A down-to-earth video chef with more than 10 million online fans was not expecting the stir he created when he introduced his audience to the art of preparing a meal out of a critically endangered giant salamander – after killing it in front of the camera.
The four-minute video, which went viral last week, attracted widespread controversy. Some people were concerned that the main ingredient was a protected species which should not be eaten, while others were shocked to see the animal killed and prepared on camera.
The video opens, like all of the 29-year-old chef’s videos, with his usual greeting: “Hi everybody, I'm Wang Gang. Today I will teach you how to make braised salamander.”
As always, Wang is dressed in his crisp, white chef’s jacket. In his left hand, he holds the struggling salamander up to the camera before knocking it out with the blunt end of his cleaver, slicing it open, washing it clean and chopping it to pieces.
Wang has apologised for the salamander video, but his regret has not, so far, turned down the heat on the discussion which it has generated among China’s vibrant online community.
In a video apology posted to social media this week, Wang explained that the salamander was not a protected animal taken from the wild. Instead, he said, it had been sourced from a farm.
But some commenters said the killing of the salamander was cruel, and accused Wang of not having enough respect for life.
In an interview with the South China Morning Post Wang said he did not see the controversy coming, particularly over the screening of the salamander’s last moments. Killing, he said, was an essential part of his daily work as a chef.
Wang’s no-nonsense approach in his videos is exactly what his followers have found so appealing since he began making them in 2017.
People have praised his concise, down-to-earth style of cooking and said they felt he was honestly trying to teach cooking skills, instead of showing off or making the process look poetic.
Today Wang has more than 10 million fans across nearly 20 Chinese social media platforms. He has published more than 180 videos on news and entertainment platform Jinri Toutiao, which have been viewed in total more than 240 million times.
Wang, from Chengdu in the southwestern province of Sichuan, was 10 when he decided he wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a chef.
As a boy he would spend his weekends helping his father in the kitchen at the cafeteria where he worked, peeling potatoes and gradually learning the trade.
After leaving secondary school, Wang got his start in a restaurant. He did everything he was told: waiting tables, washing dishes, chopping vegetables and mopping the floor. At first, he wasn’t even allowed in the kitchen. But as time went on, the chefs gradually became more willing to have him around.
Between the ages of 16 and 25, Wang worked in more than 40 restaurants in multiple cities, learning to cook more than 500 dishes, first by observing, then by imitating the chefs around him.
In 2017, Wang was working as head chef at a Sichuan restaurant in Zhuhai, Guangdong province, in southern China. By then, he had started using social media and was watching numerous cooking videos online.
“In some videos, I thought there was room for improvement in their cooking, but I couldn’t just blatantly tell them they were doing a bad job, so I thought I should try it,” he said.
Wang had zero experience of filming, and didn’t even have a smartphone at the time. He borrowed a phone from his elder brother, Wang Guochun, and asked a colleague to take pictures of him making an aubergine dish. He remembers being so nervous when he looked into the camera that he cut his finger while preparing the food.
After the photos were done, he wrote a few paragraphs explaining the dish, and posted them on social media.
It was an addictive experience. Wang was soon looking into video-making, browsing the internet after work each day and teaching himself how to shoot and edit video. He spent a month’s salary on a camera.
“How do you expect a cook to learn filming? It was extremely difficult,” he said. “I spent half a month just figuring out the editing software.”
But it was well worth it. The audience loved his videos. They praised them for being sharp and straight to the point, dubbing his style “hard-core food”.
Wang’s videos follow a straightforward pattern. He waves to the camera and says, “Hi everybody, I'm Wang Gang. In this video, I'm going to teach you how to make this dish.”
As he names the dish, he points to his left hand, which holds up the ingredients. Sometimes it’s a string of sausage, sometimes fish, sometimes hot peppers or a block of tofu.
Then, without a word, he returns to his work table. He prepares the ingredients, slices hot peppers, chops spring onions and smashes garlic with the side of his cleaver. He pours a ladle full of oil into the wok, heats it up, throws in the ingredients, followed by spice after spice.
Sometimes he grabs the edges of the wok and shakes it, hot steam rising as flames flare from below.
His style was a dramatic departure from most cooking videos on the Chinese internet, which tend to be produced artistically in a studio, instead of a kitchen. There is gentle lighting, a window that looks out to a babbling brook, a flower bouquet on the table, and the occasional appearance of a cat.
Wang’s videos show an entirely different world. His table is always oily, he is surrounded by steel bowls of different spices, and when he grabs the wok tightly and stir-fries, a vein on his forearm pops out.
His audience loved it. It was Wang’s cooking skills that people wanted to see, rather than carefully designed table layouts or beautiful scenery. They found him down-to-earth, instructional, and – most importantly – “real”.
“Whenever I get homesick, I watch Wang's videos,” one follower wrote under Wang’s Weibo. “Eating certain dishes has always demonstrated one’s attachment to their home.”
“I learned how to make braised pork from you, here's my homework,” another wrote, posting a photo. Wang told him to “keep up the good work”.
For Wang, the popularity was unexpected. He didn’t set out to make the videos this way on purpose, he said, he simply did not know any other way.
“I like the other food videos, after watching them I feel relaxed,” Wang said. “But if you ask me what filming or editing style I have, I don’t really know anything. All I know is cooking.”
In October 2017, when his fan base had grown to 600,000, Wang quit his job to devote himself full-time to making his videos. Many in his family objected vehemently to him giving up a stable income for what seemed a reckless pursuit, but Wang’s wife Yao Shufen, a make-up artist, supported him.
“She told me that if I failed, I could always start over,” he said. “She never gave me any pressure.”
Together, they moved to Chengdu, Sichuan province, and launched the business but, for the first few months, he made no money. In March 2018, when his fan base had grown to 3 million, he was recruited as a columnist by Jinri Toutiao, which pays him to regularly upload new videos to its online entertainment platform.
Wang hired an assistant, 26-year-old Wu Congyun, a retired military veteran and a devoted fan, to help with preparing the shoot and editing the videos.
Wu started watching Wang’s videos in 2017, when he retired from active service. He loves cooking and has also been helping out in the kitchen from a young age.
“I learned so much from Wang, especially the details, such as soaking aubergine in white vinegar beforehand, so it doesn’t change colour when cooking,” Wu said.
Wang makes three five-minute videos a week and each one takes about a whole day to film. Wu helps him buy the ingredients beforehand, and sets up the camera. Then, Wang starts performing. He usually gets the cooking down in one take but preparation, moving the materials around and cleaning usually takes up a few hours.
Wand did not see the salamander controversy coming, and was also unprepared for the reaction to his latest video, in which he makes a spicy rabbit dish.
Mindful of the negative comments about his previous work, in the new video he showed a rabbit running around the table for a few seconds, in front of a cleaver, but omitted the crucial moment of dispatch. In the next shot, Wang is chopping up the prepared rabbit meat.
But the new video has also drawn criticism. Some commenters said he was teasing the rabbit, like a predator with its prey. One person said Wang should not have shown the rabbit’s last moments, with its “vigour and cuteness” before switching in the next second to a pile of bloody meat.
“You are not cooking food, you are killing food,” read one comment.
Wang had no idea his videos would cause so much controversy. To him, this aspect of food preparation is just part of the job.
“You can’t tell me that the pork you eat comes from a pig who committed suicide, and divided itself up into chunks of meat, right?” Wang said. “Somebody has to do it.”
His life remains largely unaffected by the episode, he says. He will continue making his food videos as well as running a business on the side, making snacks and selling them on e-commerce websites.
“I'm a chef, when a chef shares how he cooks, he can't just talk blankly into the camera and bring out the dish the next second,” he said. “That’s cheating. I have to show the entire process.”
