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Notebook

My Father, the YouTube Star

Credit...Photograph from Jeffrey Pang

The first few emails were marked “Fwd: Jeffrey Pang sent you a video,” so I ignored them. Statistics were on my side: In the history of parental email forwards, roughly 0.001 percent have been worth opening.

Later he followed up by phone. I told him I hadn’t found time to watch whatever it was he sent. Several seconds of silence hung between us before my dad replied: “Oh.”

This is how it had gone for 30-some years — a father-son relationship kept cordial and indifferent through habit and physical distance. I live in Chicago; he’s in Seattle. Once a week, we’d talk on the phone for five minutes and exchange the least substantive of pleasantries: “How’s the weather?” “Plans this weekend?” Not a meaningful conversation so much as a scripted set of talking points.

Only when my mom nudged did I open the video Dad had sent.

Fade in: the company logo for Creative Production, with the E-A-T in “Creative” highlighted. Cue soft piano melody, the type of royalty-free soundtrack that sounds like the hold Muzak when you call your dermatologist. Dissolve to title screen: “Catherine Mom’s Shanghainese Green Onion Pancake,” with its translation in Chinese. And then a photo of my mother (Catherine) and my grandma. A shot of our white kitchen island, and my mother’s hands, her unmistakable wedding band, digging into and massaging wet dough. My virulently anti-technology Chinese parents were starring in their own internet cooking show.

Then one video turned into a few dozen, and now, somehow, my retired, 65-year-old father has nearly a million views on his YouTube channel.

As a child who immigrated from Hong Kong, I was raised as an American during the day and Chinese after school. I brought home Western ideas that confounded my parents: sarcasm, irony, recalcitrance. My father and I argued all the time. The grievances were usually benign, but they would erupt into battles between two headstrong males, each standing his cultural ground. It didn’t help that I stubbornly refused to speak Cantonese at home. Or when, during college, I went home for Thanksgiving with newly bleached blond hair. My dad was apoplectic, screaming the moment he saw me in the driveway, accusing me of being ashamed of my Chinese heritage.

Our differences would burn hot, then smolder, then fizzle to a détente. Eventually we would acknowledge each other, and everything would stay cool until the next flare-up. Our relationship reached a plateau of cordial indifference: We lived 2,000 miles apart and talked on the phone once a week about nothing important at all.

But something changed in our relationship the day I switched jobs. I was working as a metro news reporter at The Chicago Tribune when I was offered a position on the paper’s food writing staff. I had zero experience, but I did have one advantage: I was Cantonese. We Cantonese have a love of eating that borders on mania. Our people eat every part of almost every animal; we were the original snout-to-tail diners, long before hipsters hijacked the term. Hong Kong, where I lived until age 6, is a place where instead of asking “How are you?” we greet one another with “Have you eaten yet?”

Food was my dad’s obsession. He had always been a marvelous cook. He dreamed of being one of those Iron Chefs in white toques who enter Kitchen Stadium through dramatic fog. Much of the joy of Chinese food for him seemed nostalgic: He always lamented his decision to leave his beloved Hong Kong, to come here, to a foreign land, for the sake of his children.

So when I became a food writer, my father and I shared, for the first time, a mutual interest. I would call to ask about recipes and cooking techniques. He would school me on the world of Cantonese cuisine. The first time he visited me in Chicago, I took him to a dim sum restaurant for brunch, and as we ate shrimp dumplings and barbecued pork buns, he explained — gesticulating with his arms like a conductor — how the shiu mai’s wrapper should caress its filling “like a dress on a woman, like petals of a flower, like prongs on a diamond ring.” I had never heard him speak with such enthusiasm or eloquence. My father never taught me to swim, or to ride a bike, but he did teach me how to tell a good dim sum restaurant from a great one.

Food became something I could use to engage him and repair our relationship. When we talked on the phone about how to wrap Shanghai water dumplings or braise dong po rou pork belly, 30 minutes would fly by. Then, when the subject turned to anything else: “How’s the weather? Plans this weekend? O.K., goodbye.”

It’s not doingCarpool Karaoke” numbers or landing guest appearances by Michelle Obama, but the relative success of my dad’s cooking videos has been, for me, almost unbelievable. Most people would kill to have these viewer metrics. The videos are earnest and adorably cheese-ball, bearing the production tropes of ’80s VHS: There are spinning wipe effects, gratuitous zooms, saccharine background music.

His most-watched recipe, with nearly a quarter-million views, is for Chinkiang-style pork ribs. I remember eating these when I was growing up. He would use a cleaver to chop spare ribs into two-bite cubes, wok-fry them, then sauce them with a viscous glaze of Chinese black vinegar. The result was fatty and sticky and crisp, and I would slurp the meat clean off the bone in one motion. Watching through nearly two dozen more videos, I realized every single dish had been served in my childhood home. Macau-style Portuguese coconut chicken. Pan-fried turnip cake. Sweet-and-sour pork. This time, the wave of nostalgia washed over me: I was 12 again, sitting at the kitchen table, my family’s mouths too preoccupied to squabble.

My dad makes enough in each month’s ad revenues to take my mom out for a nice lunch. Making the clips is a lot of work. The two of them test each recipe a half-dozen times before committing it to film. Dad is behind the camera and editing the footage; it’s usually my mom’s hands demonstrating. They don’t speak in the videos. They say they’re embarrassed by their spoken English and feel more comfortable using onscreen text, in Chinese and English, for instruction. Writing and translating this adds several more hours of work.

“Why?” I asked during one of our weekly phone conversations. “Do you want a show on the Food Network or something?”

“You really want to know?” my dad asked in Chinese. “Your mom’s great-grandmother used to cook amazing Shanghainese food for her. She would dream about it. But when your mom was finally old enough to ask for the recipes, her great-grandmother had already developed dementia. She couldn’t even remember cooking those dishes. The only thing your mom had left was the memory of her taste. We’re afraid that if you wanted to eat your childhood dishes, and one day we’re both no longer around, you wouldn’t know how to cook it.”

“You know,” he added, “you can be pretty uncommunicative.”

Neither of us is likely to have the courage to sit down and hash out years of father-son strife; we’re both too stubborn, and verbalizing our emotions would leave us squirming. I even waited until the last minute to send him a draft of this story, and waited nervously for the response. Soon enough, a reply arrived:

Hi Kevin,

This is a good and true story. Thank you. Call me sometime.

Dad

Kevin Pang is a writer, a filmmaker and an editor at The Onion’s A.V. Club.

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