Chinese-American father-son cooks on YouTube channels Made with Lau and Hunger Pangs on how they’ve bonded over food
- Two years ago Randy Lau convinced his dad, a former chef, to launch a cooking channel on YouTube. To their surprise, Made with Lau has 789,000 subscribers
- Another Chinese-American, Kevin Pang, cooks with his dad on the Hunger Pangs show. Both Pang and Lau say the shows have helped them bond with their fathers
Growing up, Randy Lau’s favourite thing to eat was the savoury tangyuan (tong yuen in Cantonese) his dad made. The dish – sticky rice balls in a soup made with lap cheong (Chinese sausage), dried shrimp, chicken and vegetables – was not only full of flavour and texture, but also stuffed with comfort.
“It just warms you up emotionally and physically. I have a language barrier with my dad, so food is one of our love languages. When he makes that for us, I know he loves us,” the San Francisco Bay Area native says.
Lau came up with the idea to make videos of his dad cooking different Cantonese dishes while he was on a retreat with his wife at the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
“[The pandemic] really forced me to re-evaluate my career, and also to just think about where I wanted to spend my time, because my parents weren’t getting younger, and I wanted to have something to pass down to my kids,” he says.
“This desire to understand more about what it means to be Chinese and to understand more about our heritage has been an undertone throughout my life. And a part of these videos, part of the process of making these videos, is reconnecting with that.”