comes out November 1 from Penguin Random House, and the family enjoys a loyal social-media following with many“When my parents moved to China, my sister and I didn’t have access to the food we had growing up,” Sarah says. “We enjoyed cooking, but didn’t know how to make some of the traditional Chinese dishes our parents prepared for us. A food blog felt like the right thing to start, and it always felt like we would do it together.
That said, remember that, just as you can’t change your non-blood coworkers, can’t change family either — nor should you try. “In our cookbook we say each personality carved in stone, and each more strong willed than the last,” says Kaitlin. “We’ve all collectively realized: This is just the way each other’s brain works, and you just try to work with that instead of against it.
“We can’t always talk about blog work at the dinner table. So we’d say, ‘Okay, it’s dinnertime, no more work.’ It can be really challenging, but you have to put that boundary in place and enforce it.” Other good ways to add structure to your work days include using shared calendars and to-do lists to minimize unnecessary confusion and encourage more productive conversations, and limiting work conversations to apps like Slack instead of over text.
While she says there have been “very challenging times” throughout the years and moments where she questioned whether the business was “worth all the stress on our interpersonal relationships,” she now feels that the business has changed the family for the better. “We’re a lot closer now,” Sarah says. They’re all even taking a vacation soon — “The Woks of Life corporate retreats,” Kaitlin says with a laugh.