Grappling with pay cut, tech skills and isolation to pursue her passion for cooking

SINGAPORE – In the open kitchen that Ms Joyce Mak, 51, custom-built to pursue her dreams, a mirror next to the stove is partly covered by aluminium foil.

The 60cm by 30cm metallic sheet hides any reflection of the living room in her HDB flat, which ensures that the privacy of her family is respected, she says.

“There are only certain areas of my home that I’m comfortable showing on screen. This is a challenge many stay-at-home mums face: whether live streaming will affect the family and cause conflict,” says the live streamer and content creator, who goes live on TikTok when her husband and 20-year-old son are not at home.

Before the family moved into their current flat about three years ago, Ms Mak spent $25,000 renovating a kitchen for culinary content creation, a space fit for her aspirations to walk in the footsteps of iconic television chef Martin Yan.

Yan’s famous Yan Can Cook (1982 to present) show on Chinese cooking was first broadcast in the United States in 1982. The 77-year-old has since hosted more than 3,000 culinary and travel TV shows and written more than 30 cookbooks.

Ms Mak says: “I’ve watched Martin Yan since I was young. You can tell he’s passionate about food and respects it. My dream is to do likewise, where people will watch and learn from my cooking.”

She designed her kitchen with an island for food preparation, shelves for spices and plenty of storage space. There are cabinets, a built-in oven, a microwave oven and an air-fryer.

Besides selling products like Redchef ceramic cookware, she makes dinner for her family on her live streams, demonstrating their use and chatting to her audience. For instance, she may talk about how easy non-stick skillets are to wash or how many people one can cook for using a 28cm pan. She has more than 1,500 followers on TikTok.

Under her TherapeuticYou account on TikTok, where she uses @dowhatyoulike111 as a social media handle, she also sells items like skincare products and jewellery, live-streaming from her study.

She estimates that she spends about five hours working on weekdays, of which 90 per cent is devoted to live streaming at home, while the remaining 10 per cent is clocked at a vendor’s studio, where their goods are kept.

A leap of faith

Ms Mak started live streaming in January after her milestone 50th birthday in 2024 prompted her to reflect on her life.

With close to 30 years’ experience in sales in the banking and insurance sectors, she says: “I felt that as long as I worked for someone else, I could not optimise my strengths. Once I passed the age of 50, I asked myself, ‘Where have all my dreams gone?’ It was like a final call.”

She took a “leap of faith”, quitting her last corporate position as an insurance broker. She ran a home-based food business for a year before moving into content creation, then pivoting to live streaming.

She says: “I just started live streaming a few months ago. It’s quite stressful because I’m not that tech-savvy. I had to overcome my own mindset, that I was scared and could not do it. It was a big hurdle, but I had to keep up with the times and pick up new skill sets.”

Since the end of 2025, she has taken up short courses in TikTok and artificial intelligence training, and learnt to use CapCut, a popular video-editing tool. She is attending Zoom classes on weekday evenings for a professional diploma in digital marketing.

On weekdays, she starts work from almost the time she wakes at 7am, including planning what to cook for her live streams and mastering the product and marketing materials. She spaces out her live streams in two- or three-hour stints.

Saturday mornings are reserved for brunch with the family though she live-streams during the weekend when she can. In between her work, she fits in other tasks, whether it is doing high-intensity interval training workouts at home, running errands or managing the household.

“It can be demoralising sometimes when I think, ‘This is only how much I made’,” she says, without elaborating. She adds that she took a “70 per cent pay cut” from her time in corporate work.

Despite speaking online to between 900 and 2,400 viewers, some of whom raise questions and comments, she has had to reckon with a sense of isolation.

She says: “I’m getting very lonely. As a live streamer, you’re spending a lot of time alone. People can see you but you can’t see them.”