Extra: Knife Skills and the Chef

An extra chapter from ONE MORE WAY: The History Behind Chinese Esports, by BBKinG (Liu Yang). Translated from the Chinese original: 番外篇 刀工与大厨

First published in the author's Zhihu column on November 13, 2013: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/19611901

This translation was reviewed against the Chinese original on August 1, 2026. If you spot a mistranslation, a wrong name, or a factual error, please open an issue or send a pull request.

This chapter is a little abstract. At first glance it has nothing to do with esports, but it lays the ground for what comes later.

Knife skills and the chef

More than sixty years ago, a man fled the mainland for Taiwan. He had lost his papers and had nobody to vouch for him, so he was taken for a communist agent. He could not find work or register his residence, and ended up repairing bicycles outside an army camp. Relations across the Strait were tense, nobody wanted trouble, and nobody spoke to him.

There was a young officer in that camp who liked writing calligraphy. One Lunar New Year, in good spirits, he wrote a couple of couplets more than he needed and handed them to the repairman. The repairman was so pleased that he insisted on showing off a skill of his own: cutting vegetables. Most people would not care, but the officer's family ran a restaurant and he knew something about it, so he humoured him and watched. That was where the trouble started: as though possessed, he began learning knife work from him.

How far did the officer's knife work go? He would slice a winter melon a palm wide and as thick as an arm, lay the slices out flat, and every one was as even as if measured with a ruler. He cut neither quickly nor slowly, and however small the piece in his hand became, he patiently worked it away one stroke at a time. One dish was called "one stroke to draw the fish spine": a single stroke took the backbone and head off the fish, with not a bone broken or left behind, using both points of the blade, the heel to separate and the tip to lift, in one flash.

In middle age he merged his knife work with his breathing. He cut with his knees slightly bent and his feet neither square nor turned out. The finer the work, the wider he opened his hips, sinking his breath into his heels and sending the lift up into the edge of the blade, cutting vegetables and strengthening his body at once.

In old age he neither cooked nor touched a knife. If it can be eaten that is enough, he would say, so why be endlessly particular? His knife work went back into his calligraphy, which turned round and serene and became a school of its own. But that came later.

When the officer was still young, he was demobilised, took over the family restaurant, and for a time employed a head chef surnamed Zeng.

Mr Zeng was called the head chef, but nobody ever saw him in a white jacket and tall hat. In hot weather he wore a slant-fronted ramie shirt in pale blue, in winter a moon-white robe, spotless and unworldly. However busy the kitchen, he was never seen to cook. He sat behind the counter reading, perfectly composed.

Yet a banquet arranged by Mr Zeng cost a great deal more, which made people wonder what a head chef actually does.

Cooks who have spent long enough in a kitchen tend to get slippery, like soldiers too long in the ranks. They pass off inferior ingredients as good ones, swap things out and pocket the difference, or take shortcuts with tricks like monosodium glutamate standing in for chicken stock. Ordinary people can do nothing about them. A head chef they cannot fool. One look, one taste, and he has them exposed. That is what a head chef is for, and why a banquet arranged by Mr Zeng was good. Nobody dared cheat, so the food was good.

Mr Zeng liked to tell stories, and after a drink he could go on and on. Once he came to heat and sweetness. Chilli heat, he said, is the king of the flavours. It carries the air of a ruler, does not mix easily with the rest, and holds itself apart the way a gentleman does. Heat should be used boldly, or you have a weak and foolish ruler, discipline cut away piece by piece, everyone free to bully him, and how could such a state not fall? Sweetness is the flavour of the consort, cutting heat better than anything and pleasing better than anything, like an autumn moon or a spring breeze. But sweetness should be used lightly, and that restraint is a lady's virtue. Sweetness pushed past cloying is the most repellent thing there is, naked flattery.

On bitterness and salt he said that salt is the most common flavour and bitterness the highest. Nobody can go a day without salt, and nobody can take bitterness two days running. Bitterness is noticed only once every other flavour has faded, which makes it the recluse among flavours, like chrysanthemums in late autumn or plum blossom in winter snow. Salt dissolves on the tongue faster than anything and registers the moment it enters the mouth. It looks utterly ordinary. But the strange part is that salt taken to its extreme turns into bitterness, so the most ordinary things often hold the least ordinary inside them.

The officer envied Mr Zeng. He was good at knife work and trapped by knife work, he would sigh, and being a knife hand was all his life would amount to. He often said, three years for the knife, five for the fire, a whole life for the eating.

Three years will shape a knife hand. Five years of heat and timing will make a cook fit to leave his master. But eating takes a lifetime to understand, and you must have eaten some genuinely good food before you can be a head chef, just as an antiques appraiser only gains an eye after seeing real pieces.

So when he raised his son he taught him calligraphy without pushing him to practise, taught him chess without urging him up the ranks, and passed on his cooking without letting him take a master. Each stopped at an introduction, enough to know a little. At the end he gave the boy a piece of calligraphy: the gentleman is not a vessel, a line from the Analects meaning he is not a tool made for one use.

That is the end of the story. Now let me talk freely for a while.

People are sometimes trapped by what they are good at. Being a vessel or not is a deep question. Over these ten years I have sometimes been a vessel, used by others, and sometimes not, clear about how to be a person. Only after knocking about between the two did I see that there is no settled answer. Each holds the other inside it, like water with no fixed shape and wind with no fixed direction.

I told that story in order to share what follows.

1. If you really mean to make a life in esports, especially behind the scenes, do not sink into one game. Many of my colleagues over the past ten-odd years have left the industry. All loved esports deeply, and all loved one particular game too much. Every esports discipline has a life cycle. Once the golden age passes, holding fast to what you love is, on a small scale, loving what you love. On a larger scale those people are pushed to the margins along with the discipline. The ones who left may well have gone on to better things, but their dream started a new chapter elsewhere.

Many of the veterans still in the scene understand games without being outstanding at them. Pei Le, known as KinG, Zax and Sky all started in the StarCraft era and came through Counter-Strike, Warcraft III and Dota to League of Legends. They all play, and KinG plays football and NBA games too. But KinG has never sunk deep into any one game, and that is why WE, and its predecessors lion and YollinY, have not declined with any single game over these ten-odd years.

That is what it means to love esports as a whole, and many people may not understand it. Plenty still reject the move of esports onto online games. Counter-Strike players look down on CrossFire players, Dota players on League of Legends players, and once StarCraft players looked down on Warcraft III players. It happens every time an old discipline gives way to a new one, and all the while everyone loses sight of esports itself rolling forward.

Every changeover has made esports more open and more mature. In these ten-odd years the teams alone have gone from pure entertainment to incorporated clubs, and competitions have moved out of small internet cafés into concert-sized venues. Esports is moving forward, and it needs people to look at the banquet from the head chef's position rather than be trapped in the knife work.

Some will say they are happy doing the knife work, and there is nothing wrong with that. In an esports team one person plays, one manages, one works in media, one runs marketing. Every trade has its specialism and everyone's tastes differ. That is all.

1. If you want to be a head chef, read on.

First, you have to bear solitude, and you have to mind your image.

The uproar at a tournament some time ago, where a male caster forced his attentions on a young woman, is an example of what not to do. Some of this disorder goes back to the StarCraft era. In the Counter-Strike era CCTV exposed a naked webcam chat case. The Warcraft III era had its share too, and the scene had merely matured enough to know how to protect privacy. So no circle is better than another. The messiness of a world built on fame and money is no excuse for breaking the ethics of your industry.

Controlling your appetites and your temper is a form of respect for others. A few mistakes when you are young do not matter, as long as you learn to rein yourself in.

Second, say more and do more. Someone will ask, isn't the saying say less and do more?

No. These days, if you do not speak, others may never know. Do not fear getting something wrong, because it can be fixed, and you need to speak well too. But you cannot only speak and never act, because those who only speak mostly never improve.

Third, ask when you do not know. Plenty of people arrive with excellent resources and neither ask questions nor look for partners. They insist on spending their way to the same thing everyone else already has. Resources are wasted, prices are driven up, and after a year of flailing without grasping the point they pull out, having made themselves the dishwasher scrubbing suds in the kitchen. Those who know you say you meant well and made a mess of it. Those who do not say you were laundering money. It is not worth the cost.

Finally, an esports person has to think about every problem from the standpoint of the industry. Learn to set your own tastes aside when you look at new esports trends and strategic moves, instead of treating yourself as only a CSer, a Dotaer or a LOLer. The questions are these. What will esports look like in three years, five, even ten? What has to be done now? Which forces have to be brought together to push the whole industry towards standards and growth?

By then you lead a team or even an industry. It is like reaching head chef, where cutting and cooking are no longer your job. You think about running the whole restaurant, developing the customer market and tracking service quality, and selecting and training your team. You even have to get out regularly, to other restaurants or another industry, and learn different ways of thinking about operations and management. That is an esports person, not only a player.

Of course, everyone lives their own way and chooses their own road. It is only that if you are in this industry with no idea where you are going, ask yourself first. Dishwasher, knife hand, head chef, which one do you want to be?

One last note. The story of the knife hand and the head chef comes from The Ninth Flavour, by Professor Xu Guoneng of National Taiwan Normal University. It has benefited me enormously in this life, and I record my thanks here.