Subtle Asian food groups help foodies create cuisines for activism
A look into how creators like Kat Lieu and Randy Lau have brought people together through the power of Asian cuisine
Founder of Subtle Asian Baking, Kat Lieu (right) at an event for the Very Asian Foundation.
Gabrielle Niccole Photography
Words by Clara Wang
There are few places left on the Internet that uplift conversation rather than amplify negativity. For the last few years, Facebook groups like Subtle Asian Baking (SAB) and Subtle Asian Cooking (SAC)—unaffiliated riffs off the mega-popular Subtle Asian Traits group—have given AA+PI food creators a platform to turn their passions into a career. These groups offer a safe space for AA+PI creators to support each other and access a group of people bound together by shared childhood experiences and a love for Asian cuisine, which for some can translate into real-world community activism.
One such success story is Kat Lieu, who founded SAB at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 as a place for AA+PI home bakers to showcase their creations and recipes. Thousands of house-bound foodies flocked to the site, and the group hit 60,000 members within the first six months. Back then, Lieu tells me over Zoom, there weren’t many platforms or spaces featuring Asian recipes written by AA+PI authors. COVID-19 had whipped up a furor of anti-Asian violence, and Lieu decided to harness her online community to do real-world good.
“I realized that here we have a big community, we can utilize our voices…why not tie in something with activism?” says Lieu.
Subtle Asian Baking raising money for the Very Asian Foundation.
Gabrielle Niccole Photography
They began with organizing bake sales and raised $10,000 for Welcome to Chinatown in New York to provide 1,000 hot meals for elderly Chinese folks in the area, and never stopped. Since 2020, Lieu tells me that SAB has raised more than $55,000 from bake sales and fundraisers, not including more than $50,000 from Lieu’s personal contributions from her book sales (she donates eight percent of the proceeds) and content creation proceeds. The money goes to supporting a range of AA+PI causes such as Vietnamese Boat People, the Very Asian Foundation, and The Wing Luke Museum, as well as well as for nonprofits like the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund and LGBTQ suicide prevention organization The Trevor Project. “You’ll see a lot of people with like a million followers, but they can only sell maybe 30 T-shirts,” Lieu says. “Without a community, if you just focus on being viral all the time, you’re attracting the wrong audience.”
Shortly after one of her SAB community members, who happened to be a food writer, profiled Lieu’s efforts on Eater.com, a publishing house reached out and offered Lieu her first book deal. From that deal came Modern Asian Baking at Home, a cookbook featuring practical recipes for fan-favorite Asian treats like mochi and milk bread. At the time, Asian baking techniques and ingredients were not as ubiquitous as they are now; Lieu tells me that in the early days of SAB, some people would leave comments on both her and the group’s Instagram page such as, “your pandan looks like mold,” or “black sesame cheesecake looks like lint or cement.” Lieu’s cookbook became part of a changing food culturescape that introduced Asian recipes and ingredients to the mainstream. “It’s become so trendy [now] that when I was pitching a cookie recipe to a major publisher they said, ‘Don’t do black sesame or ube. We have too many of these’...which is still a good thing because I’d rather that than someone say it looks like lint or mold,” Lieu laughs.
Today, the Facebook group still retains more than 160,000 members (a dip from its peak of 300,000 in 2022 is likely due to the current saturation of Asian cooking resources), with regular daily activity. Lieu published her second cookbook, Modern Asian Kitchen, a compilation of easy-to-cook pan-Asian recipes, in April, and is currently writing her third, 108 Asian Cookies. As a rom-com writer who has been self-published since the early 2000s, Lieu is grateful to be able to now pursue her writing passions full-time.
“I see a lot of [Asian Americans] choosing the creative route, and it’s amazing. And they’re able to do it full-time—I’m a full-time food writer now. I think that has been a boon,” says Lieu.
Another food creator whose career was launched during the pandemic is Randy Lau, the man behind the popular YouTube channel, Made with Lau. The channel features Lau’s father Chung Sun Lau, also known as “Daddy Lau,” who has more than 50 years of experience cooking professionally in China and the United States and shares classic Cantonese cooking techniques and recipes.
Another food creator whose career was launched during the pandemic is Randy Lau, the man behind the popular YouTube channel, Made with Lau. The channel features Lau’s father Chung Sun Lau, also known as “Daddy Lau,” who has more than 50 years of experience cooking professionally in China and the United States and shares classic Cantonese cooking techniques and recipes.
When COVID-19 shut down his digital marketing business in 2020 and his family was stuck in the house, with his first child on the way and his parents not getting any younger, Randy decided it was a sign to start documenting his own family legacy. “It would’ve made sense to get a job, but the child in me wanted to preserve my dad’s recipes. The dad in me wanted to have something to pass down to my kids,” Randy tells me.
A longtime fan of cooking channels himself, Randy spotted a void in the YouTube landscape for an older figurehead teaching younger generations how to cook Chinese food in an English-friendly way. Randy quickly put his years of experience working in digital marketing to use, and spent the next six months developing and producing content for the channel. Their first video features Daddy Lau walking viewers step-by-step through making a Cantonese version of the classic mapo tofu. The video established Made With Lau’s signature production, which spotlights the history of the dish and includes a segment answering audience questions. Randy’s father proved a natural in front of the camera and they had a blast. “So it’s like, ‘I think there’s something here, and even if it doesn’t go anywhere, then I’ll at least have spent all this time with my family and have something to pass down,’” Randy says.
Randy and Chung Sun Lau.
Courtesy of Made With Lau
Along with the support of his personal network of friends and family, Randy began posting diligently on Facebook groups like SAC, Cantonese Cooking, and Cantonese Parents to promote his channel. SAC, which was created in 2019, has a particularly broad reach with more than 353,000 current members. It’s a diverse forum; activity varies from home cooks seeking tips and posting pictures of meals to creators like Randy who share cookbook launches and career updates.
“The group is full of Asian diaspora, and I think a lot of it in some ways relate to the yearning to connect with our culture,” says Randy.
Most groups don’t allow links to anything outside of Facebook to discourage spammers, though SAC allows for judicial promotion of AA+PI channels. Randy posted about his channel on SAC “to announce our mission” five days after the first video dropped. The post racked up more than 1,000 likes within days. “I got like a hundred views on the video the first week, so being able to expose this to tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people was pretty critical. It was a great kickstart,” says Randy.
Like Lieu, Randy was able to make Made With Lau his full-time career. The channel now boasts more than one million subscribers, recently won two James Beard awards for best Instructional Visual Media and Emerging Voice, and published a cookbook—right on the heels of the birth of Randy’s second child. The community of AA+PI food creators also continue to help each other in the real world, sharing practical work and negotiation tips.
“Tinger from Dash of Ting helped guide me on some of my first brand deal contracts…including with a Buzzfeed casting call,” Randy tells me.
Other accomplished home-cooks-turned-food-creators who frequent the space include Melbourne-based photographer Harvard Wang, who self-published his first cookbook Soy Sauce, Sugar, Mirin, Jeannette Ta of the family recipe blog Wok and Kin, and practicing doctor Bettie Liu, who recently published her second cookbook, The Chinese Way.
“[These Facebook groups are] a place for a conversation rather than a megaphone,” says Randy. “It’s beautiful in that it hasn’t evolved as much as TikTok, reels, or YouTube shorts have. It’s not trying to hook your short attention span, it’s just people trying to share what they’re passionate about.”
Published on October 29, 2024
Words by Clara Wang
Clara Wang is a freelance writer based in Austin, TX but often found wandering abroad exploring culture through the lens of food and drink. Her work has been featured in publications such as Conde Nast Traveler, Food & Wine, Eater Austin, BuzzFeed, Refinery29, the Austin American Statesman, and the Daily Dot. Her monthly column Stir Fried explores Asian diasporic cuisines around the world.