How one Shanghai chef won't let the dream die
Chen Feng dropped out of high school in Shenzhen to become a chef. Two years later he moved to Shanghai with the hope of making it in the country's biggest dining scene.Five years ago, Chen Feng (陈锋) stepped off a train in Shanghai with RMB 300 and a dream to open a restaurant and join the ranks of Shanghai chefs. Today, although he hasn't quite opened his own place, he is living the Shanghai dream so many Chinese come to this city pursuing.
Chen now lives with a roommate from the United States and works as a line chef at the riverside Paulaner Brauhaus in Pudong, a long way from his rural Shenzhen roots.
Chen’s journey is far from over, but he’s well on the way to making it in Shanghai because of one thing: a determination to keep moving.
"Living in Shanghai is 酸甜苦辣,” he says, meaning sour, sweet, bitter and spicy. In other words, full of ups and downs.
For Chen, it started off pretty sweet. The day his train arrived in Shanghai he was hired by a local chef who trained him in Western cooking.
Chen has a bouncy Guangdong accent and laughs a lot when talking about the highs of his journey, but when he talks about the hard times, he drops his head and speaks soberly.
I couldn't think about going home, I didn't even dare call and disappoint my family.— Chen Feng, Shanghai chef
"If you want good cooking experience you have to move around, it’s very risky," he says, mainly because no restaurant means no housing, limiting options for many of those workers who come to Shanghai seeking new opportunities.
For Chen, and many of the workers coming to the big city to fulfill their dreams, those are the bitter times.
Hard times on Shanghai streets
In October of 2006 Chen left his second restaurant with nothing but his last paycheck of RMB 2,000.
“Each restaurant has been better than the last, it’s the in between that’s hard,” he explains. "I didn’t know how long this would last, so I tried to spend less than RMB 20 a day."
The cheapest place to sleep was a computer chair at an Internet bar (RMB 12 per night), which left Chen with RMB 8 a day for food.
By late November, he hadn't found a job and resorted to sleeping a few nights a week in People's Square. "I couldn't think about going home, I didn't even dare call and disappoint my family."
In December, just before his money ran out, Chen was finally hired by a Singaporean restaurant. "I couldn't be that happy though, I had lost a lot of weight and I was busy just trying to keep up. I had to learn about so many new foods I had never even heard of before."
Just weeks later Chen met Jon, an American living in Shanghai, at a small local restaurant on a brief break from cooking.
"We happened to be sitting next to each and we had a great time talking," Jon, who speaks fluent Chinese, explains. "We started hanging out once in a while."
Six months later, when Chen was between jobs again he ended up at Jon’s place, and they’ve been living together ever since.
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Living with a foreigner
“At first, I didn’t dare believe him,” says Chen’s Shanghainese co-worker at Paulaner’s at the fact that Chen was living with a foreigner. Although increasingly common in Shanghai, a rare occurrence for a local line-chef.
"Now my family thinks it's unbelievable," Chen says, smiling uncontrollably. "They tell all their relatives. Living with Jon is fun. We chat a lot, and if I want to open a restaurant I need to know more about foreigners."
Being a boss
Someday soon, Chen wants to try and rent a small apartment, print a menu and start delivering take-out to his neighborhood.
It’s a risky proposition, but Chen has shown he’s willing to take the chance to be his own boss. Just like the other 200 million people in China who move to other cities in search of better work, he knows moving is the key to success.
Chen Feng smiles and shrugs. "If I ever open my own place, it would be nice to have people call me laoban [boss], but if it doesn't work, I can always start over. I'm ready to do whatever it takes in Shanghai to succeed."
