Celebrating Cantonese Food with Made with Lau, YouTube's Largest Chinese Cooking Channel
Made with Lau, created by San Francisco-native Randy Lau, shares a common story of what Cantonese food means to first-generation Chinese and Hong Kong immigrants in America and their children.
Randy, a son of a first-generation immigrant from Guangzhou, began Made with Lau as a repository and living archive of the recipes, stories, lessons, and culture that shaped his father, Chung Sun Lau, as a chef, and a way to chronicle the Cantonese recipes that his father has lived with and used for 50 years.
“Cooking in China and the U.S. since the 1970s, it would be a shame if I didn’t get to capture the recipes my father has used in his career as a chef,” Randy says.
“There’s so much tied up in food. It brings families together.” Even though Randy could not talk to his father fluently in his native tongue of Cantonese, food was presented to Randy as a way for his father to show love for his son.
Randy knew with Made with Lau that he wanted to share his father’s love language with many other Chinese- American immigrants and budding Chinese food lovers on YouTube.
What began as a small YouTube channel in September 2020 has ballooned into one of YouTube’s largest Chinese cooking channels with over 500,000 subscribers and a growing online community.
The beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. was a pivotal point for Randy, the Lau family, and the creation of Made with Lau.
The effects of the shutdown took out one of his businesses – their main source of income – and they had a child due to be born in the summer. “It was just a scary time,” Randy recounts, speaking to The Beat Asia.
“I was trying to figure out what I am going to do next. I had a lot of different skills developed over my career in tech startups, but never really considered creating a YouTube channel. I always wanted to document my dad’s cooking, even before Made with Lau, but never took it seriously as a business venture or career.”
During a quarterly weekend retreat Randy and his wife, Kathlyn, took in March 2020, he became inspired to kickstart his next passion project-cum-career by a book he was reading, “Designing Your Life,” which posited the question, “What would you do if money was not an issue and you would not get judged?”
When he returned to San Francisco, he became enamoured with the idea of creating a YouTube channel, specifically, to capture the recipes and stories of his father, a chef who worked in and owned Chinese restaurants in Guangzhou, China, and the Bay Area.
“The idea would just be fulfilling on many different levels. I get to spend time with my family, pass the recipes and stories onto my children, and understand my Cantonese heritage a bit more.”
“The YouTube channel was a good intersection for tapping into my professional skills in marketing, building websites, and shooting and cutting videos, and something fulfilling for the Lau story.”
Randy pitched the idea to his parents following the weekend retreat. His father did not respond during his elevator pitch, but his mother understood the concept of YouTube and was willing to give it a shot. He did not know his father was interested until two days later when he called Randy up and announced that he had just defrosted pork mince and asked if wanted to start.
The following six months included the birth of Randy’s and Kathlyn’s son, Cameron Lau, and the planning and filming of eight videos, cut to five final videos for uploading in September and November 2020. Their first video, “😋 Dad's EASY Mapo Tofu Recipe, Cantonese style (麻婆豆腐鸡)!,” was released on Sep. 1, 2020.
Uploads were made weekly in the beginning and Randy still follows this schedule. The second video uploaded documented the easy recipe of ginger egg fried rice, followed by recipes of his father’s egg drop soup, rainbow chicken vegetable stir fry, silky steamed eggs, and chow fun, a popular Chinese-American dish.
Randy’s father, Chung Sun, was born and raised in the city of Toishan, a bustling cosmopolitan center located in Guangdong, west of Hong Kong. At the age of 12, his parents fled to Hong Kong escaping from communist China in the 1950s, leaving Chung Sun and his older friends to fend for himself.
The Lau patriarch met his wife and Randy’s mother, Jenny, in China and immigrated to New York City in 1981, in search of a better life for his family and a stable career.
“We’ve always had a good relationship,” Randy says of him and his father, “but there’s always been a language barrier and cultural barriers with me and my parents. He is more affectionate than the average stereotypical Chinese dad.”
Having grown up in the Bay Area in California, Randy was in the minority as a second-generation Chinese American. “I was one of the only Asian kids in school. I didn’t feel Asian enough or American enough, I was not fluent in Chinese and I did not feel American as a kid.”
The project of Made with Lau is, in Randy’s words, “to reconnect with the whole duality [of American and Chinese influences in my childhood], and wanting to document this identity.”
“In the process of doing this for myself, I found a lot of people can relate to [Made with Lau]. We have a growing audience of Chinese-speakers, first and second-generation Chinese immigrants, and simply those who have no Chinese DNA but are interested in Chinese food.”
“You might come because you are searching for a recipe, but then you stay for the interaction with our family and learning the stories of awesome Chinese immigrants.”
“For the broader community, we are helping them contribute to these traditions and culture and helping people, who don’t understand Asian culture, to empathize with us and see the humanity in Chinese cooking.”
Randy sees Made with Lau as a project more than sharing recipe instructions for Chinese dishes, but an extension of his six-person family, with over 500,000 brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, and uncles who subscribe and consume his recipes.
“We’re a family and we sit together, we eat, we have these traditions, we laugh, and bicker at each other. Being able to show the commonality in human nature has been really special.”
Documenting the family interactions and preserving these recipes is important for Randy. “The experience of getting to share the journey with [our son] and document the interactions that he has with my parents is really special, watching him grow every week.”
Speaking of the success Made with Lau has had in just over 14 months, Randy is still amazed at the speed that the channel has reached over 500,000 subscribers and dominated the space of Chinese cooking on YouTube.
“I thought that we would get to this level in five plus years' time. I had to preface to my parents that the project is going to take a long time for us to see any monetization or income that we can live off.”
In the beginning, Made with Lau was neither a side-hustle, nor a hobby for Randy. In between becoming a new father and the support of his parents and wife, financial aid from their savings, as well as coronavirus unemployment benefits from the government, Randy pursued the channel has a full-time career.
Growth was slow from September 2020 to February 2021, uploading one recipe a week, until the beginning of Chinese New Year. “By then, we started exploding. YouTube began promoting our videos on the homepage and our monthly views went from 50,000 views to one million views a month. It was awesome!”
“In the beginning, I was super excited when we hit 1,000 subscribers in a month. Now, we get 1,000 subscribers a day.”
“Every milestone we had we were like ‘wow, that’s so cool!’ We got monetized on YouTube in mid-December 2020 and earned USD$3 the next day. Every step of the way has just been blessing because all this growth is just surprising to me.”
Speaking with The Beat Asia, Randy revealed that Made with Lau was not the name he was set on choosing.
“Originally our name was going to be Chung and Sons Kitchen. My dad’s name is Chung Sun and I knew he was going to have a grandson, so I wanted to play up on his Chinese name with his own sons in the family.”
“I was pretty dead set on it, but everyone I told did not like it so we chose Made with Lau instead. It’s more inclusive.”
To Randy, being Cantonese means being immersed in the culture, eating the food of Hong Kong and Guangdong Province, and living amongst other first and second-generation Cantonese immigrants who share a similar ancestry.
“This channel is my way of defining what [Cantonese identity] is. In the process of me editing these videos, I am learning more about Cantonese culture, myself [as a first-generation immigrant of south Chinese heritage] and the language.”
“What terrifies me is saying Cantonese words,” Randy explains of having to repeat the recipes in Cantonese for the series, “it pushes me out of my comfort zone to learn more about being Cantonese.”
“I do feel more of a sense of pride in the process [of creating these recipes videos], of the culture of being the son of my parents and the food. It has been a positive experience for sure!”
Made with Lau meets at the intersection of fulfillment for Randy creating this digital archive to chronicle his father’s life and recipes, and what it means to his fans and supporters. He explains that the channel helps his fans remind them of their own family history and heritage and acts to preserve the “dying” Cantonese cuisine and culture.
His favourite Cantonese food? “I have to choose savory sticky rice ball soup. It is really popular in Toishan, [Guandong, the birthplace of my parents]. We only make it three times a year because it is very complex to make. I also love wonton noodle soup.”
Randy enjoys a great working and personal relationship with his father, creating one recipe video a week, and with the help of a Cantonese-speaking Asian American team of designers, editors, researchers, and interns. “It’s been really exciting to share the love with more people who were all fans prior to joining us.”
In 2022, Randy hopes to produce more short content for TikTok, YouTube shorts, and IG reels, to capture different audiences with their recipes and stories. He is also interested in producing a book or a series of books interviewing his parents and exploring the story of their life in China and immigration to America in the 1980s.
“I hope as we continue growing, we become more of a voice in the online space and that people get to see the Asian-American diaspora as equal and human. I want to showcase this commonality that we all have.”
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