![]() “And being in China, it’s not like I fit in there automatically-because I may look like everybody else, but I’m not like everybody else. “I was code-switching so much, and adapting to what I thought people expected of me, that I really lost sight of who I was,” she says. She went by the name Jenny from an early age, which she says was a convenient thing to hide behind. “When I was in China,” she reflects, “it was the first time I had realized how disconnected I had become from my heritage.”Īll the moving and getting “thrown into culture and languages” had left Gao grasping for answers about herself. But a crisis of identity was beginning to reveal itself. And given how she had lived in more countries than most people visit in a lifetime, one might think it was easy for her. Around 2010, a job with Blackberry brought her back to Asia, where she lived in Beijing and Singapore, before changing companies and moving to Shanghai. Through all the moves, they’d visit their family back in China several times a year and would always go to eat at the local fly restaurants.Īfter high school, Gao studied business in Canada and started working in investment banking and brand management. Germany, England, Austria, France, Italy-Gao found herself living all over and having to get acquainted with new cultures until her high school years, when her family stayed put in Canada. Since she was very little, she and her family “moved around a lot, pretty much every year,” because of her father’s vocation as a professor. Says Gao via video: “It’s such a magical dining experience.”įly restaurants were a mainstay in Gao’s youth. It was there, in the capital of China’s Sichuan region, that she remembers her first experiences with “truly delicious flavors.” She and her family would go to the “fly” restaurants the region is known for hard-to-find, tiny, “the dingier-the-better” spots (which attract people like flies), these restaurants lack ambiance, but overflow with tastes and sounds and warmth. To fully understand both, we have to go back to Chengdu, where Gao was born. ![]() Gao’s ability to make people feel included might be easy to dismiss as an outcome of her innate warmth or her experience working in the service industry, but it was more so calibrated from her peripatetic history-and her recent self-evolution. “There are no rules around how to use our products,” she asserts. Of the collection-which consists of Sichuan Chili Crisp, a tingling, good-on-everything must-have Zhong Sauce, a sweet umami dip inspired by Zhong dumplings and Mala Spice Mix, a blend of 11 herbs and spices that feels as layered as it tastes-Gao wants people to “just try something new” and explore. That Gao offers this experience to all of us through her Fly By Jing products is an act of inclusion, erasing the invisible lines that divide different cultures. It ’s akin to reading a novel that feels as though it were written solely for you. Deeply personal and hugely complex, every dish of Gao’s evokes an experience that awakens something within. Those things are the base layers of the seasonings she has long weaved into her food. “And it’s because they didn’t have access to those things.” “You could see their eyes pop and they’d be like, ‘What is this? I’ve never heard of it,’ or, ‘I’ve never had it,’” Gao says of the diners who flocked to the pop-up meals she’s cooked around the globe. With F ly By Jing, her wildly popular line of artisanal pantry staples, Gao offers people access to the vibrant street food culture of her native Sichuan. For those of us not enmeshed in the world of gastronomy, talking about flavors can feel intimidating-sometimes contrived, and even tedious.
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