A Libyan Foodie in Zhejiang Jinhua: Season 4 of “Crossing the Ocean to See Jinxi” Traces Homesickness

A Libyan foodie eats his way through Tangxi’s year-fermented cabbage and a four-generation “Ten Great Bowls” feast in Season 4.

JINHUA, ZHEJIANG PROVINCE, CHINA, November 5, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- The smell arrives before the jar is fully open. Inside is lan-song-cai: cabbage fermented for the better part of a year until the stalks collapse into an amber paste, pungent, sour and deeply savory. In Tangxi, a town about 40 minutes’ drive from downtown Jinhua in Zhejiang Province, people treat that paste as the key to their local cooking.

Murphy, a young Libyan who lives in China and cheerfully calls himself a chihuo — a foodie — came to Tangxi to eat it. His trip is the subject of the fourth season of “Crossing the Ocean to See Jinxi,” a documentary series produced by the Jinhua Development Zone that sends foreign residents of China into the district’s villages, kitchens and family dining rooms.

The season, titled “Homesickness at the Tip of the Chopsticks,” was released on YouTube on Oct. 28.

In autumn, farmers around Tangxi harvest a local cabbage called gaojiaobai, whose stalks can reach half a meter. The leaves are chopped, packed layer by layer into clay jars with salt, chili, ginger and garlic, then weighted down with stones. Air and bacteria do the rest. Over the months, the stalks soften into brine and the leaves melt into paste.

“This is even worse than the video,” Murphy says, leaning over a jar.

Cooked with soft tofu, the paste becomes lan-song-cai gun doufu, the dish that anchors the episode. Science offers a plain explanation for its pull: a long fermentation breaks the cabbage’s proteins into amino acids, which the tongue reads as umami. Some flavors demand courage to approach and only one bite to remember, Murphy says in the film.

If the jar is Tangxi’s craft, the table is its social order. Food culture here traces back more than 2,000 years to the ancient kingdom of Gumie, with later marks left by Hakka migrants from Fujian and Huizhou merchants from Anhui. At festivals and weddings, families lay out the “Ten Great Bowls”: white-cut chicken from a rooster at least 10 months old, cooked with no seasoning beyond firewood and time; small meatballs, whose round shape stands for reunion; white chili with pork; beef brisket with tofu sheets; eel stewed with cucumber; taro with green beans.

The last bowl to arrive is always lan-song-cai with tofu. Served to honored guests at the end of the meal, it is the highest courtesy Tangxi extends to a visitor.
The closing scene gathers four generations around one table, the eldest lifting chopsticks first.

“A pair of chopsticks teaches us patience. It teaches us gratitude,” Murphy says in the film. “And most of all, the humblest ingredients carry the deepest affection.”

The series, now in its fourth year, has followed an Egyptian narrator through the 10,000-year-old rice terraces of the Shangshan culture and a Ukrainian resident through Tangxi’s folk ceremonies. Each season is produced in Chinese and English and distributed internationally.

In the final scene, Murphy packs a pair of bamboo chopsticks for the flight home. “Some flavors travel across the ocean — not to be smelled, but to be understood,” he says. In Tangxi, that means one that reveres nature, cares for people and treasures what the land gives.

Watch “Crossing the Ocean to See Jinxi” Season 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8ZAw0oq004

TIM ZHANG
TIMWORKROOM

Watch “Crossing the Ocean to See Jinxi” Season 4