“You met me at a very Chinese time in my life,” one text post reads on my Instagram feed. “I don’t even call it Chinese food, I just call it food now,” says another, “a glimpse into how Chinese my mind is becoming.” I don’t know if anyone else is getting these posts, but a good third of my explore pages has been dedicated to being Chinese. I’m honestly not sure how to describe this trend to someone unaware of it, because it’s almost nonsense, but let me try my best.
The vibe is casual. Each post is low-effort: a gradient coloured background, a front camera image, or a mundane, unstaged photograph, all paired with basic sans-serif white text. The messages are simple, declaring a transformation—“send this to a friend to instantly make them Chinese,” and another, “I heard it’s Chinese Thursday.” The humour comes from the idea that “becoming Chinese” is something that can happen instantly and passively, triggered through trivial things like bok choy and cigarettes, or simply by reading the meme itself.
This trend, a vibes-based identity, is part of the Gen Z oeuvre. It’s ironic and aesthetic at once, laughing at the absurdity of taste equaling ethnicity while knowingly reducing Chinese identity to cultural signifiers. This is part of a broader wave of “nationality contagion” posts I’ve seen across many identities and accounts; operating less as community expression and more as internet-speak humour.
Mostly harmless, and usually funny, the sheer volume that these memes appear on my timeline has me wondering: why Chinese culture, and why now? Is it just the persona of the season? We had “Tomato Girl Summer,” a romanticized Mediterranean chic; the “eclectic coastal grandpa” with all his enviable sweaters; and, who could forget, the soft and sensitive performative male. There’s never a shortage of micro-identities online that borrow cultural or ethnic aesthetics. Irony, it seems to me, cloaks as fetishization on the internet—these jokes aestheticize an entire culture under the guise of being “just a meme.”
In some ways, the visual shorthand of these “feelin chinese af rn” posts slip into a subtle fetishization—not sexual, per se, but a fetishization of Chineseness as an exotic aesthetic commodity. As creative all the posts are, oftentimes there’s an apparent colonial or orientalist tint. Some toe the line between humorous and questionable: “I think it’s cool that everyone is becoming Chinese but do you have it in you to hate the Japanese?” one post reads. The most concerning, though, was one post that read: “Every time I’m drunk and I look in a mirror I remember I’m Asian and that’s really hard for me to accept.”
Being Chinese is suddenly en vogue. I don’t have the answers as to why, exactly, but I personally think that it’s part of the wave of East Asian trends like boba, matcha, K-beauty, and the like, becoming more mainstream in Western society. China global digital presence continues to grow—hell, it’s TikTok’s motherland. But the bottom line here is the things that got me laughed at in elementary school are finally cool.
To better make sense of these memes, I looked to bell hooks’ theory of critical eating studies. hooks describes how dominant (white) culture turns the “other” into something exotic and consumable—something alluring, but never fully understood or possessed. She calls this the “seduction of difference,” the mix of desire, nostalgia, and fantasy that comes from looking at other cultures with an outsider point of view. While hooks was talking about film and advertising, the exact same thing occurs in memes, which renders culture into something bite-sized and scrollable; a kind of sampling that’s both pleasurable and distancing. hooks’ work remains relevant in our online world, where everything is about consuming, sharing, and then moving on, often without knowing what we’re really looking at.
These memes appeared at a moment when I was already navigating what felt like a “very Chinese time” in my own life. I’m half-Chinese, half-white (wasian, if you will), and while I didn’t necessarily reject my Chinese identity as a kid, I never really claimed it either. My mother expresses her regret that I never learned Cantonese. I have vivid memories of Chinese banquet dinners hosted by my grandmother where older relatives would gush over me, expressing affection in a language I couldn’t understand or reciprocate. I would sit there silently, picking at the cow intestines and chicken feet, and sipping hesitantly on shark-fin soup.
In middle school, I dreamt of being a makeup artist (like every other girl in the mid-2010s posting close-up eyeshadow pics on snapchat after school). It was in a summertime beauty course that I experienced what I only recognized years later as micro-aggressions. When we learned about false eyelash application, the teacher said that they “weren’t meant for me.” During the hair module, I was used as the model since I had “such beautiful asian hair,” and didn’t get to practice any techniques that day. At the time, I didn’t think of myself as particularly Chinese, but that experience made it clear that other people did.
Since then, I’ve thought a lot about what it means to me to feel authentically Chinese, especially now that the internet has made it into a meme aesthetic. Do these posts hold a mirror, or do they provide a caricature? And to be honest, I don’t really know how Chinese I feel. Maybe I like the trend because the surface-level it exists on is a level I can relate to. The ease in which I resonate with this trend makes me wonder if I am afraid of my Chineseness until it’s beneficial to me.
What makes me uneasy is how the trend collapses the cultural distance I’ve spent the better part of my life (and most of my university assignments) trying to understand. With Chineseness as a punchline, and anyone and everyone seemingly adopting it on my timeline, it becomes harder to tell what parts of my identity feel authentic and what parts feel performed. Do I like bok choy because it’s in my blood, or because it’s suddenly trendy? Will wearing a cheongsam ever not feel like a costume? My sense of self feels destabilized and conflated, not unlike the controversies that arise when clothing companies slap frog knots and mandarin collars on things willy-nilly, or making “oriental-inspired” shirts with nonsense text. I’m Ariana Grande’s hand tattoo that says barbeque instead of 7 rings.
My racial identity has always been an exercise in negotiating contradictions. Being wasian fits perfectly into Gen Z’s sensibility for the “in-between.” We love a situationship. We love creating increasingly intersectional identities for ourselves. Pride flags proliferate for things I’ll hear about once and never again. We’re quick to adopt things from other cultures because of the internet—one could say we’re global citizens. I’m sure we all know a white boy that says inshallah and habibi more than he probably should. Online, the most desirable identities are the ones that remain ambiguous, liminal and hard to pin down.
It makes sense, then, that wasian identity has become its own meme category. Maybe you’ve seen the t-shirt that says “GIRLS TRIP 2025 WASIA” (which I would unironically wear), and a couple fake news formats with reports like “Penn Announces Wasian Studies Major.” and a “Wasian Epidemic.” Again, I engage with these posts because they’re funny and they resonate with me. Growing up, one-third of my classmates were also wasian, so these posts makes me feel a sense of belonging and community.
Beneath all of recognition, the unease returns. The joy of representation lies a weird history. I think about miscegenation laws, the “Oxford study”—an online shorthand used to comment on interracial relationships—and the amount of times I’ve heard people talk about wanting beautiful, mixed-race children. Wasian people have long been idealized in both Eastern and Western media: the right amount of exotic, the right amount of palatable. In bell hooks’ terms, we exist at the intersection of desire and misrecognition. People don’t “see” you so much as the fantasies they’d like to consume. The appeal of Chineseness and these wasian memes function similarly, reducing identity to a few lines of text and images—aspirational, desirable, exotic, but familiar enough to feel safe.
Overall, I’m struggling to find a way to authentically connect to my own damn identity. As a mixed-race person, I occupy both sides of hooks’ equation at once: part of me is consumed by cultural fantasy, while another seeks cultural belonging through the very symbols that get aestheticized. These memes flatten culture into vibes, and sometimes I worry that my own connection to my heritage isn’t much deeper. And yet, I won’t reject the trend. It gives language—albeit completely ridiculous—to a feeling I’ve struggled to articulate and understand about myself. My enjoyment of them reflects my ambivalence and subsequent desire to belong to something I only partially understand. What I do know is that my identity won’t arrive instantaneously, the way the memes promise. The absurd exaggeration of Chinese identity that these memes portray only mirrors the ways I’ve tried to access my own heritage, exposing my reliance on stereotypical markers—yes, my hot condiment of choice will always be chili crisp. The orientalist undertones of these trends point to cultural sampling at work, but their appeal exposes my own longing.
And this isn’t just about me, or even about being Chinese. It signifies something broader about how my generation relates to identity online. The internet makes culture portable, something to try on temporarily, like any other micro-aesthetic. The line between appreciation and appropriation blurs, and a desire to feel something real appears.
Being online has shaped our understanding of identity and the way we convey it to others. These Chinese memes aren’t just about culture—they’re about wanting something meaningful, nostalgic, and easy to name. Gen Z tries hard while pretending not to, making everything ironic so no one can be accused or caring too much. Saying “I feel so Chinese rn” isn’t really a claim to identity, it’s a gesture towards wanting one. I can’t say with certainty whether these memes are celebratory, parody, or projection. My relationship to my own Chineseness exists in that same in-between space: wanting, reaching, hesitating.
☆ Part III of The Tryhard Trilogy ☆
Read Part I: Is It Cool to Be Weird Yet? & Part II: Sprezzatura: The Origins of Performativity