Source: The New Yorker (8/4/23)
Li Ziqi’s Online Pastoral Poetics
Millions of people subscribed to her vision of an idyllic rural existence. Who was she, and why did she disappear?
By Oscar Schwartz
Illustration by Lea Woo
Somewhere in the mountainous region of northern Sichuan, a young woman harvests soybeans alone in a field. She cuts through the beanstalks with a sickle and stuffs them into a wicker basket. Once the basket is full, she makes her way to a courtyard garden, where she shells the beans by hand and grinds them in a stone mill. Working industriously yet serenely, she boils the resulting pulp in a wood-fired wok, drains it in a cloth, curdles it with salt, and finally presses it into a large block of tofu.
The scene I am describing might seem like an outtake from some period drama. She is, say, a farmer living during the Six Dynasties period, forced to cultivate soybeans alone after her husband has gone to the northern frontier. Or she is a diligent worker manufacturing tofu for the People’s Republic. Instead, this is the opening scene of a five-and-a-half-minute-long online video on how to make mapo tofu from scratch. And the young woman is Li Ziqi, a thirty-three-year-old Sichuanese influencer and the proprietor of what Guinness World Records has dubbed the most popular Chinese-language channel on YouTube.
The mapo-tofu video is typical of Li’s œuvre. In her hundred and twenty-eight YouTube posts, she uses traditional methods to farm, cook, craft, or build. The depth of her skill and ingenuity is almost beyond belief. She can make anything from anything, like some sort of rural MacGyver. Li sews a dress from a fabric of subtle lilac, which she dyed with the skins from purple grapes. She constructs a brick oven to grill a rare fungus foraged from the forest. She fells bamboo trees and fashions a daybed with a machete and a handsaw.
All her videos are thoroughgoing demonstrations, but Li should not be categorized alongside other instructional YouTubers. To do what she does would be, for most of us, entirely impossible. (Who has a spare half acre to plant a soybean crop for a single mapo-tofu dinner?) Her videos, rather, offer the viewer an opportunity to reside, if only for a moment, in an idyllic otherworld. Spliced between her labor are highly stylized shots of rural life. Goats, kittens, and puppies frolic around Li’s feet as she works. She shares a meal by the fireside with her ever-smiling, wizened grandmother. The sunflowers turn to face the eastern sun. Purple clouds gather over the mountains. A full moon rises over a field of lotus pads. . . [Read the rest on The New Yorker site]