After spending a year working abroad and then coming back home alone, Sarah, facing the distance from her parents, started posting recipes to The Woks of Life. Kaitlin was still attending the University of Pennsylvania, and Bill and Judy had relocated from New Jersey to Beijing for Bill’s job at Nokia, where he’d been tasked with creating a new software engineering team. In 2012, when Sarah graduated with a degree in media studies from Vassar College in upstate New York, job prospects were slim. Nearly a decade earlier, long before the Leungs had to consider how to share their life and recipes with readers, they were simply trying to figure out how to navigate life’s various stages. It is a perfectly-overwhelmingly-idyllic backdrop for a cooking blog. Looking around their kitchen with its two islands and an enviable range meant for cooking with a commercial-size wok, I could see why a family documenting the details of their lives to millions would make a home here. Outside one of the kitchen windows, Bill strides across the paddock to tend to a motley crew of alpacas and goats (and one llama), as well as ducks and chickens, whose eggs they use in their cooking. ![]() As I shuffle inside, so begins a whirlwind of offerings: water, coffee, tea, soup, a mooncake that they’d made a couple weeks before for the Mid-Autumn Festival. Photograph by Leo Xander FooĪt the Leungs’ doorstep, I slip off my shoes and Judy hands me a pair of oversized slippers. Testing recipes in Bill and Judy's kitchen. The cookbook author and restaurateur Molly Yeh writes in an email that the Leungs’ “knowledge of Chinese cooking is encyclopedic.” Friends tell me they and their relatives consult the blog all the time, which I can relate to-The Woks of Life is about the only site my entire family consults, including my father, who notoriously shirks recipes. “The Leungs are as real as it gets,” he says. Kenji López-Alt says the Leungs’ recipes, both inspirational and functional, have helped him bring his own family around the dinner table. Over the years, they’ve garnered a cult-like following among chefs and Chinese cooking enthusiasts alike. ![]() Since 2013, the Leungs have published hundreds of recipes that now receive millions of views every month, and they’ve solidified their reputation as a trusted resource with detailed guides that walk home cooks through the necessary equipment and ingredients to make their dishes. ![]() The more time I spend with the family, the clearer it becomes that they’re on the precipice of something huge.
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