It’s Sunday afternoon at Seng Seafood Restaurant, a second-floor dim sum spot on East Broadway. Groups are gathered by the stairwell, waiting for their tables, which are currently filled with older friends and multi-generational families. Carts stacked with turnip cakes, steamed spare ribs, and custard buns roll by. Uncle Big Lau is here, too, and he’s ready to make some content.
The 81 year-old is wearing a thick green jade ring and a black tang suit shirt with a golden dragon and horse on either side. He rests his dragon-head cane against the wall as he records a bit of B-roll. Despite the crowd, Lau is immediately given a prime table; the restaurant is busy, in part, because of Uncle Big Lau. Through his Cantonese-language, English-subtitled videos, he’s become a voice for Chinatown at a time when anxiety about the neighborhood’s erosion — through gentrification, chains, and shifts in Chinese immigration — and fears over the demise of Cantonese are both running high.
“Three months ago?” he says, looking around the restaurant. “No line.” But to his followers, his word is worth its weight in cheong fun: “Uncle Lau is the only influencer I trust” is a typical comment left on his video. Another commenter writes, “He’s Chinatown’s only food critic I trust.” A friend of mine compares Lau’s reassuring presence to Mr. Rogers’s, while another calls him “the only influencer who matters.” John Zhang, the owner of Seng, knows that Lau’s stamp of approval is good for business: “More people — more, more more.”
A few minutes into our meal, Seng’s manager, Peter Chen, comes over with a special request. Would it be okay if his daughter, Annie, drops by to say hello? She happens to be at a restaurant nearby. “I don’t see a lot of older Chinese people on my TikTok feed talking about Chinatown and NYC,” she tells me when she arrives. “Part of it is that he reminded me of my grandparents — the spots he was recommending and talking about were a lot of the spots that I went to growing up. It’s nice to see a different perspective.”
Throughout our lunch — a mix of favorites like pea shoots with oyster sauce, rice rolls wrapped around Chinese crullers, and shrimp-stuffed tofu skin coated in sesame — he gets up multiple times to take photos: with the server, the manager, the owner, me, and others. He always gives the thumbs up.
This afternoon, we’re joined by his daughter, Yin Lau, who is also his collaborator, producer, handler of sorts, and English interpreter as needed. She often joins him at restaurants; she also edits his footage, adds the voice-over and subtitles, and manages his social-media accounts. Lau estimates that he records maybe 30 minutes to an hour for each video, and Yin gives him feedback on what he’s saying or lets him know when he needs to tweak the audio. Her son (who is also a YouTuber) helps with editing as well, making the entire Uncle Big Lau enterprise a family affair. It was not, however, planned. “It just happened,” Yin says.
Born and raised in Hong Kong, Shek Wong Lau moved to New York when he was 25, brought over on a family-sponsorship visa by his older sister and brother-in-law. When he arrived, he didn’t speak English — “I didn’t have much education; I learned from my friends,” he says — which limited his job prospects to mostly restaurants. His years working as a busboy, server, manager, and restaurateur (among other industry roles) gave him plenty of insight and opinions, and the idea to get on TikTok in the first place came from time spent eating with his family. “Every time we would get together, he would always say, ‘This doesn’t have enough scallion, this should be more hot, this is not chewy enough,’” Yin recalls. “I mean, he would always tell me about this.” At the same time, Lau had seen the success of his nephew the TikTok–famous beatboxer Spencer X, and they started thinking, Why can’t he share this knowledge with more people? So in October 2022, he went into a Fay Da and began recording. “He just started — like he’s doing right now — making observations,” Yin says. “Like Seinfeld.”
He shot a follow-up video at the Flushing restaurant Emperor Seafood and established what one might consider his spirit of journalistic independence early in his influencer career, calling the dim sum at another Flushing restaurant, New Mulan, “so-so” and prompting one early fan to observe, “Uncle Lau keeping it real.”
In the years since, he’s shared dozens more videos, leaning on his familiarity with Chinatown’s businesses. One, “The Wong That Started the Wongs,” details the Ray’s Original Pizza–esque tale of Big Wong, whose employees fanned out to start other similarly named businesses. In others, he happily offers a heat check. “A long line? You got to be kidding,” he says about Mei Lah Wah, where the pork buns are too fatty for his taste. Other installments of the Uncle Big Lau show have seen him visiting a cousin in Forest Hills, getting takeout from Nan Xiang Xiao Long Bao, and dropping into Sunset Park’s E Noodle, where he orders wok-fried rice rolls and tells his followers to have tea poured over the last of their claypot rot to make a porridge. Occasionally, he ventures somewhere like the Ikea food court, but not all videos are food-focused. Some are about Lunar New Year, an older woman who plays her erhu on the street in Chinatown, where he gets his haircut, or visits to the doctor. Once, he posted a video from his hospital bed at Lenox Hill, giving a thumbs-up while explaining he’s having a blockage cleared up. He also critiqued the hospital food, which he generally found not as horrible as people say. “We weren’t planning to make a video,” Yin says. “I think he was just bored.”
As he’s gained followers, restaurateurs and business owners have reached out to collaborate. He turns down the offers: “If I make a video, I tell the truth. I must be honest.” After he posted a video showing the contents of his fridge, the Hong Kong sauce company Lee Kum Kee contacted him about making content. “I don’t want to do it. If I take their money and sign the contract, I must say, ‘Everything is good!’” he explains. “I don’t want to do that.”
Social media rewards users who specialize in one type of finely tuned “content,” but Uncle Big Lau has the instincts of a true poster, someone who won’t be reined in by an algorithm. Take one of his most charming videos, recorded last June after the wildfire smoke cleared. Dressed in loose white pants and a button-up with an impressionistic pattern, he gives a — yes — big thumbs-up while Sam Hui’s Cantopop song “Private Eyes” plays and the words “Grateful for Good Air Quality” scroll across the screen. Here is a man who is living.
Transforming into Uncle Big Lau has, he says, also given him a fresh perspective, after spending a portion of his 70s dwelling on past mistakes and missed opportunities. “Before doing these videos, my outlook on life was a little grim, because I didn’t really feel like I had any hope for the future,” he says. Yin (who calls him Lau Big Uncle, in keeping with the Chinese tradition of placing family name first) adds, “It’s not about money — it’s about being able to connect with young people.”
As Lau tells it, Yin saw something in him that would resonate with others in the Cantonese community. He had something worth saying, and people would trust him not in spite of but because of his age. “She came up with the idea,” Lau says. “I didn’t believe myself. I think it took a couple years.”
Through the lens of his restaurant reviews, he is able to talk about something important to his generation and community. “He’s using his interest in food as a way to talk about the Cantonese language,” Yin says. “He knows that the Cantonese language is slowly fading, it’s a dying language, and even Chinatown is kind of dying.”
Some 85 million people still speak Cantonese, but concern about its future have grown for years because of the Chinese Communist Party’s push for the adoption of Mandarin, including in local education. Its use has declined in Guangzhou to the point that one academic called it “already moribund” there, and even in Hong Kong, which had traditionally served as a stronghold, some say there’s been a noticeable shift as the CCP cracks down on the island’s independence. Cantonese was once the lingua franca of the Chinatowns of London, San Francisco, and New York, but it has been supplanted by Mandarin. (In 2009, the New York Times reported that Cantonese “is being rapidly swept aside,” a change that’s “been accelerated by Chinese-American parents” who want their kids to learn Mandarin because of its economic advantages.) Anxieties over the changes led to the creation of independent schools and groups aimed at preservation like Chinatown Cantonese Toisan, which Yin describes as a weekly meetup for people to just hear the language. The Uncle Big Lau videos serve a similar purpose: “A lot of Cantonese — younger people — want to hear him speak because that’s one of the ways that they can preserve or keep the language. It can be a connection to their old family or food,” she says. In response to one video, a follower commented, “My dad passed away several years ago, so listening to uncle talk is comforting to me.”
Around 3 p.m., Seng has started to quiet down. Yin needs to head home to Queens, but Lau wants to make a stop at Chiu Hong, one of Chinatown’s last remaining Cantonese bakeries. “This place has no air conditioning,” he says. “It’s just a fan, old style. You see outside? It’s all old people.” He says he wants to walk over to get some of the peanut-stuffed mochi and to catch up with a few of his friends.
