The 31-year-old, who uses the pseudonym Chengzi, told Sanlian Lifeweek in a first-person account published last month that she pays for every meal she eats and every piece of clothing she buys with money she earned, while classmates her age still take help from their parents.

She charges $68 to $80 an hour for banquets and works seven days a week. Her clients are 99% Chinese or Chinese-American, and she takes jobs across all of greater Los Angeles County, with commutes running as long as two hours, she told Jiupai News.

Days before her graduation from the New York Film Academy, where she had studied four years of film production, her father called to say the family business had stopped operating, that he had kept her in school for two years while it was failing, and that he could no longer support her.

He offered to buy her a ticket home. She refused, telling him she wanted to see how far she could get on her own.

Within a day she sold her car, gave up her downtown Manhattan apartment, moved onto a mattress on a friend's living room floor, and started reselling the limited-edition sneakers she had once bought without checking prices.

Applications during the pandemic for script supervisor, art department and production work drew no replies at all, she told Sanlian Lifeweek, and the intermittent film jobs she found through classmates paid $500 a day that halved after tax.

A friend suggested live-in domestic work because it included room and board. The job turned out to be deep cleaning for $180 a day, which she said was half the market rate, and her employer once knocked at 2 a.m. to have her iron creases out of a bedsheet.

Inside those houses she found the opening. Los Angeles has the largest Chinese population on the U.S. West Coast, and a live-in nanny costs $8,000 to $10,000 a month before tax, she told Sanlian Lifeweek, putting one beyond dual-income households that can still stretch to two or three hours of cooking at $35 to $60 an hour.

She had cooked since primary school, making her own egg fried rice while her father was away on business and her mother worked. Years earlier she had asked to study cooking in Australia, and he refused, telling her that spending millions of yuan to become a cook was not respectable.

She flew back to China, booked one-on-one training at a culinary school and learned the 10 Sichuan and Cantonese dishes most in demand in the city's Chinese community, studying from morning to night for seven days.

Her first clients came from photographs of finished dishes posted on Chinese social platforms, and word of mouth carried it from there.

Chengzi presents a king crab platter. Photo courtesy of RedNote

The film training turned out to be the advantage. She brings four tripods and a fill light to jobs, sets three camera positions before she starts and moves between them while cooking, having storyboarded the shots in advance. Her first video took off and her client volume doubled.

Most cooks working the same market are in their 40s and 50s, she told Sanlian Lifeweek, and she started at 29. Families increasingly want someone young who is educated, easy to deal with and can cook well.

She is careful not to oversell what it pays. The 800,000 yuan ($118,700) annual figure circulating online is a marketing hook, she said, reflecting the going market rate for anyone willing to work her hours, and her take-home after tax is just over $5,000 a month.

The work is 9 hours a day across three households, closer to 12 with driving. Her longest day ran 14 hours across four homes and finished at 1:40 a.m., after which she slept 20 minutes in her car before driving home.

Her father still considers the work shameful. What she wants now is not a bigger house or a better car but time of her own, she told Sanlian Lifeweek, and the sense of achievement that comes from supporting herself is enough to carry her through the hardship and the exhaustion, because it lasts.