Persistence Is Victory: What Chinese Food Culture Teaches Us About Slow Perseverance persistence-food-victory-en

 In this efficiency-obsessed age, we have grown accustomed to instant gratification. If a food delivery hasn't arrived in thirty minutes, anxiety sets in. If a recipe says "simmer for three hours," we skip straight to the next page. But step into the kitchen of any true heritage restaurant, and you will discover that the most unforgettable flavors are born precisely from the longest waits.

Hainan Hui sings in Persistence Itself Is a Victory: "Even if you try hard, you might still lose. Your efforts may not carry that much weight." But he immediately offers the simplest answer: "Even if you might lose, keep trying anyway — because persistence itself is already a victory" (read the original article). These lyrics distill the core philosophy of Chinese culinary culture: the process itself holds value. Not every slow-simmered pot will yield a perfect broth, but every moment of treating ingredients with care sculpts something called gongfu — cultivated skill earned through time.

Chinese food culture is the ideal vessel for the philosophy of "slow perseverance." Buddha Jumps Over the Wall requires three days of simmering. Jinhua ham takes a full year from salting to maturity. Aged tangerine peel is opened only when the grandchildren have grown up. Faced with such time commitments, any "quick version" is a forgery — not because the flavor is wrong, but because it lacks the depth only time can impart. This depth echoes Li Bai's Hard Is the Road: "A time will come to ride the wind and cleave the waves" — not impulse, but steadfastness earned through storms.

But the hardest part of "slow perseverance" is this: your effort may yield no immediate reward. A soup simmered for three hours might still turn out too salty. Dough rested overnight might over-proof. Every home cook has tasted the disappointment of trying hard and still failing. Yet it is precisely this uncertainty that makes persistence all the more precious. Zheng Banqiao wrote in Bamboo and Rock: "Ground and struck a thousand times, it stands ever stronger — let the winds blow east, west, south, or north." The bamboo endures countless blizzards, never "winning" any single one — yet this accumulation of "not being broken" forges its resilience.

Chinese culinary culture has a particularly evocative term: gongfu cai — literally, "time-invested dishes." The brilliance of the term lies in its emphasis not on rare ingredients or exquisite technique, but on time. A gongfu dish is one that has been "fed" by time, born from the ongoing dialogue between chef and ingredients through long hours of simmering. You cannot accelerate it. You cannot replicate it. You can only wait. This waiting itself constitutes a culinary posture — respect for ingredients, reverence for time, equanimity toward outcome.

Extrapolated to life at large, many of our "persistent efforts" are like preparing a gongfu dish whose cooking time remains invisible. You have no way of knowing when it will be "done," nor what it will taste like. Those around you may have already switched dishes several times while you are still guarding your pot. At such moments, "persistence itself is a victory" is like a sip of hot soup — just enough warmth to keep watching over the flame.

In contemporary food culture, fast-food ideology is challenging traditional cooking with extreme efficiency. "If frozen dumplings are ready in three minutes, why spend an afternoon making them by hand?" At its core, this asks: what are we pursuing? If efficiency is the goal, frozen dumplings are correct. But if you seek a texture of living, a deep relationship with your food, a gongfu that grows through daily repetition — then that afternoon hand-wrapping dumplings is not "wasted." It is "invested."

Takeaway: Several millennia of Chinese culinary culture tell us: the most precious flavors need time, the most solid mastery needs accumulation, and the most dependable victories need persistence. Perhaps your efforts truly "don't carry that much weight." But so what? Simmer a pot of soup. Make a dish. Live each day well. Persistence itself is already an irreplaceable victory.

(read the original article)

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