Reflections on achieving Bestseller status
on the fears of being perceived and "perfect" accomplishments
The recipe Nurse Song’s Roast Duck from the Avatar the Last Airbender Official Cookbook is included at the bottom of this post for my paid subscribers!
I know I have a problem celebrating what Gen Zs call “Ws” (wins). My parents grew up in the shadows of China’s Cultural Revolution, where being poorly perceived by others — perhaps as a little too aligned with the Four Olds of ideas, customs, culture, habits — could be a matter of life and death. It was an enemy so vague, outfitted with a government directive so violent, seemingly anyone could be seized into a ‘struggle session’ and subsequently tortured to death.
Maybe you were branded as too erudite, prioritizing intellectual pursuits over practical ones. Or too fashionable in hair or dress, distracted by capitalist whims. Or too successful, a class enemy in one of the Five Black Categories. The gruesome outcome cared little about the reported transgressions, real or imagined. (Recently, the opening scene of Netflix’s adaption of the Three Body Problem depicts a ‘struggle session’ and has immediately received some…heated responses.)
I know these hushed stories, graphically transcribed through mostly oral retellings, still burn in parents’ minds. Even today, my mother warns me that talk of the Cultural Revolution is permissible, but nothing of the incident in 1989. “It’s still a sensitive subject.” (Meaning, the government denies its existence.) “It might trigger a background check because [the CCP’s] check is keyword based. Better not touch since we still need to go back to China sometimes.” In such spaces, to speak of oneself with the intention of being perceived by others — that is an act with a near-callous disregard for danger.
I can’t really fault my parents for translating their traumas onto my upbringing when they received no support to heal from them. The value system Mom and Dad lived into was one of safety: don’t upset others, don’t make a fuss, don’t brag. Stability was the biggest and most important reward one could ask in return for competence. Anything even borderline adjacent to self-promotion was not just risky, but an invitation for harm.
It doesn’t help that women in the U.S. have every reason to be terrified of being perceived the “wrong” way by others. From family and friends, colleagues and randos on the internet, to the very institutions tasked with protecting us, victim blaming offers a trove of explanations for anything unsavory that has ever happened in our orbit. (This includes from other women, too. Most fittingly, I received precisely such a comment on my last newsletter about consent.)
Professor Barbara Gilin describes victim blaming as a misguided attempt to wrestle away responsibility from broader unknowns. “It helps them feel like bad things will never happen to them [so] they can continue to feel safe.” Despite my own, intimate understanding of this defense mechanism, I spent most of my life applying exactly this logic: obsessively attempting to control everything about myself and my surroundings to avoid “misunderstandings.”
Cue years of disordered eating, a teenage suicide attempt, a series of toxic relationships where I disappeared into my partner, being too afraid to come out until my 30s…the list goes on. The gears of damage control constantly churning in my mind were endless generators of self-esteem issues. I think this is the enduring trauma response of feeling powerless. When I observe others, I see similar patterns of self-flagellation: desperate delusions that we can indeed ensure things always go according to our plans. For my particular industries — food, academia, DEI — I don’t think I need a clearer example than seeing former Harvard President Claudine Gay be ousted by billionaire Bill Ackman to be reminded that, at any moment, the career I’ve dedicated my life to can be snatched away if I am perceived unfavorably by too powerful a person.
When even the Harvard Business Review admits that “success at work depends on being—and being seen as—both competent and likable,” but “women…are penalized more heavily when they boast,” speaking even quietly about my accomplishments has seemed a double-edged sword best avoided. Part of this has been a healthy disregard for things like titles and awards I now understand are fueled by nepotism and tokenism. But an equal part of it remains a paralyzing fear of publicly saying, “I did a thing (well)” on the off chance someone I don’t know and cannot anticipate just so happens to not like that very much.
That was a long segue to…I’m taking an uncomfortable step to celebrate something today.
For a while now, the Official Avatar the Last Airbender Cookbook I wrote back in 2020 (published 2021), has been a certified Bestseller on Amazon and #1 in the Animation Graphic Design category. It also holds a near-perfect 5-star rating (!) with over 3,300 reviews.
I want to extend a big, heartfelt thank you to everyone who has supported this book from its inception through its launch, and even now, years afterward. Thank you to all the wonderful people who cared deeply and spoke loudly about this book, even when I was too insecure and nervous to do so. Who sent me messages of enthusiasm, ideas for recipes, memories of their favorite scenes from the show, and even clips from the comics as reference material; answered my questions about cultures and traditions unfamiliar to me; wrote reviews across many different platforms; cooked the recipes and tagged me on social media; set up my ATLA fandom page (!); interviewed me about my process; and created UGC (user-generated content) about the book to expand its reach. (Recently Inga Lam posted her 24-hour marathon of only eating foods from the ATLA book!)
Another reason I’ve kept somewhat quiet about the this cookbook is that I have a lot of mixed feelings about this particular project. I’ve previously written about being a commissioned cookbook author — a process that is anything but rosy — and the ATLA cookbook was no exception. The pay was poor, the timeline short, the responsibilities enormous. Except this time, there was the promise of an extensive, built-in fan base — in exchange for the potential downside of drawing their ire.
Ideating, researching, testing, styling, photographing, and writing all 60 recipes (with headnotes) for this book in 3 months was one of the most out-of-control things I’ve ever done.
Even though I was well-versed in recipe creation (having been a popup chef for 6 years), reasonably seasoned at food styling and testing, written for plenty of food media, and won an IACP award for my food photography, doing all of those together with no team, little-to-no editorial direction, limited time, and a budget so low I needed to dip into my personal funds was a whole new kind of challenge.
To start, I had to fight to receive royalties for my work. The publisher first offered me a contract for an advance sans royalties, which no author should ever sign. I finally agreed to a meager royalty percentage alongside my already-low advance, which I hoped would pay off given the significant fanbase and rumors of a forthcoming live-action (now streaming on Netflix). Last October, I posted an IG Story that, after 2 years out on the market, I finally received my first royalties check.
Next was the battle for a food and props budget, which I eventually received but did not nearly cover the costs of all the ingredients, much less the dozens upon dozens of props I purchased out-of-pocket. I’m talking everything from vinyl, fabric, stone, and wood backdrops to earthenware, glass, porcelain, wooden, and agate plateware to an array of glassware, flatware, and miscellaneous little touches (e.g., fresh flowers, a honey stirrer, coasters).
I’ve always prided myself on being scrappy with props, but this book pushed me to new heights. I was in my backyard digging in the soil to create a suitable landscape for the Mudslide smoothie; random cement blocks in the neighborhood became an artistic ledge for Aang’s Favorite Egg Tarts; branches and leaves from my / friends’ houseplants made numerous appearances, like in Nurse Song’s Roast Duck (recipe at the end of this newsletter for paid subscribers).
Then came the recipes. And gosh, did I cry over them.
The reality of recipe development on a tight budget and rapid timeline is that the first time a recipe turns out as intended, you mark it as ‘complete’ and move on to the next.
This is not the best way to develop or test recipes, because there are a myriad of still-unknown factors that may impact the replicability of that recipe for end users.
For example, the meat grinder plates my butcher utilizes may not be the same as yours, which could cause volume discrepancies in a meat filling. Perhaps I’m buying a very potent type of garlic because I’m testing in Los Angeles with California produce, thus only needing 1-2 cloves, while you require 4-5 for a comparable flavor. Maybe you’re using a different brand of flour or a fresher/older set of eggs, both of which impact the final texture of the product (through its protein content and moisture level/leavening ability, respectively).
This is before we even get into factors like the environment (e.g., relative humidity, elevation), widely differing quality of equipment (e.g., ovens, stoves that may run hot, cold, uneven), and smaller wares (e.g., pots, pans, sheet trays that may be bigger, smaller, thicker, thinner, constructed of a different material), and of course, the final user’s familiarity and expertise with cooking.
(Some mishaps can also simply be developer errors. I scribbled a “9” that I later mistook for “0.” I started my timer a minute late. I turned up the heat halfway through a recipe but forgot to denote that step. It happens — especially when you’re scrambling to finalize 3-4 recipes per day — and is why retesting is so critical.)
The mark of a high-caliber professional is someone so attuned to these minute variables that their recipes account for most of them. But even stellar recipe developers need the structural backing of their institutions to maintain recipe quality. Places like the New York Times, Serious Eats, Cook’s Illustrated are some of the few remaining outlets where dedicated time, people, and resources are deployed to test and retest recipes so inconsistencies are caught before publication. At Serious Eats, where I’ve written for, all recipes are cross-tested. That means after I finish the version I feel confident in, it is sent to at least another person on the recipes team (if not more) to evaluate in a totally different setting. From there, tweaks always arise. Instructions are clarified. Sometimes, recipes that can’t seem to be replicated across kitchens are axed. (See my shrimp chips recipe that was cut for this exact reason.)
Even now, I am haunted by the fact some of the recipes in the book haven’t been thoroughly tested.
I knew the recipes would be evaluated as if I had spent 2+ years developing and testing them — that being the average amount of time allocated to a cookbook author. It wasn’t as if finicky recipes would be contexted with a callout box of my sob stories. So when the book was published, I lost sleep compulsively reading the reviews and blaming myself for every problem listed therein.
I was glad to learn this morbid desire to know how I was perceived by total strangers with only an initial for a last name wasn’t confined to just me. In a conversation about the book’s release, The New Yorker staff writer Helen Rosner told me she used to regularly type her own name into the Twitter (now X) search bar and hold her breath as the results populated.
“It’s like she’s never cooked in her life.” “Clearly she knows nothing about baking.” “Whoever hired this person should be fired.” Amazon reviewers don’t hold back, and even the arguably silly ones sting — like when folks complain the ingredients are “too Asian” for the Asian-inspired show they enjoyed enough to buy its cookbook. To date, my favorite is still a review griping there is too much water (1.5 gallons, or 6 quarts) allocated in a recipe for stock.
The ATLA cookbook is not perfect, and that is ok. After years (of therapy), I’ve made peace with the fact that I did the best I could with what I had.
Back when I was still hosting popups for a living, I was possessed by the idea of a “perfect” service. Call it conditioning from my fine dining days, where any type of abuse was pretty much permissible if it brought the restaurant closer to “perfection,” and unhealthy obsessions were heralded as “being a visionary” instead of potential signs of being mentally unwell. Regardless of the circumstances, I had it in my head there was only one kind of service deserving of recognition.
Not just that, “perfect” was the only type of service I was allowed to be joyful about. I robbed myself of so much deserved self-appreciation — for building a working kitchen on 4 plastic foldup tables, with 3 induction burners and a fryer, to serve 50+ people a 6-course tasting menu and 3-course cocktails, all paired with virtual reality art or poetry — because I had a singular idea of success I stubbornly held onto. When service invariably failed to be “perfect” because we kept moving locations every other event to new cities, new climates, and with new staff, I found it my fault for not predicting the future.
If “perfect” is indeed real, I think it only exists in the context of inner peace.
A few weeks ago, I watched the documentary Opus, where the late maestro Ryuichi Sakamoto plays piano solo for nearly 2 hours. Many of his greatest hits, like Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, are featured. These are compositions praised as “perfect” by critics; yet during what he likely knew would be his last public performance before death, I watched as the man continued to iterate on them, tinkering as he talked to himself, refusing for his work to be denoted with a period when he was placing a comma.
I bawled the entire film.
Akin to the debate if “authentic” is real, characterizing something as “perfect” seems to me an act only available in context by the creator. It is being able to answer “yes” to the question, “Did I do this in a manner true to me?”
Perfect or not, I did that for the ATLA cookbook. The show was a meaningful part of my young adult years, and I am genuinely proud of how much care I took in applying both my culinary skills and sociology / anthropology eye to consider the ingredients, techniques, compositions, presentations, and backstories, understanding how much (very real) cultural weight was held in these fictional people, places, and dishes.
Even still, I know I missed things. Just as it is infeasible for a chef to be an expert at cooking everything (even if there exist cookbooks with such a name), it would be profoundly arrogant to say that speed-reading through several dozen articles and books transformed me into an expert in pan-Asian geo-food politics. What I gave my best effort was to be respectful of the threads I did pull on, such as:
Utilizing culturally-, climate-, and regionally appropriate ingredients. In the Water Nation, for example, animal fats (or other primarily saturated fats) are used for cooking (as an ode to seal blubber used by Inuit and Yup’ik peoples, but is not commercially available), and maple syrup replaced cane or beetroot sugar. No hot-climate vegetables (or dairy) are used. Across the vast Earth Nation, mostly based on China but also parts of Mongolia and Central Asia, recipe profiles harken to regional preferences, like cumin in the Northwest, Sichuan peppercorns and pickled mustard in the Southwest, and butter in the Southern island.
Staying true to regional cooking methods. For example, Foggy Swamp dwellers are unlikely to use dry-cooking methods, instead opting for techniques like stewing and steaming. (A little Easter Egg for those reading: check out what makes the “swamp water” in the Foggy Swamp Chicken special!)
Building from timelines congruent to the show. For example, the Fire Nation’s Fresh Jang Hui Clams are only available after our foursome departs and the polluted river is thoroughly cleaned. The Water Nation’s Kale / Blueberry Cookies and Spirulina Noodles, which include dairy and flour (respectively), are only available due to inter-nation trade resuming post-Hundred Year War.
Addressing underlying geopolitics in the region. There is a reason the Fire Nation recipes freely use ingredients from virtually anywhere. Read the headnote for Misty Palms Special Rice, and you may notice some parallels to current, real-life incidences of state-sponsored violence…
My editor and publisher could not have cared less about me spending limited recipe development time doing this, and the same could probably be said of much of the readership. But this book is not for them. I committed months of my life — and unknown years of my mental health — to write in between the lines. Because I am not the first, nor the last, person to see how much ATLA reflects the duality of our world.
I hope readers with a spidey sense of it will find those parallel messages in this book. That destruction of tradition is a genocide in its own right. That a desire for comfort can be weaponized to absolve ourselves of responsibility in the face of others’ oppression. That militaries may retreat, but colonialism and imperialism scar a land and its people in ways forever unraveling. And in the face of all this, community is possible. Love matters. Power to the people.
Three years after the release, it feels bittersweet to see the success of something I created, fully knowing its exploitative origins.
If I were given the same terms to write this book today, I would not accept them. But all the heartache of my younger self was not for nothing, and I am glad I can call myself the author of this (bestselling!) cookbook. I will go ahead and mark this as a “W” for the records — give myself permission to be joyful, let my accomplishments take up space, and release the fear of being perceived.
Thank you all for being my village.
Meme from This Week
Just one since this email has gotten aggressively longer than I anticipated.
Personal Stuff from This Week
Listening: Nothing. I’m one of those weird folks who needs total silence when writing certain things, and I’ve been totally absorbed in my book proposal (more details soon!) the last few weeks.
Watching: Three Body Problem
Reading: Rituals of Dinner by Margaret Visser
Eating: Frog claypot porridge, specifically requested by my parents for their Singapore trip. (They had a wonderful time in Singapore & Kuala Lumpur, and returned to the States on Monday!)
Drinking: The Koong Woh Tong version of Ya Sei Mei 廿四味 (24 Flavors Herbal Tea). Every night for digestion and immunity!
Nice thing I did for myself this week: I rested the whole week after suffering from a nasty bout of foot capsulitis while also bleeding from my second tattoo removal treatment.
For paid subscribers, a special recipe from the ATLA cookbook:
Nurse Song’s Roast Duck
Iroh: I’ve never had roast duck like the one prepared by Nurse Song’s mother. What a rapturous meal that was! I keep requesting the chefs of the Fire Nation palace replicate it as a special dish to accompany National Tea Appreciation Day, but they keep stalling on me. Something about the ducks being different here. I guess I’ll just have to reserve my roast duck-eating for when I’m back at the shoppe in Ba Sing Se.
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