A couple of months ago on my YouTube homepage, I saw a strange-looking video of 4 raw eggs over rice in a rice cooker titled “Since I knew that Rice can be cooked like this”. Curious cat that I am, I clicked on that video and that was the beginning of a long voyage that sent me down the conspiratorial rabbit hole of the YouTube Channel Xiaoying cuisine. While this post started off as a “look at this weird thing” type of post, it took a bit of a hard turn into conspiracies and investigating my understanding of cultural differences, but more on that later. Ultimately, this is the tale of a mysterious and strange cooking YouTube Channel.
I simply love the cooking part of YouTube, especially channels that focus on Asian cuisine. Cooking YouTube tends to be so wholesome, and it is how I get a majority of my recipes these days. Some of my favorite YouTubers in this field are channels like Souped Up Recipes, Maangchi, and Taste of Asian Food. So, my frequency of watching those creators likely resulted in Xiaoying’s appearance on my home page. And oh, my what a find.
Xiaoying is nothing like the previously mentioned food creators. In fact, it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before. The other creators and food YouTubers tend to focus on welcoming personalities and teaching about cooking. What is highlighted in these videos is the presenter’s personality, the history/practicality of the dish, and, of course, the recipe. I think my favorite example of a quality cooking video in the Asian cooking corner of YouTube is this:
The viewer feels very connected with Maangchi as her personality is on full display. Additionally, the dish is very simple and you know what you are going to cook: Spicy Braised Tofu. (Also, the caption at the 1:02 mark is perhaps one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen in a cooking video). This is what I would consider an example of a well-done, traditional, cooking video: an emphasis on the creator’s personality, straightforward instructions, and diversity in camera perspectives. Furthermore, based on the thumbnail and the title, as well as the structure of the video, one is fully aware of what they are making and what the final product will be. You know, normal cooking stuff.
Xiaoying Cuisine does none of this. And that results in fascinating and mesmerizing videos.
Let’s get to the basics. Xiaoying Cuisine is a YouTube channel with 3.75 million subscribers and a total of 1.1k videos. This is simply wild stats for such a surreal cooking channel, and I’ll get back to that later. The description on their about page is very lovely: Hello everyone, welcome to Xiaoying Food. Hi, welcome to watch Xiaoying Cuisine. I usually like to cook very much and love food. I will share a dish here every day. You can learn and try to make it. I hope everyone's life can be better. Welcome to subscribe and turn on the bell. I too hope that everyone’s life can be better. The channel is listed as being in Hong Kong, and on all social media platforms, the above portrait is the only image used for the profiles. This is as much information I could find regarding the channel and the creator. The person’s personality is unknown (a little mysterious I must say), but they mention their family a lot in videos. Not being a Chinese speaker, I am unsure if this is the proper usage of Xiaoying, but it seems like Xiaoying is effectively best translated as “little guy” which, again, makes this channel amazing. For the rest of the post, when referring to the figure in the videos (the voice and the body), I call them as Xiao as I don’t know their real name. I highly recommend you check out their page now and a video or two so you know what I will be talking about in this post : https://www.youtube.com/@XiaoYingFood
The typical Xiaoying Cuisine video flows something like this: you get a video with a vague and mysterious title with the thumbnail being a mid-step in the cooking process (e.g. the image above). You click on the video and it is an airy woman’s voice describing the cooking directions. You never see the woman’s face, only the hands (and my first conspiracy theory is that the voice and the cook are not one in the same). The whole time there is reverb-heavy piano and the same tracks are used for many of the videos. Most of the shots are extreme close-ups, and a vast majority of the run time of most videos is the cutting of vegetables. At the end there is the reveal of the dish and a lot of promises about how good it is, but unlike other cooking channels, you rarely see anyone eating the food. These videos are trippy and ASMR adjacent, but ultimately very relaxing and soothing. There is almost no variation in the layout of the videos (I’ve probably watched around 100 of them, but again, there are more than 1100) and one never learns anything about Xiao – the sole focus is the food.
My favorite element of these videos is jumping into the videos without ever being aware of what the final product will be. “Normal” cooking videos are straightforward. If you watch a Binging with Babish video called “Carnitas” with a thumbnail image of delicious meat, you expect to watch a video that explains how one would make Carnitas, and in typical Babish style, a couple of variations on the dish. Xiaoying Cuisine does not follow this expectation. The titles are poorly translated and clickbait-esque, and they never detail what the final dish is. In fact, based on my sample size, one never learns the name of any of these dishes, which absolutely fits in with the Xiaoying Cuisine ethos. Here are a couple of my favorite examples of the Xiaoying titles that I’ve gathered:
· “Carrots learn this practice, can’t eat at the restaurant…”
· “Don’t eat pumpkin directly, teach you a new way to eat, simple and delicious”
· “Cucumbers are not directly cold, teach you new way to eat”
· “Eat chicken breast like this, children like it, crispy on the outside and tender on the inside”
· “Can you scramble eggs with water? No oil needed, simple and delicious”
· “Drizzle two egg liquid in the onion, don’t fry it, it’s too fragrant”
· “Beat 4 eggs in the rice, learn to do this, my family will not eat steamed buns”
· “The recent popular potato method costs less than 3 yuan at home, so delicious”
In addition to this, the thumbnail images are more often than not not, in fact, an image of the final product, but rather one of the early steps of the preparation or simply the ingredients, rendering the majority of their videos some type of uniformity in unknowns. What this means is that when you click on a video you are never sure what you are going to end up making, it’s a full mystery box. In some videos, one might have an example of the final product at some point in the “intro”, but that’s often not the case. Dishes can range from an omelet pizza to fried rice, to dumplings to little cakes, but you are never sure of exactly what it will be. And that’s really the fun of the whole video, trying to guess what the food will eventually turn into. This makes no sense to me – if you were a YouTube channel you would want people to click on your videos so they can learn to cook they want to cook right? For example, if I wanted to get a recipe for an onion frittata dish, I would type in “onion frittata” not “the onion and eggs are so fragrant, the child rushes to eat it and relieves it”. So the titling of videos these videos is extremely questionable (again, I recognize that this is coming from a different cultural reference point - so my interpretation of this is indeed quite limited).
Another element regarding what I love about these videos are the phrases that the narrator uses to describe the final product. “Simple and Delicious” are the most frequently used words in these videos, but other Xiao’s other catchphrases are “even picky eaters will like it”, “children love this”, and “fragrant”. There tends to be an emphasis on how these dishes are simple, delicious, and nutritious. And while a lot of the recipes do in fact look pretty decent, after watching these videos for a while they get pretty repetitive: frittatas or omelets with differing ingredients, cakes and buns, fried rice, etc.
Something else that makes this channel so intriguing and mysterious is that no one else on the internet seems to be taking any interest in it (again which is weird considering the 3.75 million subscribers, but I’ll circle back to that). In search of companionship on this deep internet dive, I scanned the comments of these videos, and again, it only leads to more mysteries in the Xiaoying story. It seems like no one else is acknowledging how surreal these videos are and I truly feel like I’m in this rabbit hole alone. There are rare comments of humor and surreal acknowledgment (e.g. “People only watch these videos at 3 am” and “These titles are so weird” ), but the vast majority of the comments I’ve seen are along the lines of “Wow looks super tasty” or “I’ve never seen [insert ingredient] cooked like that before”. The comments are rather linguistically diverse as well. In just some quick scrolls through a couple of the video’s comments I observe English, Portuguese, Korean, Spanish, Russian (or at least a Cyrillic language), Italian, Thai. Polish, Japanese, Turkish, and Arabic. So again, more mysteries than answers.
I recognize that an element of what makes these videos so funny is the awkwardness of translation and cultural differences. My reference point for what a cooking show should look like is based on the influx of food network programs, so a non-western cooking show is likely to look and feel very like what I’m used to. So, I definitely need to interrogate that about myself when stumbling upon this corner of Youtube. But still even still, Xiaoying remains a world of mystery.
Let me do a breakdown of what I just discussed above for one video, almost like a case study. This is the video that I will analyze:
The title of this video is titled “Eat More Lotus Root in Winter, Teach You How to Keep the Restaurant from Spreading” and as you can see from the thumbnail it’s just two bits of lotus root. So, going into the video the only thing that the viewer knows about the recipe is that it will include lotus root and it might somehow stop the restaurant from spreading. But other than that, anything is possible!
The majority of the video is EXTREME close-ups of all the chopping of the ingredients: carrots, mushrooms, lotus root, pork belly, sausage, etc. The whole time I watched this I wondered what the final result would be. Ultimately, Xiao made some rather tasty-looking meatballs and calls them “Lotus Root Balls” so I guess that is what we can call the dish. Xiao describes the dish as “delicious and beautiful”, and says their catchphrase “Even picky eaters love it”. Watching this video is pretty similar to what a typical Xiaoying cuisine video is like and it’s safe to assume the other 1099 follow the same pattern as this one.
So as a recap, these are the elements included in the majority of Xiaoying videos:
1. Vague, non-descript title
2. A thumbnail of ingredients or a middle step, not the final product
3. Airy voice and relaxing music
4. Extreme close-ups of the cooking process
5. A glossy final product
6. Xiao describing the food as “nutritious or delicious” and saying something like “even children and/or picky eaters will like it”
7. Around 30-50 comments saying how good it looks in a plethora of languages.
So…my question is: what exactly is going on here? Who is making these videos? Who are they for? Who are the 3.75 million subscribers and where are these 1.25 billion views coming from? Why is there no additional information about this channel? There is no sponsorship in any of the videos I have watched, and there never seems to be any mention of selling their own unique products or assembling a cookbook. Who is Xiao!?
To me it seems crazy to me that these videos are popular when the viewer don’t even know the name of the dish that they are making! I swear the more I think about this page the stranger it gets. How is it so popular? Why is the assumed creator not anywhere else other than YouTube? What does the production schedule look like?
Out of curiosity, I compared Xiaoying to the other Asian cooking channels that I enjoy …and I am simply astounded. I looked at the number of videos, number of subscribers, dates joined YouTube, and total video views of Xiaoying, Maangchi, Souped up Recipes, Chinese Cooking Demystified, Taste of Asian Food, and Babish (who I used as an comparison because I assume he is at the top of cooking YouTube). Xiaoying has, by far, the most videos – more than doubling everyone except Babish with 1,100 videos. Xiaoying also has the third most subscribers, again only behind Babish and Maangchi, which is shocking considering how weird this channel is as it has no personality compared to these other channels. Passing 1 million is a huge accomplishment. My fave YouTuber only has 1 million. How is it possible that a bucketful of mysteries is at 3.75? Xiaoying is also by far the most recent.
Babish and Maangchi are YouTube veterans, joining in 2006 and 2007 respectively (and this duration is likely responsible for their high subscription rate). Xiaoying joined in 2019. The last statistic I looked at is video views. Only Babish and Xiaoying break the 1 billion mark (which is so cool). Xiaoying has 1.25 billion video views, whereas Babish has roughly double at 2.5 billion. Ultimately, this would suggest that Xiaoying is an extremely popular and well-established channel. But then why am I the only person who seems to be talking about this? I just can’t believe that these near-surreal videos are statistically more well-received than extremely popular channels with much more personable hosts who have their own cookbooks, products, and are sponsored.
And let’s also take a moment to think about these 1100 videos. If these videos are each around – let’s say – four and half minutes then that’s basically 5000 minutes or 82 hours of content on YouTube. That’s more than 3 full days of these videos Xiao’s calming voice. Let’s also assume each video takes 5 hours to produce (sourcing ingredients, prepping, getting the shots, cooking, captioning, editing, doing voiceovers, etc. so I’m being generous here). That would result is 5500 hours, or 229 full days, of work, being put into these videos. While these stats are just speculative…it is evident that regardless of what the final product is…there is a lot of effort being put into these videos!
When I first started writing this, I thought it was “haha, this is a weird channel”, but now that I’ve become invested I think there must be some mid-level conspiracy going on here. A potential limitation of my analysis here is not understanding what YouTube is like in China and in the Chinese-speaking world. I understand the website is blocked in Mainland China, but not Hong Kong, which is theoretically where Xiaoying is based. But other than that we don’t know anything. And this can be perhaps a limitation for my understanding of the channel and its vast popularity. But if these videos were designed to reach Chinese-speaking audiences, then why are the titles in English? Again, the mysteries keep piling up.
This is the highest-level conspiracy theory that I am cultivating: Xiaoying is a complex revenue scheme that uses YouTube ad monetization policies to generate immense profit for someone. I’m picturing a whole ad farm somewhere with thousands of computers watching these videos on 24/7 non-stop rotation. All imagination and no grounds, but this helps this whole mystery make sense to me. This is obviously wild speculation – but it is fun to wonder: what is going on here!?
The lowest level conspiracy is that this whole channel is simply an ASMR bait channel, and people just watch these videos in the background for the soothing voice and music and the ambient sounds of food being cooked…but that one is not as fun although probably the most likely option.
I could go much further down this rabbit hole – I could watch all the videos, look for clues, speculate if the hands are the same in all the videos, examine if some of the shots of cutting carrots are recycled, look through all the commenters and examine if they are bots. I could follow a whole series of questions and look for answers, try to find some semblance of truth behind the looming enigmatic presence of Xiao. There are other mysteries that I didn’t go into: such as the fact that all the links they provide in the descriptions simply link back to the YouTube channel home page and the fact Xiao always talks about “a child”. But I’m not going to go into any of that. I’ve already spent far too much time in the rabbit hole. So what I am going to do is just ask a couple of last questions and throw them throw this out into the ether:
· Who is Xiao? Is the person in the image the real person? Is the voice real or AI?
· Who makes these videos? What does the production set look like? And who makes the food? Who eats the food?
· Where are these videos made? Is it really Hong Kong?
· Why are the video titles and thumbnails so vague? Is there an SEO reason behind this?
· Do people watch these videos with the intention of making the recipes? Who comments?
· Why is there no one else on the internet talking about this?
· Will they ever stop?
Thank you for going on this whacky adventure with me. If you have any answers, ideas, or conspiracies of your own, please comment and let me know. I simply want answers!
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