She moved back to her Chinese village to take care of her ailing father. Now Dianxi Xiaoge’s an online cooking sensation
- For her millions of fans, Dianxi Xiaoge’s soothing cooking videos offer a glimpse into life in rural China
- But how did she get started, and is her life really as idyllic as it seems?
In three short years, a young woman in rural China became an internet sensation, with over 11 million followers worldwide. The video that made her famous? An instructional piece on how to cook hamburgers for her grandparents in the countryside.
“My grandparents and relatives have spent their entire lives in the countryside,” says Dianxi Xiaoge, a vlogger whose videos of life in rural China have a devoted following online. “I really wanted to take them to the city to try hamburgers because in their eyes, hamburgers are Western food and a novelty.”
But they were getting old, making travel difficult, so she decided to experiment and make her own rendition of the hamburger.
“While I was making it, I was worried that people might think my hamburger wasn’t authentic,” she recalls. “But when the video came out, no one commented on whether or not my methods were good or how it tasted. They were all saying ‘I also want to take my grandpa and grandma to eat a hamburger.’”
There’s a way in which people relate to Dianxi Xiaoge’s videos — which are all shot in her childhood home in southwestern China’s rural Yunnan province — that transcends distance and cultures. Perhaps it’s her accessible presentation of traditional Chinese cooking methods, or her seemingly idyllic life that hearkens back to simpler times.
