In the west, I am called Lillian, but in China, I am 周瑞婷 Zhou Ruiting.
(周 zhou : cycle/circle, circumference, completion; 瑞 rui : auspicious; 婷 ting : graceful).
First Life:
I was born in Brooklyn, New York to a Shanghainese father and a Cantonese mother. At 14, I began working in my aunt’s Chinese restaurant in Northern New Jersey where I grew up. In college, I studied fine art photography and took a semester off to work in an Italian restaurant to support myself while my father grumbled about my hopeless future in art. I learned about western service, eating with forks and knives, olive oil, aged cheeses and wine. Returning to school, a class in food styling brought together my love of food and photography and I decided that culinary school would let me understand my subject better when I really should have been studying light.
I didn’t mean to become a chef and after line cooking in restaurants, I ended up as a pastry cook at a New York restaurant called Le Cirque working with the world’s best chefs and meeting industry legends. Even though I was never serious about cooking, I briefly staged in pastry in France and soon left for Asia. Over the next seven years, I worked as a pastry chef and eventually transitioned into publishing and consulting while living in South Korea, Japan and Singapore and spawning my taste for travel and adventure, visiting many countries in between. I ate everything and visited every market I could. I entered private kitchens and homes and cooked with villagers and other chefs.
Second Life:
In 2001, I returned to New York City and filmed Chefs in the City, a 20-episode television show for UK Living as lead presenter, developing recipes and food styling. Shortly after, I joined Gourmet magazine as a food editor where my travels and experiences ended up on the delicious pages as menus, recipes and photographs. The 2008 Beijing Olympics inspired stories from provinces that I had only heard of and after nearly six years at Gourmet, I decided to return to Asia.
China Life:
In 2009, I packed my bags and visited China for the first time and for the next 18 months, studied full-time university-level Mandarin at Beijing Language and Culture University (BLCU 语言大学) in Beijing. Studying was harder than working, and I became the food editor and restaurant critic for Time Out Beijing. China’s food safety scandals regularly headlined news stories, inspiring me to search for organic farms and clean food sources. In 2010, I could only find four legitimate organic farmers in greater Beijing. I foraged and cooked a dinner by Alice Waters of Chez Panisse for 250 guests at the US Embassy in Beijing in 2011. Shortly after, I became the lunch lady at Daystar Academy, a bilingual school where I fed 500 elementary and kindergarten students and staff from local, uncertified, organic farms and Beijing’s only organic dairy. This was China’s first organic farm to table school program and it changed my life.
I’ve traveled through much of China and have lived many stories. I stay in temples, farms, and guesthouses as well as the homes of my many friends. I’ve met tea growers, urban and rural farmers, traditional tofu makers, vinegar makers, caviar farmers, cured ham producers, and fresh cheese makers among the many friends I have made over a decade of exploration. I go back again and again, because once is rarely enough, and to truly understand something, you must practice often. Sometimes practice is simply showing up and sometimes, I publish a story about my trips. But really, I go to see rapid changes and capture as much as I can before the beautiful traditions disappear with the modernization.
Current Life:
I work in many realms, unable to commit to one because, like a mother with many children, I love them all for their individual reasons. I love food and everything about it from its conception to its realization, its transformation, appearance, and how it works to heal or cause imbalance. I am fascinated by the many facets that our feeding habits inflect in daily life.
Most of all, I love its many modalities and the process that happens to it. I have managed to hustle and revisit each love at different times and phases. Sometimes I cook more,
or style, I like to photograph, write and tell stories, create recipes, grow plants and I think it is important to share and teach others to cook, especially children. I try to understand how food interacts with my body, moods and emotions and which choices are better and which are most delicious.
I am lucky and have a most fortunate life full of experiences and precious friends and colleagues. I currently hold more presence in the US with a residence in Jersey City, outside New York, and a traditional hutong in Beijing near the Forbidden City. I like California too and am often in Los Angeles finding reason to be near the sun and ocean.