I’VE BEEN OBSESSED WITH 李子柒 FOR THE PAST COUPLE MONTHS EVER SINCE MY FRIEND SHOWED ME HER VIDEOS AND I ADMIRE HER SO FUCKING MUCH
SHE’S SO INDEPENDENT AND STRONG AND HANDY AND BEAUTIFUL AND INTELLIGENT AND I FUCKING LOVE HER
But her backstory makes me love her EVEN more
李子柒 (Li Ziqi) was born in Sichuan in the countryside to a poor family. Her mom left the family when she was very young, and she was abused by her stepmom when her dad wasn’t around. After her father passed away, she ended up orphaned and living with her grandparents
She dropped out of middle school and moved to the city to look for work because her family was in such poverty. There, she worked as a waitress and a DJ for 8yr, making barely enough to get by — at one point, before she had found steady work, she was homeless and was forced to seek shelter under a bridge
Her grandfather was a professional chef, and after he passed away, she decided to try her hand at the culinary arts and to share her cooking skills on social media — she started making YouTube videos (entirely independently!!)
She initially received an incredible amount of backlash… people left hurtful comments and really just shat on her for no good reason
But she persevered and continued making videos, and now, she has 3.8 million followers (as of May 4th, 2019) and gets the bulk of her income from her YouTube channel
She isn’t completely alone in making her videos anymore (she has a cameraman and an assistant), but she still does the majority of the work — the actual cooking/farming/handiwork being filmed, arranging the scenes, and video editing
She is an absolute BADASS and carries on so many Chinese traditions that are being forgotten
Most of her videos are of her cooking, but she shows you more than just the cooking process — you see her pulling vegetables and herbs and mushrooms out of the fucking ground and slicing fruits and flowers and shit off of trees with a machete in the beginning of the video, and by the end, it’s a finished, beautiful, mouth-watering dish
She also does way more than work with food — there’s a video of her building her clay oven (which you see her cooking with in a lot of videos) from SCRATCH just with some bricks and a mud mixture she made herself
There’s also a video of her making paper from scratch and then using it for calligraphy, and LET ME TELL YOU, LI ZIQI IS AS ARTISTICALLY GIFTED AS SHE IS CULINARILY
Li Ziqi is a fucking boss and I love her and please watch her videos
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