/reader

(sidenote: it is worth watching Culinary Class Wars just for the challenge where participants can only work with convenience store ingredients and one of the participants made chestnut tiramisu)

I’ve been to South Korea twice with the most recent time just a few months ago, but both visits I didn’t really pay attention to anything Paik related. To me, he was just one of the hundreds of celebrity personalities South Korea has manufactured.

I started watching Jinny’s Kitchen last year out of curiousity because it was mentioned on a friend’s ig story. I wasn’t really a fan of korean variety shows. I would watch the occasional reality show like Physical 100 because it was on Netflix. But Jinny’s Kitchen made me fall in love with a certain sub-genre of korean reality tv – a sub-genre people like to call, “healing”. They offer almost no drama (gasp how is this possible on tv): in fact most of the time nothing is really happening. Jinny’s Kitchen is just a bunch of celebs cooking and interacting with the locals who mostly do not seem to know them. But it was funny and heartwarming. It is rare for tv these days to feel heartwarming, because most of them are designed to dramatic and provocative.

So from Jinny’s Kitchen I watched everything in the same series: Youn’s Kitchen and Youn’s stay. This year they released Jinny’s Kitchen 2 on amazon prime, and we eagerly watched each episode as they were being released. While waiting for a new episode people on reddit was asking for recommendations to other shows that give a similar vibe, and one of those recommendations was “The Genius Paik“.

Just one episode in, I started to comprehend why Paik has garnered so much popularity. The first few episodes of The Genius Paik was uncomfortable to watch for many reasons, but he was such a good sport about it. People complained that it was not a “healing” tv program due to the discomfort, but I was impressed by how he navigated the situation, that those episodes can even be aired in the first place (it did generate controversy). So we watched Genius Paik 1 & 2, and now we’re making our way through The Backpacker’s Chef 1.

The more we watched him the more enamoured my partner and I became. Yes we know what we see on tv may not be real and he may have a hyde to his jekyll, but not every celebrity can go on tv for decades and maintain such a likeable persona consistently.

Watching him navigate the different restaurant and cooking challenges, he embodies the sort of creative spirit I admire: spontaneous, curious, innovative, while trying to enjoy every moment. As of writing this post he is 58 (1966), but his zest and energy seems to know no bounds. When mistakes or unfortunate events happen he remains unfazed, possessing a knack for thinking on his feet to resolve them creatively.

Once his team mate accidentally used cured pork instead of fresh pork to cook jokbal, Paik rescued the entire dish over the phone without even pausing much to think about it. He doesn’t seem to like food waste which seems inevitable for tv shows, cooking all the remaining ingredients into sellable food at his popup restaurants even though it is just for tv. I have begun to cook and repurpose my leftovers more creatively as new dishes instead of just warming them up for consumption. Just this morning, I worked a leftover chinese chicken soup into a cauliflower rice risotto. I think it is so cool that my brain has started thinking differently simply because I watched some tv.

I read that people like to watch his youtube channel for recipes because he tries to make it easy for them to learn, incorporating easy-to-find ingredients and simple instructions. I like people who makes learning skills as accessible as it can get instead of trying to gatekeep them. He is known for not measuring his condiments and spices, and he makes cooking look like anybody can do it. He likes to tell people he is not a chef, but a businessman. Some people don’t take him seriously, because he is not classically trained. I think it doesn’t matter whether he is a chef or a businessman. After all it is just a label. I think what matters is his love for his work and what he does with it. One can be the best at something and yet continually make people around them feel bad about themselves. I think what is more rare than just mere skills, is the ability, capacity and willingness to uplift in a world bent on weighing us down.

My partner tells me she feels like she has changed after watching Paik, becoming friendlier to people in general. For me watching his tv shows has revived my interest in cooking. I know cooking can be a creative activity but it is difficult for me to sustain that mindset because I am prone to falling into fixed patterns. This gets worse as I age as I gradually lose my will and energy to be spontaneous and experimental. So watching a 58 year old having so much life in him, more life than a ton of people half his age is eye-opening for me.

I personally find it difficult to find people who are positive influences on me, because I am cynical beyond help these days. Is someone like Paik a net positive effect on this world? I don’t know. His franchisees may be disgruntled with him. I don’t know enough about him or his businesses. But his tv persona at least is a positive influence on me. I feel the “healing” effect of his tv shows like the korean netizens like to say: watching him tend to make my heart lighter more often than not. That is super rare for a person like me who tends to be weighed down by everything.

further reading

• Someone else’s blog post about Paik Jong Won with more on his background story and his philosophy