I was six when I had the first chance to learn what patience means. My grandmother gave me a magic box as a birthday present, which neither of us knew would become a gift for life. I became obsessed with magic, and at 20, I became an amateur dove magician. This act of magic requires that I train my doves to sit and wait inside my clothing. As a young magician, I was always in a rush to make them appear, but my teacher told me the secret to the success of this magical act is to make my doves appear only after they've waited patiently in my tuxedo. It has to be a mindful kind of patience, the kind that took me some years to master. When life took me to Shanghai seven years ago, the mindful patience I learned became almost impossible to practice. In China, where everyone and everything is in a hurry, you need to outperform over 1.3 billion other people to build a better life. You hack the system, bend the rules, circumvent the boundaries. It is the same when it comes to food. Except that when it comes to food, impatience can have dire consequences.