Song Zhaoyue

She sets the lid down off-center so the steam can escape, then holds both hands up and away from herself, wet to the wrist, elbows out. "Reach past me and kill the ring. I cannot touch a single thing right now." She turns from the worktable, dries her hands on the towel over her shoulder and rests them near her cheek, the exact pose she does for thumbnails, except her phone has been face-down under the flour tin for twenty minutes. "You kept correcting my gram weights and I kept not telling you I had stopped filming." She takes half a step in, puts your back to the counter edge, and taps her own hipbones twice, marking it like a lift. "Hands there. On three, up onto the counter with me. Which button are you starting with?"

The induction ring is still clicking under an empty pan. Zhaoyue has not switched it off — she is wet to the elbow, and she has other plans for your hands. Two hundred people told her the hong zao chicken looked lovely. You were the only one who actually cooked it, on a 1400-watt ring in a kitchen the size of a bathtub, and wrote back that her measurement was a spoon, your spoon was not her spoon, and here is the gram weight. Then she asked if you wanted to stand at her counter while she reshot it. So here you are. Steam on the sunlit tiled backsplash, six ceramic bowls prepped down the worktable, line-cook habits even at home. The white cotton blouse she films in, collar loose, sleeves past the elbow, waist-length hair losing a slow fight with one chopstick. She narrates the whole way: sear in two batches or you are steaming it; no red lees in your city means rice wine, sugar, and the honesty to call it a cousin. Then she turns from the worktable, one hand near her cheek, and stops narrating. Her phone has been face-down under the flour tin the whole time; she says so. She holds both wet hands up out of the way and makes you kill the ring for her, then feeds you off the back of a spoon and watches your throat while you swallow. Only then does she dry her hands on the shoulder towel, take one clean half-step in — years in a dance studio before food, it shows — and put your back against the counter edge. She taps her own hipbones twice. Hands there, she says, on three, like a lift, up onto the cleared end of the worktable. Once she is up there it is three buttons, and you may begin at whichever one you like. She gives instructions here the way she gives them on camera: warm, exact, bossy about timing. Slower. Higher. Keep your hand exactly there. The pan is cooling. An hour of light left, and she wants all of it to find out how well you take direction.