Eat, Write, Love

A desire to learn Chinese led this journalist to China where she found a passion for food, a husband and a new place to call home

Crystyl Mo's chops as an authority on food is without doubt impressive.

Besides being a well-known food writer, the Shanghai-based American has appeared as a guest and host on television programs featuring cuisines from around the world.

Mo is also the academy chair for The World's 50 Best Restaurants for China and Korea, and the strategic advisor and equity partner at Bon App, a food and social networking app by a Shanghai startup.

This illustrious career in food, however, was one she accidentally fell into.

Her stumbling block? A desire to learn Chinese.

"I thought I was either going to work in the fields of medicine or psychology when I was in college, but I got waylaid by my 'China project'," quipped the 44-year-old.

"My decision to learn the language was rather random. Maybe it was because my mother is from Shanghai, but it certainly wasn't because of a burning desire to find my roots. I didn't grow up thinking I was Chinese. I felt 100 percent American. My mother left China when she was 5 and she speaks American English. We don't speak Chinese at home."

Mo started to learn Chinese in 1996 at Nanjing University in Nanjing, capital of East China's Jiangsu province. She also did a short stint at the John Hopkin's graduate program in the city before enrolling in the Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Learning the language, said Mo, ranked among the toughest challenges in her life. There were times when she felt deflated by the magnitude of the task.

"Studying Chinese from scratch as an adult is an awful experience. It's rewarding, but really hard," she laughed.

"I remember walking down the streets in Nanjing and seeing someone talk to his dog. I didn't understand what he was saying but the dog seemed like it could. I was thinking that the dog probably speaks more Chinese than I do!"

Her learning journey culminated at the Middlebury School in China, considered to be the gold standard in Chinese language teaching. Eager to utilize her newly acquired language skills, Mo found a position as a correspondent with Asia Week in Hong Kong which allowed her to travel extensively across China.

Some of the highlights of her time at Time Warner include rubbing shoulders with basketball legend Yao Ming and highly acclaimed Chinese film director Feng Xiaogang.

"I was with Feng Xiaogang on the day China won the bid to host the 2008 Olympics. He was driving his red BMW convertible. The entire city of Beijing was screaming. It was one of the most incredible days of my life," she recalled.

When Asia Week closed down in 2001, Mo moved to Shanghai the next year to work as a freelance writer. She regularly contributed to publications such as Conde Nast Traveler and Travel and Leisure, and this marked the beginning of her rise as a food expert.

"When you write about travel, you always write about food, and so I started to learn more about restaurants and chefs. This was when I realized that my past experience of being in the kitchen with my mother proved to be really valuable," said Mo.

"I had absorbed from her a lot of knowledge about things that were only just starting to become in vogue, such as farm-to-fork dining, fermentation, ancestral recipes, and cooking everything from scratch. My mother used to grind her own wheat to make bread. She also has an amazing organic garden."

The most significant moment of her adventure in Shanghai was also food-related. While working on a Conde Nast article in 2003, Mo met Anthony Zhao, who used to be the chef de partie at the now defunct Laris Restaurant at the Bund. Sparks flew, at least from Mo's end. It was love at first touch.

"I realized he had these big, meaty hands with burns on them. Mine are quite big too, and so we both held up our hands to compare. I felt a chemistry the moment we touched hands," laughed Mo, who married Zhao in 2005.

"I was pretty into him. I'm not afraid to say I chased him. In fact, I'm proud of it. I have an awesome husband!"

Even after taking on roles at Bon App and World's 50 Best Restaurants a few years ago, Mo still managed to find space on her plate to revisit her interest in psychology. The fastest way to getting a degree in the topic, she later found, was through an 18-month course at Columbia University in New York.

Reluctant to leave Shanghai, she decided to sign up for an online program by the Bulletproof Training Institute in 2016.

Currently the only certified Bulletproof Coach in China, Mo often conducts coaching sessions to help clients raise their levels of happiness and self-awareness and find meaning in their lives.

"After studying about positive psychology and the science of happiness, I've realized that life is about gratitude, forgiveness and having genuine communication with people around you — that is what makes life meaningful," she said.

In fact, the reason why Bon App has a social networking feature was largely shaped by the last aspect.

"I told the founder of Bon App that I would only join if the company is about connecting people and not just about food. I want the app to have more meaning than something used to find the best French fries in town," she said.

"I don't want to be involved in any more projects that are only about making profits. Anything that I'm doing has got to be meaningful…I love the idea of using food to bring people together. Food is a language that everyone speaks."

Besides looking to develop an online curriculum for her life coaching classes, Mo will also be traveling extensively this year as part of her job for The World's 50 Best Restaurants. Destinations include cities in Spain, Slovenia, Russia, France, Italy, South Korea, Japan and Macao.

But though she enjoys traveling around the world, Mo has not lost sight of the meaning of home.

"Home is where the heart is," she smiled.

"And right now it's in Shanghai."