Hong Kong’s shy Indonesian YouTube star is recognised around the world
- Rosidah started her YouTube channel in 2013 to document her daughter’s recovery from a brain tumour
- It took off when she started posting family and cooking videos, and has 1.4 million subscribers, with 1,000 more joining every day
One of Hong Kong’s most popular YouTubers makes her videos from a village house in the New Territories – in neither of the city’s official languages – and is really quite shy.
Indonesian Nikmatul Rosidah’s videos, which focus on cooking demonstrations and elements of life with her family, are so popular that the family now get endless selfie requests on the street, and have even had a few unsolicited visits to their home.
Originally from a small village near Surabaya, East Java, Rosidah has lived in Hong Kong for about 20 years. As with many YouTubers, her channel started as a hobby, but in her case it was prompted by Cassandra, the older of her two daughters, being diagnosed with a brain tumour; as she stayed at home to care for her, Rosidah documented her recovery.
05:59
Indonesian YouTuber Nikmatul Rosidah cooks up online fame with stories of family life in Hong Kong
Her first video was uploaded in October 2013, but she started to get serious traction with one that followed nine months later. “It was my daughter trying to blow out a candle, which she didn’t find very easy,” she says. “There were a lot of people laughing at it, and it went viral.”
Since then about 1,500 other videos have followed, several a week – “every day when I’m in the mood”, as she puts it. Those videos have earned her 1.4 million subscribers, making her one of Hong Kong’s top YouTubers; about 1,000 new ones join every day. She currently receives about 150,000 views a day, and plenty of her videos have several million views – the most popular of all, for fish curry, has 5.6 million.