Focus on Arts and Ecology

The couple film most of their videos on their apartment’s sunny, plant-filled balcony, using woks and skillets set over a portable burner. But for their latest video, on mantou—steamed buns—they hit a snag. In the video, we see Li’s hands mix the dough and form the buns, then arrange them in a bamboo steamer set in a wok over the camp stove on their balcony. Then, unexpectedly, Li picks up the wok and steamer and carries them indoors. “Forgive us real quick for moving into our terribly lit kitchen for this step,” Thomas says, in a voice-over. “See, our little outside camper burner is down to its very last can of butane. And right now it’s a touch annoying to buy more, because it’s the apocalypse outside.”

Like many cities in China, Shunde has placed its residents under lockdown, as the country tries to contain the breakout of the coronavirus. The majority of confirmed cases of the disease are concentrated in areas around the city of Wuhan, more than a thousand kilometres to the north, where epidemiologists believe the virus most likely originated in a wet food market. But there have been several dozen confirmed diagnoses in the cities of the Pearl River Delta, a dense megalopolis that includes Shunde, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Macau, and half a dozen other cities, collectively populated by more than fifty million people.

Last Saturday, after nearly two weeks of living under lockdown, Thomas posted a long, detailed, riveting entry about the experience on Reddit’s cooking forum, which quickly spread far beyond the usual readers of the site. In the post, he discussed his and Li’s surreal daily routine and what they’ve learned about making their limited food stores last. Like most people feeding themselves in the world’s developed cities, Thomas and Li had been accustomed to working with an abundance of easily available ingredients and a shortage of time. Now, on lockdown, this relationship was reversed—a change that, as Thomas wrote, has fundamentally changed the way he and Li think about cooking, recipes, and the notion of “authenticity.” I spoke to Li and Thomas via Skype, early in the morning of their eighteenth day on lockdown, about living and cooking in China right now. This conversation has been edited and condensed.

What’s it like right now, being under lockdown?

stephanie li: For the first couple of days after the virus, the whole city was quiet; nobody was on the street. That’s very rare for Chinese cities. You stay in your apartment; you don’t go anywhere. If you’re going on a grocery run, you wear a mask. If you’re walking your dog on the rooftop, you wear a mask. We don’t really get food supplies, especially fresh vegetables. Before the virus, the markets had been closed down already for the Lunar New Year, and supermarkets only get one shipment a day. Because everybody’s cooking at home, the fresh vegetables run out in the first half-hour. We were running on our vegetable supply that we bought before the Lunar New Year for at least a week.

chris thomas: There was some sad-looking broccoli for a while there.

s.l.: After that first week, supplies started coming back in the stores, but you don’t get to choose what you get. You just take whatever’s available.

c.t.: It’s definitely getting better. About a day after I posted that Reddit article, the markets opened again—for a Chinese city, that’s absolutely huge. Certain people, especially U.S.-based, have this position of looking down on open-air markets. They’ll say things, like, “Of course this virus happened in China, they have open-air markets.” I don’t know how much you’ve travelled, but open-air markets can be absolutely wonderful. And in China, especially, the markets themselves are so important to the food-supply chain. In the U.S., the major suppliers of food are the supermarkets, and maybe you go to the farmers’ market to get some extra-fresh produce or whatever artisanal goods. Here, the importance is really reversed. So getting the markets back was huge. They still run out of stuff, but it was really something today that we could actually get some scallions. That was big. That was exciting.

How did the lockdown in Shunde unfold?

s.l.: Things really escalated after Wuhan had all been locked down. That’s when cities in other parts of China started being in a semi-locked-down mode. There’s a community-management level of government, and they would arrange for apartment complexes to be locked down. No delivery guys allowed; only residents could come and go. In some places, some bus lines are closed, some public transportation. They tell you not to go out, but people are scared to go outside anyway. It’s also mandatory that you wear a mask to go out, and many people didn’t have the luck to actually have any masks.

c.t.: Yeah, that was very quick thinking on Steph’s part. At the beginning of all this I was, like, “Oh, it’s just some news.” But Steph went out immediately and bought masks.

I remember saying to Steph something, like, “Well, how long can this last?” And she said that the sars scare, back in ’03, that whole thing was about two months. I was, like, “Jesus, two months?” That was the moment I realized, O.K., yeah, at the very least, life is not going to be normal for a while.

When the markets were closed, where were you able to get food?

s.l.: There was one bakery in the market that was open, and we’d order from them online. We have a 7-Eleven across the street, and we can get snacks, drinks, some packaged foods, like instant noodles. Pickles.

c.t.: We’ve had a couple of orders from the supermarket.

s.l.: Basically to get whatever vegetables were available there.

c.t.: The big ones are broccoli, carrot, and chilies. They always have carrots. Nobody likes carrots, really.

s.l.: I saw fresh shiitake mushrooms one time, and there’s some kind of red-stem choy sum that’s we just get whenever we see it, because it’s a leafy green. There were—are they sweet peas? Snow peas?

c.t.: Sugar-snap peas.

s.l.: Oh, and the chinese yam. White chinese yam is always there. That’s a root vegetable that we don’t really buy, because we already had potatoes at home.

c.t.: This is where we’re lucky with the strange job that we have. We had done a video of a mashed-potato dish from Yunnan, back in December, and we needed to test it with these specific Yunnan potatoes, which turned out to be a whole thing. To get the Yunnan potatoes here in Shunde we had to get these monster-sized bags of them—which have since run out, but, boy, we had those baby potatoes for a while.

s.l.: Luckily our latest video was about mantou, so all you need is flour and yeast, and we had that at home. So during this time we also have an abundance of these sweet steamed buns. And, coming up, we’re going to do a video that’s just discussing ingredients.

c.t.: We don’t even need to cook anything for that one. And the follow-up, we do have a bunch of dried chilies, so we’re going to be doing a dish from Guizhou, which is just crispy chilies as a snack. I imagine after that we should be able to get more ingredients, and then we be a little more free with our subjects.

Walk me through a trip to the store to buy food.

c.t.: I need to preface this by saying that, for people in our situation, I may be a little more paranoid than I have to be. So first I put on my outside clothes, which I keep in a little corner, and I put on my mask. Going downstairs, I make sure not to press the elevator buttons with my hands but to use my sweater or something. Steph doesn’t like that I do that; she wants me to carry a pen to press buttons. But you do have to make sure that you don’t use your hands to interact with the world.

Once you get your stuff, you go back upstairs. You change your clothes; you wash your hands. In order to make sure we’re not infecting the pump on the liquid soap, we first use some bar soap and then we can press the pump to wash our hands. Everything we bought, all the ingredients, all the packaging, we put it in its own quarantine. We put it all out on the balcony, we spray all sorts of sanitizers on it, and let it sit outside for a couple of hours before we bring it inside.

You’ve been living like this for two weeks now. Does it feel normal now?

c.t.: No, it really doesn’t. I know we’re being a little bit paranoid, but where’s the line between paranoia and sensible risk management? I don’t know exactly. We’ve been really liking serving things in the laoguo style—it’s a dish from the Guizhou province, where you take some ingredients and you toss it on a mildly heated sizzling pan, and you just sort of slowly munch on it. One of the things we’ve enjoyed during this lockdown is going and eating that on the balcony. It feels a little bit like eating outside.

What other adaptations have you made to how you cook and eat?

c.t.: Especially here, down south, people eat a lot of rice. We do have rice, but we have a lot more flour. So fresh noodles have become a new staple for us, because we have a bunch of time and a bunch of flour.

s.l.: We also used flour to make tortillas—but we don’t have Mexican ingredients besides some Oaxacan cheese.

c.t.: It turned out to be kind of like chun bing, spring pancakes. In the north of China, there’s a tradition of making stir-fries, and then you take some spring pancake and wrap the stir-fry in it, almost as if it’s a taco. It’s always funny, those kinds of things. For one of our videos we had been doing suanni bairou, spicy pork with garlic sauce, which is basically just thinly sliced pork belly, and we had made some crunchy bread—it turns out thinly sliced pork belly is great as a sandwich meat. Then you put some kimchi on there, some Kewpie mayo, and I always have some Dijon mustard around—it’s perfect. A month or two from now, I might look back on that sandwich and be like, “Eh, whatever,” but right now, man, I’ve really been enjoying that.

What do you miss the most?

s.l.: Fresh scallions, and fresh herbs in general.

c.t.: With that sort of thing, it’s not like you need it, you can go one meal without finishing a dish with scallions or cilantro and it would be very normal. But after many meals without, you end up being aware of how much you miss it.

s.l.: Another thing that has happened is that without herbs, without scallions and cilantro, you start to look at other options, to see what else can serve that function. We have a lemon tree on our balcony, and I looked at it one day and started to pick lemon leaves.

c.t.: Don’t pick too many of them, though!

Have you been talking about the lockdown in the videos?

c.t.: People are so inundated with news right now, so overwhelmed by the situation with the virus and everything, that I didn’t really want to pile on, if that makes sense. Especially for us—we have to stay inside, and that sucks, but it’s not really that bad. There are many people who have been a lot more affected by this tragedy than we have, and that’s really sad. I don’t want people to worry too much about us.

I was watching the video diary of Ben Kavanagh, an Irish teacher who was recently evacuated from Wuhan, and he was having to get himself psyched up about eating a portion of pasta with some hot dogs on it.

c.t.: Exactly. In Wuhan they’ve really been so affected by this. Really, even on lockdown, Steph and I are spoiled with abundance. We’re not trying to get creative with dried pasta and nothing else. Because of our videos, we have this huge stock of ingredients from around the country. It’s a weird contradiction, having less but still having so much.

Some of the online conversation about coronavirus has bothered me a lot. A lot of people have maybe not even heard of Wuhan, and because the virus originated there, they have this conception that it’s a dirty, backwater place. But Wuhan is awesome. It’s one of the centers of the punk-rock scene in China—there’s this one venue, Vox Livehouse, that’s one of the coolest live-music venues that I’ve been to in the country, and right downstairs is this dive bar called Wuhan Prison that’s the kind of dive bar I think someone like Anthony Bourdain would have loved. And the food in Wuhan is awesome. It’s sort of a combination of Shanghai regional flavors and Sichuan flavors, and there’s some northern influence as well. One of their most beloved dishes is something called hot dry noodles, and it’s incredible. It’s a rich city with a rich culture. It’s an important city; it’s not nowhere.