceyness of Feed Me, and the diligent efforts of peers like Chinese Cooking Demystified. I am also forever inspired by the first Substack project I worked on, Chaoyang Trap, where a group of friends and I wrote about having fun on the Chinese internet. I find myself missing those days, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned from that, it’s that sometimes you can manifest the kind of audience you want into existence.

Our name comes from a slightly-off translation of má là 麻辣, the signature flavor from chili pepper and Sichuan peppercorn, representative of Sichuan cuisine and many Southwestern Chinese dishes.

Chinese speakers have long used the “five flavors” to capture a mixed emotional state. wǔ wèi zá chén 五味杂陈, a commonly used chengyu idiom, literally means “five flavors all at once.” The phrase suān tián kǔ là 酸甜苦辣—sour, sweet, bitter, spicy—is often used as a catch-all for life’s full range of experiences and emotions.

麻 má, or numbing, hasn’t traditionally been part of that emotional vocabulary—but that’s changed with the internet. Phrases like “我麻了” (“I’m numb”) and “赢麻了” (”winning so much I’m numb”) have become popular Chinese internet slangs over the past decade. We love them because they capture the buzz, the tingle, the strange feeling of being both overstimulated and slightly numb.

For us, Numb and Spicy is about food, but it’s also about that state of being—rawdogging this immigrant life with no manual, half-overwhelmed and half-numb to it, and still, somehow, wanting more.

You’ll see these things from us:

• Essays, like this one, about Chinese food experiences and opinions broadly

• Recipes and guides—sometimes traditional, sometimes unconventional—written from a place of familiarity and respect

• On-the-ground reporting, dispatched from everywhere we encounter Chinese food

• Trend pieces translating and interpreting food conversations happening in Chinese, especially online

• Interviews with restaurateurs, home chefs, connoisseurs, farmers, and anyone else in the food world we find interesting

• Graphic essays from our one and only Yanki, about her food feelings

• Other things we feel strongly enough to write about

We want to be your favorite gatekeeper. If you want to chat, you can reach us all at editors@numbandspicy.com.

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About Writers

Yang Xiong is a consultant-turned food and travel writer from Wuhan, China. He is currently bouncing between places in China with good food (which is practically everywhere) and New York (where he cat-sits for old friends). A genetic test has confirmed his fondness for high-calorie food, which is true, so he’s trying very hard to manage this vice with lots of tennis.

Yanki Kung is an artist from Shenzhen, China. She is currently based in Toronto, arguably the capital of Chinese food in North America. With a background in cultural anthropology, she now illustrates, tattoos, writes, does stand-up comedy, hosts a podcast, and cooks at a Japanese restaurant. She throws a lot of dinner parties.

Caiwei Chen is a writer, journalist and critic from Xiangyang, China. She currently lives in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, where she finds therapy by wandering through the grocery stalls along 8th Avenue. She also reports on tech, AI, internet and thinks about how these things impact society more broadly. She has, at various points, been the designated China woman at an American media organization. She is more online than she likes to admit.