Chef Wang is my favorite music teacher
I have a new favorite music teacher, and he’s a chef.
Wang Gang (王刚) was born in Fushan County, Zigong, Sichuan, and since 2017 has been uploading videos to Weibo (and later YouTube) highlighting the range of Sichuanese cooking to an increasingly broad audience. I’ve been a fan for a while, but he’s been increasingly on my mind as I think more about learning.
Watch a few of Wang’s videos (like this fish-fragrant eggplant tutorial) and you’ll notice a pattern (if you don't speak Chinese, be sure to use YouTube’s caption button):
Wang introduces the dish
Wang processes the ingredients, highlighting the cooking process and in the process dazzling us with his knife-work and wok skills.
Wang provides a summary of the dish, offering a few tips for cooks at home.
Or take this spin through a pork rib braise, where Wang walks us through the how and why of cleaning the pork, adjusting the recipe for a home stove, even providing an executive summary, all in under 3 minutes.
It’s almost impossible to overstate how good of a chef he is. Wang’s technique is almost hypnotic, occupying the same part of my brain as a perfectly executed snare drum roll. I could watch his cleaver destroy garlic and ginger, neatly organized cucumbers, or gently fillet a fish for hours.
Wang shines in technique-heavy dishes, where his skill and effortless mastery are on display.
Wang is straightforward, clear, focused, self-effacing, and fast. His narration is calm, and he speaks with the efficiency of Strunk and White. Even the austerity of his surroundings and simplicity of his tools are on message. He doesn’t need a special device for it anything, and cooks almost every video on his channel with a single cleaver and a single wok.
At times, Wang shares technical videos, such as this not-so-subtle level-up on your home knife-sharpening:
Most of my students will tell you that my analogies are almost all cooking, so it’s no surprise I spend some of my free time watching cooking videos. But what was it about Chef Wang that had me so captivated? Yes, I was primed for appreciating his work, having grown up with Jacques Pepin, Julia Child, the Frugal Gourmet and their PBS cohorts demonstrating in real time why cooking wasn’t so hard. But Chef Wang touched upon something else. Was it the pangs of hunger at the food his pitch perfect technique was creating?
It was what I was learning about teaching, and by extension, learning.
What can we learn from Wang Gang and his gestalt?
How to cook
We can learn a lot about cooking! With Wang’s clean and consistent technique, disciplined attention to fundamentals, and broad repertoire, we do learn a lot about how to effectively cook and appreciate the dishes he espouses. Through Wang, the depth, range, and brilliance of Sichuan cooking comes to life.
How to Learn
Perhaps more importantly for those not interested in braising a carp or cleaning pork liver, Wang teaches about how to teach. Although some of Wang’s videos show him actively teaching, most of his solo ventures demonstrate a virtuosically economic pedagogy. He picks significant dishes about which he has something to say, articulates a frame for his work, highlights important techniques and concepts through modeling, and reinforces his work with a clear summary which frames larger topics. His clarity belies a deep fundamental knowledge, skill, and experience. Wouldn’t we all love to be such a lecturer?
The power of analogy
From Wang we can also learn about how we can improve our musical skill. In fact, I would argue that for we musicians, studying how we might learn other skills provides a terrific framework for how we might refine our own. When we think in analogies we pay attention to structural similarities. To meaningful compare something to something else we have to know what those things are at their deepest levels. That’s powerful.
There’s something about the interplay of fundamental technique and individual artistry, history and innovation in cooking that proves a strong analog to making music. These thoughts are a little more likely to enter our mind via a non-musical analogy.
Chef Wang’s Neighborhood
The most important thing I learned from Wang is exemplified by the transformation in his channel after he moved back to his hometown and began making videos there. While his production value improves, he gains an audience: his stoic, practical and honest aunt and uncle.
Cooking under his Uncle’s watchful eye, Wang provides helpful clarifications to his dishes, and feeding his family seems to inspire a richer, more effusive cooking. These videos also begin to add meaningful feedback. How does his food impact others around him? His circle grows to include students, the presence of whom moves Wang into a more overt teacher, and he easily moves from modeling to critique, even of his student’s eating speed.
Sometimes he goes full Mr Rogers, visiting factories, restaurants, farms, and other culinary locations, even taking over a dumpling shop. At other times, he learns how to butcher a pig from his Uncle.
Why have I really been so interested in Chef Wang? It’s because his work perfectly highlights my beliefs around learning, namely the through-line between technique and community.
Wang has leveraged a rigid classical training to engage with people he cares about in a meaningful way. Most of his recent videos end with the satisfaction of a shared meal, or begin with a shared experience that requires cooking. In this way, Wang highlights the vitality of community in our artistic pursuits: the framework of his technique allows him to effectively convey his ideas, his breadth of experience allows him to tailor his content to his audience, and, most importantly, he uses all of his skills to enrich people’s lives.
Thus, Wang slicing and dicing on the way to feeding his aunt and uncle are neat analogues to how we hope to nourish our communities with art. And, his deep dives into soy sauce and why you should always have water running at your wok station highlight how every expert goes deep into the weeds, and only true masters can emerge to the zone of abstraction and clarity. He makes clear the linkage between mastery and community, between emulation and transformation. For him, cooking is the emulsifier, although it might be any activity.
If you haven't noticed, I’ve been thinking a lot about how multifaceted learning strategies can help us be stronger community builders. For those of us struggling to connect the technical studies we do with our public facing work, a chef is a terrific example to follow. All it takes is a lot of pork, and a few uncles.
Mike