They Built ‘The Woks of Life’ From Home. Now They’re Cooking Things Up From a New One

If their house was a person, Judy Leung tells me over dinner, it would probably be surprised to see her family living in it. Just imagine, she suggests, the sprawling 18th-century farmhouse peering down at us: five Chinese Americans flanking a long table, tucking into delicate stir fries and a vat of Cantonese soup. It’s probably not what the builders pictured either in 1785, when they constructed the colonial-style house atop what was then a quiet New Jersey peach orchard—which, after buying the property just about a year ago, the Leungs are now transforming into a bok choy farm.  

Judy, Bill, Sarah, and Kaitlin Leung aren’t just any Chinese American family, but the team behind The Woks of Life, possibly the internet’s most popular English-language Chinese food blog. Since the site’s launch a decade ago, the Leungs have published over a thousand painstakingly researched recipes and general how-to guides, some of which can be found in a new cookbook they released this November. Like many of my millennial Chinese American friends, I’ve been enjoying the Leungs’ recipes for years now. Some bring me back to the years I spent working in Hong Kong, but my favorites remind me of my childhood in Seattle and the homey Cantonese dinners my mom and dad cooked on weeknights before I moved to New York at 18.   

That, it turns out, is what the Leungs were going for. "There are so many variations to any dish, but the warmest, most ideal memory that you have of that dish is what we try to put on the page," says Kaitlin, the younger Leung daughter. The project, she explains, came out of an anxiety over forgetting: In 2012, Kaitlin and her sister Sarah were in college when their parents relocated to Beijing for work. The siblings—suddenly on their own in America—realized how much they missed their parents’ home cooking, something they had taken for granted growing up. They decided to start recording the recipes in a blog, starting with family favorites like roasted chicken with sticky rice and braised pork belly, for just a handful of readers. About a year in, after one of the recipes unexpectedly went viral, they decided to make The Woks of Life into a real thing. As the blog grew, all four Leungs began taking research trips across China to learn the secrets to regional specialties from the country’s far-flung corners. Since then, the site has built a massive following, with more than three million monthly visitors. 

What sets The Woks of Life apart from many other Chinese food blogs is its attention to detail. Along with drool-worthy images, videos, and heartfelt essays explaining each dish’s origin, each recipe brims with wiki-style cross-links, so you can click the name of almost any ingredient—say, Chinese chives—for an in-depth explainer. (They "taste a bit more vegetal than herbal" and "turn up most often in our dumpling fillings," the Leungs write, adding that they grow easily in your garden: "Just cut them like you’re trimming grass, and you’ll have more within the week. It’s GREAT.") 

In recent years, the close-knit family have switched to working on the blog full-time: cooking, photographing, and posting from their New Jersey home—what they call "The Woks of Life HQ." I wanted to get a real taste of their behind-the-scenes operations, so I took a long drive from my tiny Brooklyn studio apartment to the Leungs’ farmhouse to learn how the proverbial lap cheong (that’s Chinese sausage) gets made.

It turns out the HQ is in the midst of a huge upgrade. The site, covering 12 acres in quiet woodlands about an hour’s walk from the next town, represents the Leungs’ expanding aspirations. "At our old house"—about 20 minutes away—"we were comfortable," Sarah says. "But it was just like, either we stay there and don’t do anything different, or we move here and shake things up a lot."