New Weekly
2024-05-19 12:53Published on the official account of Guangdong New Weekly
Author | There is Bi
Edit | Lu Yiming
Title Picture |Tridy competes in a chef's competition
Tridy and I made an appointment to meet at the restaurant where she worked. She is very thin and her arms are also slender. It's hard to imagine that she is a chef who can work in the back kitchen for more than ten hours straight, turning a few pounds of iron pot upside down.
The story of a person who chooses to become a chef should not be anything special, but if you add a series of words to this person - "985 students", "change of career in the architecture department", "study abroad", "post-95 girls", and perhaps add "in a barbaric, sweaty, and smokey kitchen dominated by men" - this story is difficult not to become exciting.
S. Pellegrino Young Chef Academy Competition, Milan, Italy. (Photo/Photo provided by the interviewee)
The story is led by Cui Di, a 28-year-old chef from Xinjiang who is the head chef of two fusion restaurants in Shanghai.
After studying landscape architecture at Tongji University in Shanghai, Cui Di went on to study for a master's degree in hotel management in Europe before becoming a chef.
When she started learning to cook at the age of 24, the person in charge of the restaurant stall was 21 years old. A high degree doesn't seem to help learning to cook. Shortly before that, she once wanted to enter the back kitchen of a Cantonese restaurant, but repeatedly hit a wall, and the Chinese kitchen is often a mentorship system, and only accepts boys.
If you want to be a chef, why do you want to go to college? When I was in middle school, Cui Di asked her teacher, "If I want to be a chef in the future, why do I have to study so hard now?" Of course, this doubt was dismissed by the teacher. Going to college seems to be the only ticket to the world of the future. At that time, seeing that everyone else was immersed in studying, Cui Di could only follow the crowd and continue to move forward without doubt.
When she finally went to college, majored in landscape architecture, and while drawing drawings on the computer to complete her homework, she found that she actually loved "manual labor" that required physical participation.
In her first chef internship, Tridi worked 14 hours a day in the back kitchen of a Belgian restaurant, where she could only eat one meal a day. After graduating and returning to China, she found a job as a chef in Shanghai with a monthly salary of only 5,500 yuan.
When she wants to enter a Chinese restaurant, she is faced with a situation where "the kitchen accepts men but not women", but she enjoys the process of trying to make it, and the feeling that people are satisfied when they eat it. She was determined to continue on this path, and at that time, in order to learn Chinese food, she even wanted to re-enter New Oriental to study.
Not long ago, Cui Di was invited to do a live conversation with He Zhisen, an associate professor at the School of Architecture at South China University of Technology, and was invited by a university to give a speech at the school, where she faced a group of architecture students who were struggling with their employment options.
Cui Di gave a lecture at Shanghai University. (Photo/Photo provided by the interviewee)
Cui Di said that now the state of the students is a bit poor, and the teachers do not know what to do, and one teacher told her that by the second semester of the third year, the students have stopped attending classes, or they are studying other majors under the class, and they obviously feel that it is useless to study this major.
What happened in the Department of Architecture is also a microcosm of the depreciation of academic qualifications. As the window of opportunity narrows, so does the obsession with white-collar jobs.
Cui Di's story has attracted attention in this way. Many people will be curious: as a woman, how can she survive in the kitchen that is "dominated" by men? How can a person have the strength to be firm in an anxious era? The following is Cui Di's own statement.
Why should a girl learn this?
When I was in college, I watched the cartoon "Little Master of China". The main character, a 13-year-old Chinese teenager, said that he wanted to make convincing dishes, which is also the original intention of my cooking. I don't like to eat, but I like to make others feel loved and cared for through the medium of cooking.
Tongji University has always had a saying of "eating in Tongji", and every year there is a "Chef God Competition" competition. I thought it was fun, I signed up every year, I didn't make it to the finals in the first year, and I won the championship in the second two years. Before the first time I participated, I had never cooked before, so I had to open a small stove in the dormitory. At that time, we didn't have a balcony, so we opened the windows, stretched the drawing board to the drying rack, and put an induction cooker on it to cook rice.
At that time, the dishes were very basic, cola chicken wings, okonomiyaki...... I eat it with my roommates when I'm done, and if everyone thinks it's delicious, I'll be happy too. At that time, I thought I might try to be a chef as a career, so I went to a restaurant near the school to work part-time and experience what a real kitchen job is like.
When I first applied for landscape architecture design, I saw the introduction of this major on Baidu, saying that it uses the knowledge of biology and geography that humans know to make people and nature live in harmony. I thought this major was planting trees, and I was quite fond of animals and plants. In fact, cooking is the same, to understand the characteristics of these plants, to do some "dissection" and "reset" of them, and finally they become gourmet. This not only satisfies my curiosity, but also uses human wisdom to live in harmony with nature.
The School of Architecture of Tongji University is a place where "top students gather", and students are very hard working in their majors and will spend extra time doing professional courses. But I felt like a bird in a cage, suddenly released into the forest. I signed up for a lot of electives, met a lot of people outside of my major, and tried everything that interested me. At that time, in addition to cooking, I could also form a band, play drums, and think about becoming a football coach.
(Photo/Photo provided by the interviewee)
Until the eve of graduating from university, I felt that God had blocked my other paths, and I wanted to go to graduate school first - people didn't think about what they wanted to do, they usually went to graduate school first - but I didn't get a place, so I wanted to go to France to learn cooking.
I am a person who does not care much about other people's opinions, and once I have decided, I rarely think about it, which is a common feature of INTP. But this decision was blocked by the family, and my father said that it is unreasonable to go to a junior college after studying for an undergraduate degree - spending so much money to train a college student and now want to learn to cook? Chefs are neither decent nor make much money, why would a girl do this? But my mom said that if you really like it, you can keep doing it.
In the end, we both made a compromise and I went to Switzerland for a graduate degree in hotel management and then looked for an opportunity to learn cooking.
Studying in Switzerland, there is a long internship. I voted for restaurants in Switzerland on the Michelin website and ended up interviewing a two-star restaurant in Belgium. The night I passed the interview, I was giggling even in the shower.
The days in Belgium were pure and autistic. I'm the only girl in the back kitchen, and I'm Asian. It only takes about 5 minutes to get up to work every day, and I work more than 14 hours a day.
After a day of drying in the back kitchen, the color on the clothes. (Photo/Photo provided by the interviewee)
At that time, I experienced the hardest time of my career as a chef. Sometimes I accidentally cut my own flesh, sometimes I was swollen and itchy because of food allergies, and in addition, I had to endure the disgust and cold violence of my colleagues. It was there that for the first time, I cried in disgrace in front of others.
Ever since I was a child, I was raised by my father as a boy. When he was an only child, he wanted a son himself, so when I was a child, I always had a tomboy hairstyle. He would teach me to ride, play basketball, and swim, so I was more athletic. It seems that because of this, I have been good at patience since I was a child, and there are not many emotional waves in my life, and I have always been very "flat".
It was only after college that I became aware of my "female identity" that I started paying attention to some news incidents of violence against women. At the time, I was so angry that I even wanted to write some novels about it. That's when I started to realize that being a woman is a situation, no matter how strong you are.
In 2020, I started my first full-fledged job as a chef. As soon as I entered, the French chef joked with me, "You're married, you're not going to have a baby in my restaurant, are you?" If you give birth in my restaurant, your child will have my last name. "It's a threat, in a half-joking way.
The French kitchen is extremely hierarchical and orderly, not to mention a girl in the restaurant. Another colleague of mine was beaten away by him – he kicked the colleague during one of the clashes – and it's not surprising that violence appeared in the back kitchen of the restaurant.
Western food kitchens do not have such high physical requirements, but girls who are patient and meticulous will have more advantages. But for Chinese food, you can't get into this circle, they don't recruit girls at all.
I remember going to a Chinese restaurant for an interview, and the person in charge took me to the back kitchen, turned on the gas stove and range hood in the kitchen, and the whole kitchen began to "whirring and hushing" loudly. He said, "Pick up the pot." The pot needs to be filled with water, flatten it and hold it steady for 15 seconds. Even for men, this is a very demanding task. He wanted me to retreat.
A noisy and fiery Chinese kitchen. (Photo/Picture Worm Creative)
After hitting a wall in a Chinese restaurant, I thought about going to New Oriental to learn Chinese food. At that time, I had signed up for the name, but now the owner of my restaurant also wants to make something new, so he repeatedly invites me to come. He said that there are more experienced Chinese chefs in the back kitchen, and you can learn as you go.
Practicing spoon flipping is the basic skill of Chinese cooking, which relies on both skill and physical work. The masters all have different techniques for stirring pots, and they will teach me different ways to practice, sometimes with rice, sometimes with ice, sometimes with stones. After everyone gets off work, I work overtime to practice the pot by myself.
I still don't know a real-life female hot pot master. If women really want to do hot frying, they have to change the size from the customization of the stove and pot, and the whole industry, and it doesn't have to be that big pot.
There is also a kitchen environment, where most of them are men, and there are a lot of foul mouths and yellow accents, which is a mental adjustment for them. Maybe it means that they don't get enough fun from their work, so they will relieve their mental stress in this way.
Now, as the leader of my team, I am the one who shapes it. So, no one on my team is going to be rude, and I want to build a friendly kitchen environment where everyone can learn and grow.
How to examine the "waste of academic qualifications"?
I was 24 years old when I started my career, and I was 21 years old when I was in charge of a Belgian restaurant stall where I interned.
24 years old, which is very old for a chef. Sometimes I think I've taken a long detour to get here, and some people say that it's a "waste of education" for me to study architecture and then become a chef.
But when you think about it, every step is not wasted. I remember when I first submitted my internship resume, I was deeply struck by a quote introduced by the chef on the official website of the Belgian restaurant: "I always wanted to be an architect, so I built my work on a plate." ”
The chef's menu also has the idea of landscape architecture: biotope (biotope), aqua (water), flora (flora), fauna (fauna). I couldn't help but exclaim: sure enough, architecture and cooking are connected!
Tridi's favorite dish at this restaurant: biotope. (Photo/Photo provided by the interviewee)
Landscape architecture taught me how to think about design, and I think that's a big reason why I was able to become a chef so quickly.
For chefs, how to design a dish is a matter of self-understanding, and there is no methodology. Although I refer to other chefs in the industry, I may learn to cook my own food faster than the average person.
In addition to aesthetics, chefs also need to combine different flavors and different ingredients. For example, Western food will make a lot of vegetable puree, will also make a lot of crisps, they are matched together, it is a kind of texture collision, crispy things and very slippery things mixed together, will produce changes and complex tastes, people will like the collision of rich ingredients and texture.
Although the flavor is different, the two ingredients must also have something in common when they go together. For example, if the chicken is stewed with mushrooms, the common denominator between the chicken and the mushrooms is umami, or the feeling that they come from the land together, and they can be delicious when stewed together.
For a designer, I don't have any limitations, I can combine any combination, as long as it is delicious, there is unlimited space in it. Now, we change the menu every season to make fusion dishes, so I often have to go to different places to collect the style and bring back the local dishes that are good and make something new.
The spring dish that Cui Di made a while ago. (Photo/Photo provided by the interviewee)
Looking at it now, I seem to be lucky. A lot of people come to me and ask me about my experience of changing careers. I know some students in the Department of Architecture or people in the construction industry, some of them have relatively low salaries and are not facing layoffs, but many of them are thinking about their own way out, either to change careers to go to large Internet companies, or to study for further studies.
Recently, the Ministry of Education issued a notice to change the Department of Architecture from 5 years to 4 years, perhaps in the hope that studies will no longer take up more time and allow students to have more time to practice.
But for more young people, I am very worried, for example, AI is a promising industry now, so people choose the popular computer information category. However, when we chose architecture at that time, we did not expect that the construction industry might not be in a recession in the future. Every industry has its cycles, and it may be faster and easier to throw away than the general environment.
If you don't know yourself at all, and you just go to computer science because you have good grades, you are likely to encounter industry saturation and still be in the anxiety of losing your job. Therefore, no matter what major you choose, you must have a clear understanding of yourself and then weigh the pros and cons.
I've had a lot of moments when I've stood at a fork in the road. My first job was an internship at a French restaurant, where I had planned to work for two years, rotate through all the stalls and lay the groundwork, but then I received an offer from an appreciative chef.
At that time, I was really struggling, so I made a table to analyze, listed each gain and loss, scored each item, and added it up to calculate the average score. In this process, even if you stay with a higher score, you already know where you want to go. It's also the process of grooming yourself.
I remember watching "How Steel is Made" when I was a child, and a sentence by Paul Kochagin probably said that his ideal in life is to remember this life when he is dying, and he will not regret doing nothing. I don't think you should regret any choice you make, so I'm going to be extra cautious when I make my choice.
My road to cooking was actually very bumpy, I spent 300,000 yuan when I studied abroad, and my first job as a chef after returning to China was only 5,500 yuan.
Later, I wanted to go to the back kitchen of Chinese food, but I was always persuaded to quit. During the pandemic, restaurants in Shanghai were closed, wages were almost none, and I had to pay rent every month, so I had to find a job as a food editor first. But even so, after making a choice, I don't compare again.
After returning to China, Cui Di worked in a restaurant, and the daily life of a chef was full of hardship. (Photo/Photo provided by the interviewee)
Therefore, instead of looking for what's popular, it's more important for me to understand myself and find what I'm really passionate about. Because true love will not betray you, it will follow you all the way.
Why study hard?
When I was in high school, I was in a key middle school in Xinjiang, and my classmates were all "top students" from all over the world, as if everyone was an ascetic, without any hobbies, and studied from morning to night.
At that time, I would have a little bit of internal friction - why should I work so hard to learn something that I may not use at all in the future? I asked the teacher: If I want to become a chef in the future, why do I have to study so hard now? Without a true goal driven by the heart, learning is a painful process.
I don't really remember the theorems of mathematics and physics anymore, what left and right - why should I learn this?
As a child, I seriously wanted to be a scientist. Now that I think about it, it seems that only this ideal can perfectly cover so many subjects studied. When we were young, we could only get in touch with our parents' occupations, and if you don't have enough samples around you to observe, you don't know anything about this society, and you don't know what kind of professions exist in this society.
But since I was a child, I've always been thinking about "for what". In the process of growing up, everyone will have a self-consistent and self-justifying answer to this matter. But most of the answers I hear are "happy" – "I'm happy every day", it's good to be happy, but it's not an ultimate answer for me.
It's good to be happy, but it's not the ultimate answer. (Photo/Photo provided by the interviewee)
That's why I gave up my architecture major, and I couldn't seem to find the meaning of the process. When I was in college, we often had to use software to do design, which was very draining for me. Maybe it's because my computer is so bad, I feel very distressed, because I have to stay up all night before every assignment, and I feel very unhappy.
Then I thought that maybe I prefer physical labor, or sports. This type of work requires your body to move, as opposed to you sitting in front of a computer all day and you seem to be working all the time, but your body isn't moving at all – and it makes me physically and mentally exhausted.
Later, an architecture teacher said that this was because we humans would pursue a sense of physical existence. When you are exercising, or after physical exertion, you feel tired, and you feel like you are proving to the world that you exist. But if you're just working on a computer, you might feel empty after a long day at work.
The reason why some people always think that being a chef is not as good as being an architect is actually because the service industry is a not very dignified industry in China, and people are not very willing to say that my ambition is to be a service worker.
When I was studying hotel management in Sweden, my teacher would tell us that service is also a subject that requires wisdom. It's like a famous hotel slogan – "We are ladies and gentlemen serving."
ladies and gentlemen. That's it, the service staff will not feel inferior.
As a chef, I think it is very meaningful to be able to make others feel delicious and meet their physical needs through my own creations.
Write at the end
Cui Di's alternative choice is a reflection of the imbalance between the current education system and employment structure. Her seemingly unwise choice turned out to be a kind of luck now.
In the past 30 years, the rapid development of the economy has given rise to many "popular majors", such as accounting and finance, including the architecture major that Cui Di applied for. However, with the change of the current environment, those majors that were once hot are facing "unemployment after graduation" overnight.
Fears of unemployment upon graduation loom over students. (Photo/"The Next Suhee")
After Cui Di became a chef, the construction industry faced its toughest time in decades, with few job opportunities, closed upward pathways, pay cuts, and layoffs. Among her classmates, many began to ask her how to change careers.
Since the so-called "popular majors" are a pseudo-concept, should people rethink what we can get from education or higher education other than a diploma? In an era of white-collar work, it's time to rethink the dichotomy between physical and mental power.
In fact, the clear distinction between physical and mental labor is a product of modern industrial society, which appeared with the birth of the "assembly line".
Managers collect the knowledge that craftsmen have acquired in the past from practice, organize and classify it, turn it into rules, regulations, and formulas, and then distribute them to workers in the form of instruction manuals. The entire workflow that workers originally needed to complete was cut into parts in the assembly line and distributed to different people.
Thus, the mental work that requires the use of knowledge is thus separated from the physical work. At the same time as the efficiency increases, it is also the beginning of alienation.
Nowadays, not only blue-collar jobs, but even white-collar workers end up facing the problem of assembly-line programming.
In the book "Electronic Sweatshops: How Computers Can Turn the Office of the Future into the Factory of the Past," author Barbara Garson says, "Human intelligence is used to eliminate the need for human intelligence."
The cognitive elements of work are separated and a fixed system is formed, and the decentralized work is handed back to the new working class (white-collar clerks), and people can no longer participate in the completion of a thing from beginning to end, nor can they feel the results and meaning of a thing done, and the feeling of being miscellaneous in "bullsh*t work" is thus generated.
1999 American film about the meaninglessness of work. (Photo/"A Worm at Work")
Is the obsession with white-collar work a void?
Matthew Crawford, a young American, also had this question, and in 2009 he wrote a book, "The Future of Work in Motorcycle Repair Shops". After completing his Ph.D. in political philosophy from the University of Chicago, he was quickly hired by a think tank in Washington to move into the top of the pyramid.
It was a good start to a career that people recognized, but he felt the emptiness in it. He felt that the high salary was like a compensation — as compensation for the boring work every day.
Later, he left his post and went to a motor vehicle repair shop. There, he repaired motorcycles with his hands and also thought with his brain. He used the "craftsman spirit" to regain human subjectivity.
In an environment where manual labor always means low income and low social status, the physical participation embodied in the concept of work of "Cui Di" may bring us some inspiration.
Proofreading: Huang Siyun
Operation: Lu Zirui
Typesetting: Chen Yi
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