With her round face, long, straight black hair and square-framed glasses, Mandy Fu Manli looks just like the girl next door in China, but this hasn’t stopped her from becoming one of the most popular Chinese YouTubers internationally.
Fu, 28, found her recipe for success in bringing the secrets of Chinese cooking to the rest of the world from her kitchen in the US state of Florida, where she moved last year. While her instructions may be delivered in imperfect (but clear) English, her recipes – and her heart-warming smile – have won over amateur cooks worldwide and attracted more than 730,000 subscribers to her channel, Souped Up Recipes.
“When I first started, I never thought of having any big impact,” she says. “I wasn’t thinking of doing anything grand. I just wanted to do something I like.”
Souped Up Recipes specialises in teaching viewers how to cook typical dishes served at Chinese restaurants, from sweet and sour pork and chicken chow mein to egg foo yong and xiao long bao.Fu’s goal in these videos – which are usually tagged “Better than takeout” – is to teach foreigners how to make authentic Chinese cuisine from scratch, using elaborate explanations and step-by-step instructions.
She is not a professionally trained cook, but started picking up cooking skills around the age of 10, when her parents worked long hours at construction sites while leaving her and her younger sisters at home in a mountainous area of Guangdong province in southern China. The responsibilities of feeding herself and her two sisters during the daytime fell onto the young girl’s skinny shoulders.
“At first I started with easy recipes like stir-fried vegetables and fried eggs, which I learned from my parents,” she says.
After graduating from college in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province, with a major in Chinese herbology, Fu first worked for a medicine company and then a food ingredient supplier. Inspired by her boyfriend (now husband), an American fascinated by Chinese cuisine, she decided to share her passion for cooking with others via YouTube in English.
“I love cooking – that’s the most important reason [why I started the channel],” she says. “And I want foreign friends to know what real Chinese food is like. A lot of Chinese restaurants in the US are too Americanised – the taste is not authentic.”
With no filming or editing experience, Fu kicked off her journey as a YouTuber with a recipe for her favourite dish, char siu, also known as Chinese barbecue pork, in early 2017. Since then, she has produced a video a week – handling the shooting, editing and publishing all on her own.
“Being a food blogger doesn’t mean I know how to cook everything. I need to try some dishes four or five times before I can start filming,” she says.
For her recipe for crispy pork belly, she practised for two full weeks with two huge slices of pork belly, but still couldn’t perfect it. “I cried like a baby [after failing so many times]. I wasn’t even able to post my regular video that week,” she says.
As a non-native English speaker, Fu does not have the confidence to improvise in front of the camera – she writes and practises every line of script for each video.
“At first I made a lot of grammatical mistakes and pronounced some words wrong, and some comments pointed out my accent was hard to understand,” she says.
But the quality of her content has overshadowed her videos’ imperfections.
In 2018, Fu and her husband decided to move from China to Ecuador, and a year later, they relocated to the United States. Then the Covid-19 pandemic came, which benefited her channel as governments around the world started to impose lockdown measures to curb the virus and people started to cook at home more.
A chicken fried rice recipe she uploaded back in 2017 has so far received almost 5 million views, with more than 4,000 comments, most of which were made in the past six months.
“I like how you keep it simple without having a five-minute conversation with yourself before the actual instructions,” one comment says. “This is a great recipe for self-quarantine.”
Of all her videos, she says one titled “Chinese Cooking 101” was the most memorable for her. In the video she introduces six “must-have ingredients” for Chinese cuisine – from spices to noodles – and offers instructions on how to choose from different types and brands.
“It seems that the video really solves the pain point for some foreigners who would like to try cooking Chinese food,” she says. “Though there are Chinese or Asian markets in most cities in the US, the variety and nuances among different ingredients always deters non-Chinese buyers from trying it.”
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tK%2FMqWWcp51kuaqyxKyrsqSVZLKvwMSrq5qhnqKyr8COmqmtoZOhsnB%2FkGlvaWxpZLWww4ymmKSdXZi1qrrErJxmnp%2BksW7CyJ2cqKtdlrauscNmnaiqlZ60r7HRrGShmaaaerXB0aecnQ%3D%3D