Cooking: It Began with a Plate of Egg Fried Rice

The first time I ever cooked was in middle school, when I poured every ounce of my creativity into frying an egg — and produced a pan of charcoal. After that I rarely appeared in the kitchen, and even refused to go in and help, feeling it simply wasn't a place for me.

At first my mom would still call me in to lend a hand, but once she saw that no amount of coaxing or pestering could move me, she gave up. School was taking up more and more of me anyway. As I saw it, campus life was the most important part of life: at school, I did school things, and outside of school, I did more school things. However delicious the food on the table might be, I couldn't be bothered to wonder how it got made. My head was permanently full of all the other things waiting for me to do.

Even after leaving campus life behind, the idea of cooking for myself never came up. Delivery is so convenient these days — browse on your phone, a few taps, and food is at your door in half an hour. Once in a while you go out to a restaurant to "upgrade the diet." That's just how modern people live, isn't it? I saw nothing wrong with it at all. To the me of that time, knowing how to cook or bake was surely a wonderful skill — just not one that mattered much to me. Besides, I had zero confidence I could produce a meal anyone could actually eat.

At the start of this year, unable to stomach a job that made me sick and a city I didn't like, I quit. It was right around Chinese New Year, so I went to Dong-ge's place to spend the holiday. I discovered that Dong-ge loves to cook — whipping up a little dessert at the slightest excuse, regularly pitching in on the family dinner. Even when we ate Vietnamese food out, she'd point at a dish she liked and announce she could recreate it at home.

I started to wonder what charm cooking could possibly hold for her. The way I saw it, making yourself a little dessert changes nothing about your life — it just adds one more pot to scrub and one more set of dishes, a net gain in hassle. I asked her what it was all about. She said: I just like it. There's no why. Ha. Asking got me exactly nowhere.

After the New Year I went back to living alone. Since I wasn't planning to look for the next job yet, I started trying to make my own food to save some money. In the beginning I had planned out a mountain of things to do — this to learn, that to study, all the things I was curious about — so cooking a real meal felt like a waste of time, and I just boiled noodles. Boiled noodles are so convenient: bring the water to a boil, drop in some meat and vegetables, then the noodle cake, crack in an egg once in a while — done in under ten minutes, and the pot comes out clean, barely needs washing.

Convenient, yes. But boiled noodles taste, forever and always, like one thing: nothing much. Eventually I was so sick of them I couldn't swallow another bowl, and went looking for some other simple dish to take their place. Egg fried rice became my first target.

The first plate of fried rice, naturally, burned. All I could do was tip the scorched rice — and the time I'd spent — into the trash, wondering whether I was simply incapable of this, if I couldn't even manage fried rice, the simplest dish there is.

I didn't lose heart entirely. I decided to go back through the recipe online one more time and compare, step by step, where things had gone wrong — same steps, same ingredients, so how did I end up with something else entirely? This time I noticed something I had never paid attention to before: heat.

It turns out heat comes in levels — high flame, low flame, medium flame. Before, whenever I cooked anything, I only knew to crank the burner and let it roar, assuming a fiercer fire meant faster food, with no idea it would char the outside of an ingredient to carbon while the inside stayed raw. Once I knew where the problem lived, I started over — and sure enough, the second attempt was far better than the first. Edible, at the very least.

A few more plates in, I got tired of fried rice — and having harvested a small, precious ration of confidence in the kitchen, I slowly developed something like ambition. I started following recipes for dishes with actual color, aroma, and flavor: stir-fried pork with chilies, spicy fried chicken, cold shredded-chicken salad, red-braised pomfret, and so on. None of them turned out very well the first time, but by the second or third attempt, they could basically be called delicious.

Along the way, I discovered that how you handle the ingredients matters too. Take a piece of meat: which cut you use, how thick you slice it, whether you marinate it, what you season it with — all of it shapes the final taste enormously. The order things go into the pan, how long you stir-fry, the temperature of the oil, the choice of seasonings — every one is a factor to weigh. But here's the marvelous part: out of all the ways that don't work, you always manage to feel your way to the one path that does.

Now I finally understand what the joy of cooking is: it's a small pursuit where progress is visible to the naked eye, where a steady stream of mistakes delivers a steady stream of successes. You know with certainty that this won't be the last time you cook — there will always be a next attempt, and you can even start over on the spot. Every failed result points back to some error in the process, and those errors teach you the ingredients, teach you the many rules of "never do this" and "always do that." The more you know, the more likely your next attempt succeeds. Start simple, and in time the complex comes within reach — but set out on day one to cook a magnificent feast, and odds are you never will.

These days I clearly enjoy cooking a great deal. But one torment remains: who is going to scrub the wok and wash my dishes?