李子柒：隔离时期的田园“公主”
The Reclusive Food Celebrity Li Ziqi Is My Quarantine Queen
TEJAL RAO
2020年4月28日
Like so many home cooks in quarantine, after I’ve used up the green tops of my scallions, I drop the white, hairy roots into a glass of water to regenerate, feeling pleased with my own sense of thrift and pragmatism.
和许多隔离中的家庭厨师一样，葱的绿色部分用完后，我会把长着根须的葱白放进一杯水里重新生长，为自己的节俭务实感到欣喜。
But last week, after the Chinese internet star Li Ziqi posted a new cooking video to YouTube called “The Life of Garlic,” I wished I could graduate from scallions on the windowsill.
但上周，中国网络明星李子柒在YouTube上发布了一段名为《蒜的一生》(The Life of Garlic)的烹饪视频后，我真希望自己能早点从窗台上种葱这个阶段毕业。
In the 12-minute video, which already has over seven million views, Ms. Li pushes garlic cloves into a patch of earth outside her home. A time lapse shows the sprouts growing, reaching up toward the sky.
在这段12分钟、浏览量已超过700万次的视频中，李子柒把蒜瓣铺在她家外面的一块土地上。随着时间流逝，蒜苗开始生长，伸向天空。
Ms. Li sautées the young, fresh green garlic shoots with pork. When she harvests the bulbs, she plaits the stems, hanging them up to finish the drying process, pickling and preserving the rest, and using some to season chicken feet and dress salad.
李子柒用新鲜的青蒜苗炒猪肉。收获蒜头之后，她把茎秆编成辫子，挂起来晾干，剩下的用来腌渍和保存，用其中一些给鸡爪和拌菜调味。
Ms. Li, who lives in a village in Sichuan Province and rarely speaks to press, looks not unlike a Disney princess in her crown braids, wearing a silvery fur cape, trudging gracefully in the snow. At 29, she is famous for her mesmerizing videos of rural self-sufficiency, posted on Weibo and YouTube.
李子柒住在四川省的一个小村庄里，很少接受媒体采访。她梳着皇冠辫子，身穿银色毛皮斗篷，在雪地里优雅行走，看上去就像迪士尼的公主。29岁的她因为在微博和YouTube上发布自给自足的农村生活的迷人视频而出名。
For a worldwide audience in isolation, her D.I.Y. pastoral fantasies have become a reliable source of escape and comfort.
对于世界各地隔离中的观众来说，她这种一切自己动手的田园幻想，已经成为逃避和安慰的可靠来源。
I usually plan to watch one — just one — but then I let the algorithm guide me to another, and another, until, soothed by bird song and instrumentals, I’m convinced that I’m absorbing useful information from Ms. Li about how to live off the land.
我通常只打算看一个视频——就看一个——但之后就放任算法指引我再看一个，然后再看一个，直到在鸟鸣和乐曲的抚慰下，确信自己从她那里学到了不少如何靠土地为生的有用信息。
If I’m ever stuck with two dozen sweet potatoes, I now have some idea how to extract the starch and use it to make noodles. This is what I tell myself. Leave me alone in a lotus pond, and I know how to harvest and prepare the roots.
如果我曾经对着两打红薯不知所措，现在我已经知道应该如何用它们来提取淀粉并且做粉条了。我对自己这么说。就算一个人在荷塘里，我也知道该怎么采获和收拾莲藕。
Ms. Li doesn’t explain anything as she goes. In fact, she tends to work in silence, without the use of any modern kitchen gadgets. Her sieve is a gourd. Her grater is a piece of metal that she punctures, at an angle, then attaches to two pieces of wood. Her basin is a stream, where she washes the dirt from vegetables.
李子柒的视频里不做任何解释。事实上，她喜欢安静地工作，不使用任何现代厨房设备。她的筛子是葫芦做的。她的刨丝器是一块金属片，自己穿了一些斜孔，固定在两块木头上。小溪就是她的盆子，她在那里清洗蔬菜上的污垢。
Her kitchen is nothing like mine, in Los Angeles. But watching Ms. Li on my laptop, while eating a bowl of buttered popcorn for dinner, I think maybe I could be happy living like that, too, soaking in the sheer natural beauty of the countryside, devoting myself to extremely traditional ways of cooking.
她的厨房跟我在洛杉矶的厨房完全不一样。但是一边用笔记本电脑看李子柒，一边吃着奶油爆米花当晚餐，我想我或许也可以像她那样快乐地生活，沉浸在乡村纯粹的自然之美当中，忠诚地使用极为传统的烹饪方式。
Ms. Li makes peach blossom wine and cherry wine, preserves loquats and rose petals. She makes fresh tofu, and Lanzhou-style noodle soup with a perfectly clear broth, and ferments Sichuan broad bean paste from scratch. She butchers ducks and whole animals.
李子柒酿造桃花酒和樱桃酒，保存枇杷和玫瑰花瓣。她制作新鲜豆腐和汤汁清澈的兰州拉面，还从零开始发酵四川豆瓣酱。她宰杀鸭子和整只的动物。
She is not known for taking shortcuts. A video about matsutake mushrooms begins with her building the grill to cook them, laying the bricks down one at a time, scraping the mortar smooth, then hunting for mushrooms in the woods.
她的出名不是靠急功近利。在一段关于松茸的视频里，她先是搭起烤松茸的烤架，一块一块地把砖头垒起来，刮平灰浆，然后在树林里搜寻蘑菇。
In a video about cooking fish, she first goes fishing, in the snow, patiently throwing back any catches that are too small, as snowflakes freeze into her hair.
在一段关于焖鱼的视频里，她先是去钓鱼，在雪中耐心地把太小的鱼扔回去，雪花在她的头发里冻结。
Like the main character in some kind of post-apocalyptic novel, Ms. Li is almost always alone, though she doesn’t seem lonely, riding her horse through fields of wildflowers, or carrying baskets of sweet potatoes under citrus trees. She seems tireless, focused, confident, independent.
就像某些末世后小说中的主人公一样，李子柒几乎总是一个人，不过她似乎并不孤独，她骑马穿过野花丛中，或者提着一篮一篮的红薯站在橘花树下。她似乎不知疲倦，专注，自信，独立。
The videos are deeply soothing. But it’s not just that — they reveal the intricacy and intensity of labor that goes into every single component of every single dish, while also making the long, solitary processes of producing food seem meaningful and worthwhile.
这些视频让人深感慰藉。但是不仅如此——它们揭示了每道菜所有组成部分中倾注的复杂而密集的劳动，同时也让漫长而孤独的生产过程显得有意义和有价值。
It’s the complete opposite of most cooking content, the kind that suggests that everything is so quick and easy that you can do it, too, and probably in less than 30 minutes.
这与大多数烹饪内容完全相反，那些内容暗示着一切都是那么简单快速，你也可以做到，而且可能用不了30分钟。
But Ms. Li also romanticizes the struggles of farm life, and, as any savvy influencer would, monetizes that appeal. In her online shop, she sells a curved cleaver, similar to the ones she uses in her videos, as well as loose Hanfu-inspired linen clothing, Sichuan ginseng honey and chile sauces.
但是李子柒也浪漫化了农村生活的挣扎，而且像任何精明的网红一样，她也将这种魅力变现。她的网店里出售一种弯刀，类似于她在视频中使用的那种，还有以汉服为灵感设计的宽松亚麻服装、四川参蜜和辣椒酱。
Skeptics are suspicious of her access to YouTube in China, where the platform is blocked. And though it seems unlikely, some people have wondered in the comment sections if her videos are propaganda.
心存质疑的人觉得奇怪，她为什么能在中国访问YouTube，因为该平台在那里被屏蔽。虽然看起来不太可能，但评论区有些人怀疑她的视频是不是政治宣传。
Ms. Li’s story, as she tells it, is that she left home as a teenager to find work, but returned to the countryside to take care of her grandmother, then began documenting her life. Though she used to shoot her videos alone, on her phone, she now works with an assistant and a videographer.
按照李子柒自己的说法，她的故事是这样的：她十几岁时离家去找工作，后来又回到农村照顾祖母，然后开始记录自己的生活。虽然以前都是一个人拍视频，但现在她有了一个助手和一名摄像师。
“I simply want people in the city to know where their food comes from,” Ms. Li said, in a rare interview with Goldthread last fall. (She never responded to my requests.)
“我只想让城里的人知道，他们吃的食物是从哪里来的，”去年秋天，李子柒在罕见地接受Goldthread采访时说。（她始终没有回应我的采访请求。）
But most of the world’s food, whether in China or the United States, doesn’t come from anyone’s backyard, and isn’t made from scratch. Noodles are produced and packaged in factories. Chickens and pigs are gutted on fast, dangerous lines.
但是，不管在中国还是美国，世界上的大部分食物都不是来自任何人的后院，也不是从零开始制作的。面条是在工厂里生产和包装的。鸡和猪在快速、危险的流水线上被宰杀。
The fragility of our industrial supply chains, and the immense risks for the people who work in commercial plants and slaughterhouses, have been laid bare in the last few weeks.
我们工业供应链的脆弱性，以及在商业工厂和屠宰场工作的人们所面临的巨大风险，在过去几周中都暴露无遗。
Ms. Li sidesteps the existence of that broken system entirely. This is the powerful fantasy of her videos right now — people growing and cooking all of their own food, not wasting anything, and not needing anything more than what they already have around them.
李子柒完全回避了这个残缺体系的存在。这是她的视频在当下提供的最有力的幻想——人们自己种植和烹饪食物，不浪费任何东西，不需要太多身外之物。
In isolation, watching Ms. Li gather rose petals and ripe tomatoes, I catch myself thinking, is this sequence set in the past, or the future? Are these videos a record of the collective food knowledge we’ve already lost, or an idealized vision of its recovery?
在隔离中，看着李子柒独自采摘玫瑰花瓣和成熟的番茄的视频，我不禁思忖，这一切的背景是过去还是未来？这些视频是关于我们已失去的集体食物知识的记录，还是对其复兴的理想化愿景？
