You met me at the only Chinese time of my life

Do you drink hot water in the morning? Do you use a gua sha, or love a warm porridge for breakfast? Do you clasp your hands behind your back on a long walk? Are you into mahjong? Dim sum? Shoes off in the household? Avoiding cold foods? Then you just might be at a very Chinese time in your life.

If you’ve been online at all over the past couple of months, you may have seen a new trend crop up across your feed: being Chinese. I’m not exactly sure where this originated from, but all of a sudden, I started seeing videos of people drinking hot water in the mornings, learning how to cook Chinese food, avoiding cold drinks and foods, and partaking in historically traditional Chinese behavior. There has been a weird rise in Chinese content, this one man who teaches people how to say crude phrases in Chinese. Tsingtao beer has taken flight, and shoes inside the house are now unanimously sacrilegious. This appreciation for Chinese culture was warming at first, generous, even, until it wasn’t.  

bell hooks, in her essay Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance, states: “Cultural appropriation of the Other assuages feelings of deprivation and lack that assault the psyches of radical white youth who choose to be disloyal to western civilization. Concurrently, marginalized groups, deemed Other, who have been ignored, rendered invisible, can be seduced by the emphasis on Otherness, by its commodification, because it offers the promise of recognition and reconciliation.” 

At first, it was empowering for Asians, Asian Americans, the Asian diaspora, and especially Chinese Americans,  to see the mainstream, aka the white, American population, embrace Chinese food, our fashion, and our culture. But that does not automatically mean they see Asian people as inherently equal to them. In fact, this trend of “become Chinese” perpetually reinforces the foreigner stereotype, of being constantly seen as the Other. It goes hand in hand with the rise of Chinese hegemony and the widening cracks in the American political system. It’s no surprise that many of the people you see claiming the title of becoming Chinese are more left-leaning, disapproving of the current state of America, and what has ensued in the current presidency. It makes them feel less racist while partaking in the Orientalist fantasy because they are embracing new and diverse experiences. 

When it first became a trend, I thought to myself how wonderful it was to see the masses, especially a majority of white people, accepting and even partaking in Chinese culture. In the mess of social media trends and controversies, it was a beacon of positive light of recognition and community. But slowly, as time went on and it seemingly wasn’t just a trend anymore, the obsession with drinking hot water and people even learning Chinese, it still remained extremely surface-level. It was an empathetic approach at first, to be in our shoes, or at least eat our food and emulate our habits, could help someone understand the Other. But these practices have now been conflated with becoming that ethnic identity just because they are eating that culture’s food. The Chinese identity has been flattened by the commodification of our culture, through fun snack packs, or by incorporating Chinese fashion styles into mainstream clothing. Essentially, you can now buy your way into being Chinese because you shop at HMart or because you managed to get your hands on the coveted Adidas jacket.

The most frustrating part of this trend is that people take elements of Chinese culture, which by and large are great additions to anyone’s daily routine (hot water, walking, etc.), and then they make it into an identity. Or rather, the performance of identity. It completely ignores that being actually Chinese is a wholly different thing from just adopting elements of historically Chinese habits into your life. Being of Chinese descent, growing up in a Chinese household, comes with a whole other upbringing of language, culture, country, and tradition. These things vary between every individual who is Chinese, but at the end of the day, it’s not an experience that another person who is NOT Chinese can also have by simply following a TikTok trend, which will probably disappear in the next month of so. At this point, we’re not inviting people to join our culture. We have become a third-party viewer, watching people think they completely understand us while they parody our lives. People think that it’s a silly trend, that they’re embracing us into the fold, but all the while, we are still the Other, watching as people disguise a weird sinophobia as appreciation. 

And it’s not just Chinese people who have experienced this odd obsession with their culture. Korean people have long since endured this fascination with online behavior, with the rise of K-Pop, Korean food, and Korean media, like the popularity of K-Pop Demon Hunters. Some people may think I’m being “too woke” or thinking too critically about what is only a funny trend, as if just because everyone is now so into Asian culture, everything is “all better now”. I should be grateful for the acceptance of Chinese culture, and I should be so appreciative that so many people are now more aware of Asian traditions. But none of these trends or outside enthusiasm actually touches on the complicated social impacts of being the Other, especially in the current climate where being visibly different than the masses (white Americans) is a palpable danger. 

I met you at a very Chinese time in your life, but this “time” is extremely temporary. You drink your hot water in the morning, you gua sha your face, you take your shoes off before entering the house, but then you leave the comforts of your home, and you’re white again. You rave about hot pot and ramen, but you won’t pick up a packet of shrimp chips. You love seaweed and xiao long bao and going to Din Tai Fung, but you were the same person who turned your nose up at the lunch I brought from home in elementary school. 

I know that at the end of the day, most people’s intentions for joining the trend are not meant to be harmful. But, as it prolongs, it seems more like a way for people to spend and consume to prove their activism. When you take it at face value, it’s fun and not that serious. But when your culture plays a pivotal role in the success of other people’s videos, you begin to peel back the layers. These people aren’t taught to meaningfully engage and interrogate the systems they thrive in, so they approach it the only way they know how: exploitation and consumption. It’s not on Chinese people to teach people the social implications of what a “frivolous trend” might be. As much as they think they are accepting and embracing our culture, we will really never be anything but the Other.