or: “No, it’s fine, I just — I just didn’t think it would be Chinese, that’s all.”
I am frequently loath to admit that I, a degree-having, truth-enjoying human being, spend time on TikTok. It’s unfair of me to criticize the app entirely, of course. There are a few creators whom I generally find to be both informative and entertaining (and who usually can be found on other platforms as well). All the same, there are few pastimes of mine that are less shameful than admitting to myself I regularly subject my brain to the incredible attention span-destroying-power of that damn phone.
As of writing this post, I have averaged about 90 minutes daily on that app. That means I routinely disregard the one-hour built-in limit and continue browsing guiltily for another half hour. Yikes.)
I deleted the app once, you know? Sometime in 2022, I read some absolutely mind-bogglingly daft comment, and was so fed up with it I removed it from my phone. But now I’m back in, maintaining a streak just like I did in middle school with Snapchat, and my quality of life has suffered. The kinds of comments that would have triggered a break from social media for me are more common than ever, and yet I remain. I often ask myself why. I don’t have a great answer, as you’ll find is the case for most questions I ask.
One thing I can pick out is that by tracing what TikToks go viral, I’ve developed the barest amateurish hints of an impression of how Chinese culture is represented in the United States. I’d like to put my thoughts about this down somewhere; a little bullfrog croaking out a poem about the sky through the top of the well. Narrow though it might be, it’s mine.
Disclaimer: I’m no anthropologist, so I won’t make any gestures toward any scientific approaches; this is purely anecdotal. I also won’t make any overtures towards representing “the West” in its entirety, as weird and fiddly as that giant umbrella tends to be anyways. I’m just as Asian as I am American, which is to say not really at all and also very much so at the same time.
My “for you page” (in TikTok parlance, “fyp” — look ma, I’m hip!) is pretty weird at this point just by virtue of what the capital A Algorithm has decided I’m into (mostly cats, politics, and animations, which is pretty spot on), so I can only tell when something’s truly blown up when a friend finds it reposted on yet another social media site and forwards it my way. I don’t know if it’s just that I happen to be their token Chinese friend or that I’ve expressed interest in this kind of stuff before, but the latest example is this video, about a pair of magical glasses, which I’ll embed below (mind the trackers!):
@eric.realm ♬ original sound – eric.realm
This one made me laugh, to be honest with you. I’ll unpack it more later on.
Also recently, I came across a video of an Asian woman defending herself against white tears (context video here). Quick summary if you don’t care to watch several minutes worth of drama to unpack this: A white teen was complaining about Chinese Americans reading white cosplayers using huadian (花钿) as cultural appropriation, and in the course of doing so casually implied that the Chinese Americans complaining about this were whitewashed. The implication of course being that “real” Chinese people don’t care, and Chinese Americans, being “whitewashed,” are somehow less entitled to caring about it.
Of course, this is a stupid premise which deserves to be clowned upon thoroughly and rejected outright. The issue of cultural appropriation being a non-motherland issue is a whole subject worth touching on later, but the crux of it is that diaspora — especially in the US — have historically been discriminated against and made to feel unsafe when engaging with cultural practice, while nobody really minds in the homeland. Their opinions differ as a result of this history, and none is less valid or more real for it.
Clearly, the woke Chinese mind virus lives on in the impressionable USAmerican youth. That is, Chinese TikToks (culture, casual joke, etc.) are everywhere, and I can’t get this thought out of my head that even though it’s a mix of cosplay racism and lackadaisical skits, it has to reflect our current cultural reality somehow. So I want to trace that interplay — between American and Chinese cultural influence — and see if I can string anything coherent together.
So, let’s start at the beginning. And like a good American, I’m going to talk about immigration. Oh joy!
Disclaimer: This is all pretty loose research, based off of my recollection refreshed by a few quick searches. Take it all with a heavy grain of “I need to do my own research.” It’s fairly accurate, to my knowledge. But it’s my blog and I can be as unsubstantiated and biased as I want! Hmph!
A Quick Primer in Chinese American Relations Over Time
The First Wave of Immigration: Riches, Rails, and Reeducation (mid-to-late 19th century)
The discovery of gold on the western coast of the continental United States was a great, big glowing arrow hung over Californian!Damocles’s head, and on that neon sign it read “COME AND GET IT!” The relatively few merchants who had already migrated to the area were soon joined by many from the south of Qing dynasty China, eager for work.
Or perhaps they were more eager for the money they could send home to their families, use to better their lives, etc. It was a rare individual who yearns for the mines purely for the sake of the mines. Minecraft wasn’t around back then, after all.
Soon, threatened by the sheer volume of new labor, the surrounding white communities enforced the ethnic-enclave-forming tendencies of new immigrants with exclusionary laws (see: the Anti-Coolie Act) really doubling down on segregation as an All-American Thing™. It was a real “You stay in your Chinatown, we’ll stay in our Whitesville! And we also hate mixed couples! And we’re gonna tax you really hard!” kind of time. Lucky for them, these Chinese folks were used to living under the thumb of an emperor, so it wasn’t super different [written with oodles of sarcasm].
Now, maintaining racist systems (and I guess mining for gold too, whatever) isn’t easy, and all the products necessary for such work had to come from the more-developed eastern cities of the US. So some clever cookies in the government and in industry got together and drafted up a plan for the (first) Transcontinental Railroad (which actually only went halfway across the continent). And what do you know, the hard and dirty work of laying track was beneath most white laborers, and so it went to the people of color. Americans benefiting from cheap migrant labor, a story as old as time.
These are all fairly-well-known stories about Chinese folks in the US. A little less widely known, perhaps, is the tale of the Chinese Educational Mission, a well-intentioned effort by reformers within the ranks of Qing dynasty officials to send a few select boys somewhere other than Jupiter (to get less stupider, hopefully). While those dastardly, scheming officials [more sarcasm.] hoped they would maintain their innate Chineseness of culture and reap the rewards of the relatively-better-funded American education system, many of them “went native,” cutting off their braids that were common fashion for Qing dynasty men at the time and going to — pretend I’m clutching my pearls! — church with their host families.
There were only 120 primary-education aged boys sent overseas, and they arrived on the east coast, so the aforementioned events are fairly separate; but I think the cultural impact is noteworthy. The idea that American culture has this ability — to absorb and assimilate the Chinese government’s best, hand-picked youths — is one that has some proper staying power throughout the lifetime of the US. It’s part of why the pervasive myth of the “melting pot” is (was, now) so potent; we Americans love to believe we’re a kiln. We take in your weary, your wounded, and your unrefined, and we turn them into pristine Americans, with none of the slag. If you can’t remove them, make them indistinguishable from you!
They ended up banning Chinese immigration for ten years, which was later on renewed and made permanent anyways. Go figure.
The Second and Third Waves of Immigration: Warmer Seas, Cold Wars, and Lukewarm Todays (mid-20th century to today)
The Chinese Exclusion Act held strong for about half a century. During this time, the Qing dynasty was overthrown in the Xinhai Revolution in 1911, and the freshly-revolutionized Republic of China (ROC) began to lay the groundwork for infrastructure building and education of the masses. Given a few decades (and the advent of World War 2, the great uniter of nations, praise be, et cetera), the ROC and the US were tighter than ever, and this act was passed in efforts to improve those relations (although Chinese immigrants were ostensibly allowed in now, it remained the case that racial dynamics disadvantaged them heavily. There’s a reason mall restaurants and laundromats became stereotypical Chinese family businesses.)
But with the growth of the Red Scare in the post-WWII era, following the rise of the PRC after the Chinese civil war and further development of the Cold War elsewhere, there were efforts made to naturalize Chinese national students to prevent them from going home with all their scheming stolen Western knowledge, a fear the current administration is still terrified of. We don’t want to benefit from the brain drain of Chinese talent too much; the idea that they could return and produce a brain gain for China is too terrifying, after all!
Even as this yellow peril swept the nation, there was still a widespread misconception that China was still the “sick man of Asia,” an impoverished and self-ruinous nation, best demonstrated in the casual racism of this ad for Jell-O, of all things.
This is a common issue when it comes to most racial or otherwise minoritized identities in the US. Othering comes in (broadly) two flavors: exotic and dangerous, or weak and victimized; and the worst part is both are often performed simultaneously. The Chinese man is both a leech capable of taking good, hard-working jobs away from true Americans; and also an emasculated being possessing zero sexual appeal. Women are both seductresses, luring good men away from righteous paths; and also frail things, deserving of protection. And so on it goes.
Contemporary immigration is mostly relative-based; that is, people are not coming over on work visas or the like anymore. They’re getting green cards to move and be closer with family. This process, speaking from experience, usually takes about 12-15 years. Imagine uprooting your whole life to move somewhere a decade in the future. Hard to plan for that… especially in today’s climate.
COVID-19. (2019-ongoing)
That, hopefully, will bring us to the modern day. As you can see, the US has had a rocky relationship with Chinese folks basically from day one. And you know what didn’t help that, like, at all? A global pandemic with an origin in Wuhan, China, immediately inspiring the most unimaginative of conspiracy theorists and Sinophobic rhetoric from the administration of the US, driving a marked increase in anti-Asian hate crimes, ranging from streetside stabbings to spa shootings.
The US never fully recovered from this. We already viewed China as a threat, with its rapid economic rise founded on its status as a manufacturing powerhouse, and already engaged in a few ill-advised trade wars. But the economy is a vague thing, to be gestured at by theorists, and only to be invoked on your average voter when 1) gas prices are high or 2) eggs cost too much; it’s harder to incite hatred in the autoworker who’s lost her job by blaming Chinese factories than it is to incite hatred in that same person when they’re stuck at home all day because of a virus. Another bullet loaded into the gun of identity politicking.
I mean, honestly, this anti-Chinese sentiment is one of many, many symptoms of a deeply ill society, with its embrace of fascism, but if I were to talk at length about how the country’s rejected any semblance of racial equity and reparations we’d be here forever.
When I had just turned double digits, my dad told me about a Jimmy Kimmel clip that had caused some protests. In it, Kimmel asked a bunch of kids what the US should do about the debt the US owed to China, and one of them suggested “killing everyone in China,” to which Kimmel responded “interesting!”
Nothing really came of that conversation. I told him I thought he maybe shouldn’t have said that. My dad agreed. That’s about all I heard about Sinophobia, at least until I’d grown up some more, and I got a concerned text message asking if I was doing okay after hearing the news on that March 16th of 2021.
That was the first I’d heard of the shooting.
It should come as no surprise, then, that I tend to be rather uninformed when it comes to… pretty much everything. So believe me when I tell you I had to work to wrap my head around this TikTok stuff.
TikTok
It is in this particular tense climate that TikTok persists, the blood of the Vine which it consumed drying on its slavering jaws. TikTok is not a Chinese company, but it is one with culturally Chinese origins, if that makes sense. Of course, as we all know, the CEO is famously Singaporean; I don’t want to perpetuate the myth that it’s some kind of Chinese data-stealing operation. It’s just a regular data-stealing operation.
Insert obligatory joke about how of course a Chinese company bootlegged an American app. Nothing more Chinese than that.
Yes, its parent company, ByteDance, is China-based. No, they aren’t harvesting users’ data any more than Google is. But that cultural association with their “golden” version of the app — Douyin (抖音), the mainland Chinese version — was enough for the Second Coming of the Red Scare heralds in Congress to levy a ban on it (by the way, one of the worst bills I’ve ever read). This drove many of the users into a frenzy, preparing other social media platforms to jump ship to in case the worst happened.
In a cowardly move that will go down in the annals of brown-nosing legend, TikTok voluntarily took itself down the day before the ban was set to be enforced by the newly-elected Trump administration; in mere hours, an executive order was issued extending the deadline on the ban, and the following message was displayed to all users upon logging back into the app.
[Image text: Welcome back! Thanks for your patience and support. As a result of President Trump’s efforts, TikTok is back in the U.S.! You can continue to create, share, and discover all the things you love on TikTok.]
This happened in time to mitigate, but not completely reverse, the mass emigration of TikTok users. In a truly astounding show of USAmerican stubbornness, many of them jumped ship to Rednote (小红书), a much more explicitly-Chinese app, and engaged in a spite-fueled cultural exchange with many of the bewildered Chinese nationals on the app. I would compare it to a blend between Instagram and Pinterest, if that helps you visualize it.
This, to me, is indicative of the fact that some USAmericans are in fact open to Chinese culture, especially the younger ones. This is great! I welcome this kind of cultural exchange with open arms. It would do Chinese nationals some good to learn about the reality of the US, as much as it would for US nationals to learn about the reality of China. Both sides are constantly inundated with propaganda from their governments and news media; it is a rare opportunity to tune into more authentic experience.
It is the form in which this openness manifests that conflicts me, however.
Does it bother me that these people only chose to engage with an outside culture upon being literally forced to log off their US-only app? Yes. Does it also bother me that much of this interaction is — staggeringly — openly founded upon fetishization and the flattening of Chinese culture? Yes.
I argue that when being Chinese is reduced to a punchline, as in the magical glasses video from earlier, these video creators are drawing from a decently-established online history of Chinese memeification, a long tradition of othering. If Chinese, then funny. Social credit memes. That one bald dude who sings that classic song. Uncle Roger’s cooking videos. White boy SHOCKS Chinese man by speaking perfect Chinese. Those strange, strange videos where white queers are on TikTok asking Chinese lesbians to be their mommies. Slow down, girl! You can’t even differentiate between the tones in Chinese yet!
It, to me, is yet another manifestation of the same dynamics at play when those “passport bros” prey on other cultures. Do they appreciate those other cultures? Yeah. Is it in a good way? Eeeeehhhh……
All being said, this is a step up from before; it’s certainly a kind of acceptance. These random jokes that lean into Chinese culture are probably a net positive. The Sinosphere is bigger, now, more voluminous, and perhaps more curious folks will be brought into the fold.
I will still laugh and enjoy these things as they come my way. I am glad for them. I will just do so mildly uncomfortably. But that’s how we, waist-deep in the river between two worlds, do most things. So it shall be.