The Woks of Life: How stories of food & family bring thousands of people together
The Leung Family documented their cross border experience cooking Chinese dishes on their blog The Woks of Life and sparked a community
This post is part of the People & Company team’s ongoing research into exceptional communities that are bridging the gaps between us. P&C is a strategy company that helps organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments.
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“As the community grows and people come back, they start wanting to know more about us and where we’re coming from. We wanted to make that really clear — the origin of all of these recipes and of our family.” — Sarah Leung
The Woks of Life has opened the door for many families to connect over the food and memories they love. The Leung family, Bill and Judy, and daughters Sarah and Kaitlin started the blog to document their favorite Chinese dishes and family memories in 2013.
Food has been a central part of their family’s heritage. Sarah’s grandpa was a chef in the New York Catskills and Sarah’s dad, Bill, worked with him in the restaurants.
Today, their blog is recognized as an authority for Chinese cooking and has sparked a robust online community. They developed their beloved editorial lens by capturing sincere experiences and rich memories with food as Chinese Americans. We talk with Sarah of how her family found their voice and supercharged others to share theirs too.
You can listen to the full episode here:
Just like when building a fire, there’s an order of operations you can follow to cultivate communities that burn bright.
In our book, “Get Together: How to build community with your people,” we take you through three stages of building a community: sparking the flame, stoking the fire, and passing the torch.
In our recent interview with the co-founder of The Woks of Life Sarah Leung, she offers insights into the second step: stoking the fire.
You can’t fake the funk.
Communities spring from a personal place. When Sarah and her sister Kaitlin were in college, their parents moved to China. Living in opposite time-zones, there was a tiny window to talk each day early in the morning or late in the evening and the conversation usually centered around food.
The sisters realized that without their parents around, they were not eating many of the dishes they’d grown up with. For the Leung family, the blog became a “way to stay connected across that incredible distance, and over something that we all agreed on and enjoyed.”
There are parallels to the Green brothers who began recording video messages to each other while apart on personal topics of loneliness, mental health, and things they are learning about. When they shared online, they found resonance. People saw bits of themselves in the brothers.
In approaching The Woks of Life as a way to reconnect, the Leungs captured a sincere story that resonated with many other Chinese Americans and people curious about Chinese culture and recipes.
Role model storytelling.
In that personal spirit, the Leungs started using The Woks of Life as a place to record the history and dishes they wanted to keep track of themselves. They treated it almost like a diary, writing memories associated with each recipe.
Later, it became a conscious choice to use stories to convey the context these recipes sit in. The Leung’s now make clear that the site is “about this continuity through generations and the memories that are connected with every dish.”
Certainly, site visitors have different motivations when searching for a recipe. Some people want to go straight for the ingredients and start cooking. But others keep coming back to The Woks of Life for the stories and are motivated to share themselves. By sharing their own stories, the Leungs are setting the tone and encouraging readers to do the same in the comments. That kind of textured sharing can bridge the gaps between strangers and make the site more than just a place to find a recipe.
Curating the conversations on “The Woks of Life.”
The Leung’s asked early on: are we only going to document authentically mainland Chinese food? No, they decided. Chinese American dishes had become a central part of their experience of Chinese cuisine growing up in New York.
“The glue to all of those different lenses is that our family has, in some way, has been touched by all of those things,” Sarah shared.
People from lots of different backgrounds have found an entry point to the blog because there is a recipe that’s familiar to them. Considering how niche their topic is, their audience is diverse. That’s because The Woks of Life isn’t just about a specific type of food, it’s about the power of sharing it with one another — and experience we all can connect to.
Say hi to Sarah and check out the recipes on The Woks of Life.
Thank you to Maggie Zhang, Get Together correspondent, for boring this story to us.
This interview is part of the People & Company team’s ongoing research into exceptional communities that are bridging the gaps between us. P&C is a strategy company that helps organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack, and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments. Learn more about what we do and how we work with organizations.
To hear more of our interviews with people organizers, subscribe to our newsletter and podcast, “Get Together.”
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