Today we’d like to introduce you to Fuzhou Sisters.
Hi Fuzhou, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
As childhood friends, we grew up together in Fuzhou, China, surrounded by the flavors, traditions, and stories that shaped us. Our connection to this culture runs deep. After reuniting in New York City in 2023, we founded Fuzhou Sisters as a way to share it with the world.
Growing up, Qinghong rice wine was something intimate and familiar—tied to home, family, and memory. But we realized that outside of our community, it was almost invisible. That absence made us want to share it more widely, to bring it into new contexts and conversations. We began hosting tastings, collaborating with artists and cultural institutions, and creating spaces where people could encounter Fuzhounese culture in new ways.
For us, Qinghong is not just a drink. It’s a medium. It carries history, migration, labor, and care. It’s alive, constantly fermenting and changing—just like identity.
Today, Fuzhou Sisters exists at the intersection of art, fermentation, and community. We curate experiences that bring people together through taste and storytelling, working with partners like cultural organizations, galleries, and community spaces.
What began as a way to hold onto where we come from has become a way to build something new—a shared language that moves between places, people, and stories.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
One of the earliest challenges for Fuzhou Sisters has been around identity, how we see ourselves, and how we are seen. As Fuzhounese immigrants, we come from a community that has long been overlooked, misunderstood, and often flattened into broader narratives of “Chinese” identity. There’s a history of migration shaped by labor, survival, and tight-knit networks, but also by stigma and invisibility.
In many ways, Fuzhou Sisters began as a response to that—to create space for a more precise, self-defined narrative. Not just to be included, but to be understood on our own terms. With Qinghong, the challenges take a different but related form.
One of the biggest has been working with something that exists in between categories. Qinghong isn’t widely recognized in the U.S., so we’re constantly navigating how to position it—is it wine, fermentation, cultural heritage, or art? In reality, it’s all of these at once, but that also means there’s no clear path to follow.
There are also practical challenges. As a naturally fermented product, Qinghong is alive and sensitive—it responds to temperature, time, and movement. On top of that, navigating regulations and licensing in the U.S. has been complex, especially for something that doesn’t neatly fit into existing systems.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about Fuzhou Sisters?
Fuzhou Sisters is a women-owned brand creating cultural experiences centered around Qinghong, a traditional Fuzhounese rice wine, as an entry point into Fuzhou culture.
At the core of our work is Qinghong—a fermented drink made with red yeast rice—but what we do extends far beyond the beverage itself. We use it as a starting point to create experiences that bring people into contact with culture through the senses.
We specialize in creating immersive, story-driven tasting experiences. Our events often blend food, drink, and art, and are designed to feel intimate, interactive, and layered. Whether it’s a guided tasting at a cultural institution, a pop-up in a community space, or a collaborative performance, we think of each event as a living environment rather than a static presentation.
What sets us apart is that we don’t separate product from context. For us, the drink, the story, the space, and the people are all part of the same work.
Qinghong itself is also unique—it’s naturally fermented, slightly effervescent, and constantly evolving. Its flavor sits somewhere between natural wine and kombucha, which makes it both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. That in-between quality reflects the diasporic experience we come from.
Brand-wise, what we’re most proud of is the world we’re building around it. From our visual language to our events to our collaborations, everything is intentional. We’re not just introducing a product—we’re introducing a cultural perspective that hasn’t had much visibility before.
We want people to know that Fuzhou Sisters is about connection. Connection to origin, to memory, to each other.
And ultimately, we hope what we’re creating feels like an entry point—into a culture, into a story, and maybe even into a different way of experiencing something as simple as a drink.
Can you talk to us about how you think about risk?
We don’t necessarily think of ourselves as risk-takers in a traditional sense—but what we’re doing involves stepping into the unknown almost every day.
Starting Fuzhou Sisters meant working with something that didn’t have a clear category, a clear market, or even a clear path forward. Qinghong is not widely recognized here, and there’s no blueprint for how to build something like this in the U.S. So in many ways, choosing to do it at all was a risk.
But our relationship to risk is less about taking big leaps and more about staying in motion.
We follow curiosity. We test things in small, iterative ways—through events, collaborations, and conversations—and let things grow organically. Each step informs the next. In that sense, risk becomes something distributed over time, rather than a single high-stakes moment.
At the same time, there is a deeper kind of risk that feels more personal—choosing to center a culture that has often been overlooked, and to present it in a way that is both honest and contemporary. That requires vulnerability and a willingness to be seen.
For us, the bigger risk would be not doing it at all.
So we move forward, not because everything is certain, but because it feels necessary.
Pricing:
- retail: $30/bottle (500ml)
Contact Info:
- Website: https://fuzhousisters.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fuzhousisters/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/fuzhou-sisters
