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In the midsummer of 2026, I happened upon the “Baiwei Songru” website. On the screen, an old man’s face — calm, resolute. That was Master Chen Songru. Thirty-three years had passed since I last saw that face. It was as if fate had quietly planted a piece on the board deep in the years, and across three decades, across the gulf between the living and the dead, bound me once again to a Sichuan-cuisine giant I had never met.

In the winter of 1991, I put on a soldier’s uniform and came to Beijing from Neijiang, Sichuan. Master Chen Songru was from Ziyang, Sichuan — his ancestral home and mine lay in neighboring counties. In Beijing, we would have warmly called each other “hometown folk.” That year, I was still a green young man, full of wonder and awe at everything in this ancient capital.

One ordinary day in early 1993, a colleague at the Zhongnanhai service office mentioned in passing: “The head chef at the Sichuan Restaurant passed away — from Ziyang, Sichuan, named Chen Songru.” He joked, “About your height, too.” I paid it no mind at the time — Sichuan people are, after all, generally on the shorter side — and took it as idle chat over tea. Who could have known that the name Chen Songru would lie dormant like a seed in the soil of my life for thirty-three years, only to break through the earth today and grow into a towering tree of remembrance.

I. Kindred Roots in Poverty

I was born into a poor household, one of many siblings, raised amid hardship from an early age. This is what struck me most about my kinship with Master Chen Songru.

At twelve, he left home alone for Chengdu and apprenticed at the Taoletian restaurant¹; I, too, grew up struggling in the cracks of poverty. He sweated at the stove; I crawled through the training grounds. He rose to the summit of Sichuan cuisine through talent, wit, and diligence; I carried the years of military life on shoulders that were never especially strong. We both understood the weight behind the saying: “A poor man’s child takes charge of the household early.”

Master Chen Songru and I were fifty years apart in age, yet the underlying color of our fates was so alike. He wrote with a spatula for a pen; I wrote with a rifle for ink — each of us composing our own life on a different battlefield. He chose the stove; I chose the barracks. He blended a hundred flavors into the warmth of everyday life; I guarded the lights of ten thousand homes with my youth. Different paths, the same destination — we were each, in our own ordinary way, extraordinary.

II. The Same Sky, Looking Up and Being Looked Up To

From 1991 to 1993, I served as a soldier in Beijing. At that time, Master Chen Songru presided over the kitchen of the Sichuan Restaurant at No. 51 Xirongxian Alley — the state-guesthouse kitchen personally established by Premier Zhou Enlai.² Back then, I was just an ordinary soldier in the city of Beijing, while he was already a legendary figure celebrated as the “doyen of Chinese Sichuan cuisine” and a “national treasure chef.”³

We once breathed the same air under the same blue sky, walked the same city’s streets and alleys. Perhaps our paths crossed; perhaps our eyes met at some corner — and I never knew it. Back then, I looked up toward the direction where he stood, unaware of just what kind of giant stood there.

In those years as a soldier in Beijing, I was, like an outsider, utterly unaware of how close I truly was to this master — close enough to share the same breath, close enough for our fates to intertwine. I was simply too young then to recognize the mountain before me.

III. Thirty-Three Years Later, Ink and Paper Reunite

By 2026, I had long since left Beijing and returned to my hometown, where I had lived for many years. When I came across the “Baiwei Songru” website again, fate, unexpectedly, tied me to him once more. That offhand remark from a colleague thirty-three years ago now seems like a foreshadowing fate had written in advance. In 2026, I took up the pen as my blade and ink as my flame, engraving his legendary life onto paper. What a rare bond — and what an honor!

Standing here in 2026, I look back on that early spring of 1993. My colleague’s remark, in hindsight, feels like a quiet call from Master Chen’s spirit. He likely never knew that, during his years working as a chef in Beijing, a young man of roughly his own height once looked up at him under the same sky. And thirty-three years later, that young man has, through words, left his name, his flavors, and his spirit in this world forever.

Baiwei Songru — a hundred flavors, a life fully lived. The master is gone, but the kitchen fire burns on. In the name of Langtaosha — “waves washing the sand” — I sift through the drifting sands of time, so that the world may remember: within that vermilion-gated courtyard, there once lived an old man from Ziyang who, through a lifetime of kitchen fire, cooked up the flavor of an era.