Absolutely. China has so much to offer—I didn’t even fully appreciate that as a Chinese person until I started studying, and now the more I study, the more I’m just fascinated. Like, 80 percent of trendy superfoods have roots in Chinese culture.
China invented everything!
Kombucha: Everybody drinks it, and it was invented in China! I get goose bumps when I think about the potential of wellness culture in China. China is not very good at letting other people know what we have, which is such a shame to me.
TCM here is honestly very whitewashed. TCM is actually very creative—it’s an art or philosophy, but that’s hard to convey, because the entire logic behind it is built upon the Chinese language, and you know how intricate the language is. So I’ve just been trying to be the translator.
And not just language, but an entire worldview…
Oh, absolutely. You know the Chinese nutritional concept of heating and cooling? For a Chinese person, it’s in our language, we automatically understand it. But I realized a lot of Americans have no idea what this means—“What do you mean I’m heated?”
When did you make the transition from learning for yourself to coming up with a business concept for sharing your knowledge with everybody else?
About two years ago, when I started hosting dinners in my apartment. The first dinner was for my friends, and the second meal I advertised on Instagram, so that was the first time I got paid. From the dinners, and continuing to post content, brands started approaching me for consulting and promotions, and it got bigger.
It sounds very organic, as if you didn’t set out to capital-B “Build a Brand.”
I probably should have been more intentional about building a brand, but that’s just not me—growing organically feels better. And since I’m passionate about education, my company, Five Seasons TCM, continues to offer a lot of free resources. My goals are simple: to make people feel more joy around food, to make them feel more knowledgeable around healthy eating, and to show the beauty of China.
Ever since you started posting the seasonal points on your Instagram, I’ve paid more attention to the outside world and to my body. I think living in America, I had lost those instincts. Following your seasonal eating guide has made me realize how much better I feel going into this winter, but also how much of that philosophy my family followed without even thinking about it. It turns out that Chinese cuisine is already built around the seasonal points!
Exactly! Especially holiday foods, which are always seasonal. And that’s true here too. For example, with Thanksgiving, you have pumpkin and warming spices, which are seasonally appropriate. But aside from holidays, eating is so nonseasonal here. Many of my consulting clients ate the same thing every day—they want three vegetables they can eat all year. Dieting takes people’s attention away from the natural world and puts the focus on food groups.
Actually, a lot of my followers are Chinese Americans. As you said, they tell me they know their roots a little better through me.
You must also get a lot of thirstiness from the mainstream wellness space. I feel like a lot of companies see someone doing something interesting and authentic, and they try to turn it into a trend.
It can be very superficial enthusiasm, like “OMG!!!” but without really trying to understand or learn these ingredients, this philosophy, and it shows when some of the collaboration requests I get are so off base from what I believe in. I also personally hate start-up culture—pitch decks, seed rounds—it drives me crazy. It’s so much more about the numbers and the fundraising than actually what you’re doing.
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February 02, 2021 at 09:00PM
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Traditional Chinese Medicine Practitioner Zoe Gong Is Sharing Generational Knowledge Via Instagram - Bon Appetit
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