Eileen Gu and Chloe Kim are the darlings of the media right now, having swept the 2022 Winter Olympics with armfuls of gold medals. It’s already a big deal that they’re both Asian women. It’s an even bigger deal that they sound like this and this when they take the snow goggles off and open their mouths.
These women are not docile or polite. They’re outspoken, well-spoken, and dramatic, with big smiles on their faces.
But this isn’t even the most surprising thing! What’s surprising is this: if you look at Eileen’s Instagram, it’s full of her modeling gigs and clips of her being a badass in practice runs. She’s constantly decked out in high fashion and streetwear brands like Louis Vuitton and Nike, which have started trending toward louder colors, fabrics, and silhouettes.
This is more than just your typical Asian-American kid speaking out and up for what they want. This is Asian-Americans becoming cool.
We’ve been cool before — they were called ABGs (Asian Baby Girls) in high school and college, girls who wore lots of eyeliner, consumed incredible amounts of boba but always managed to stay skinny, and who practically lived at raves. (Thank you to Alex Hao for reminding me about ABGs lol). I can’t tell you how many girls I knew who were studious and meek in high school, and transformed, seemingly overnight, into this party-hard persona in college.
But a new kind of cool Asian is emerging. Let’s look at the entertainment industry, where it’s even more pronounced. Audrey Nuna and Rei Ami are just two singers/rappers who’ve burst onto the scene in the last few years. In Rei Ami’s most popular song, she says over and over again, “I am not your queen, I’m your dictator.” She’s not nice. Her lyrics are not nice.
Audrey Nuna’s lyrics are slightly less aggressive, but her persona is just as provocative — her top two songs are named “Comic Sans” and “Damn Right.” This is how a recent interview describes her: “Her self described aesthetic is ‘visual vomit’— a phrase that complements her unapologetic, unfiltered sound” (source). Both musicians dress like the Gen Z’ers they are, chaotically and unapologetically¹:
These are carefully crafted public personas, and they’re sending a clear message of power and dominance.
But let’s listen to the rest of Ami’s “Dictator.” Halfway through, the song pivots: “Cold, why you gotta treat me so cold? / You say you love me but I don't know, don't know / I've been feeling stressed out, head is all ruined.”
This isn’t the dominating dictator from the first half of the song. This is a softer, more vulnerable personality — and she owns both of them. (If you listen to the rest of Ami’s discography, she returns to this pivot in almost every song. She’s clearly interested in this idea of embodying multiple personalities.)
Audrey Nuna is too: she claims this duality in her art is a projection of her Asian-American identity:
“So many different sounds make up this project because I’m always like, ‘How can I have everything?’. I’m just a greedy bitch!...Though, subconsciously, I think I have always had this interest in weird combinations. I love mixing fat 808s with beautiful chords; I’ve always had this focus on trying to be more than one thing at a time.It stems from growing up, where I knew what it was like to walk this tightrope between two different worlds,” she continues. “At school, everyone spoke English, there was no diversity. Meanwhile, I’d go home to a culturally rich environment, so I felt like I could access and manoeuvre both areas so well.” (source)
No one owns this duality more confidently than my favorite Asian-American cool girl: Broadway ingenue Eva Noblezada. Just look at her trajectory: when she first started out in the classic musical Miss Saigon, she was plucked out of her senior year of high school to play the bright-eyed lead role (originated by the GOAT Lea Salonga), a Vietnamese woman who is “rescued” by an American GI during the Vietnam War, then abandoned by that same man and left to starve. After establishing herself as a powerhouse in that role, Noblezada became even more famous as the tough Eurydice in the hit musical Hadestown. Through her explosive rise, her personality seems to have changed along with the roles she’s played. Compare her behavior in her backstage vlogs:
The shift from cute and soft-spoken to chaotic, sardonic, and sometimes unhinged, is hard to miss. But within all this dgaf attitude, Noblezada does care. In fact, she has an anxiety attack in the middle of one of her shows, then films herself recovering during this incredibly vulnerable moment as part of the vlog, using it to remind folks that mental health and self-care is important to talk about publicly and address.
So here’s the final layer of the “cool” definition we’re starting to produce. These women aren’t just strong and outspoken. They’re in touch with their emotions too, and aren’t afraid of embracing all the parts of themselves. They’re allowed to dress in tight bodysuits, or in baggy snowboarding pants. Whatever they are in the moment is justified.
Multiplicity, or the ability to embrace multiple parts of our personalities, has been a trend for a while — in the little research I’ve done into race and gender studies, the idea that there’s no one “right” truth has become the dominant concept in the 21st century. For example, the “riot grrl” movement in the 1990’s was all about embracing femininity, where women wore high heels and lipstick again as defiant symbols. Now, the emerging fourth-wave feminism movement is all about intersectionality, or how all women, regardless of their body type, age, class, race, and sexual orientation, should be accepted (source).
You might have noticed, though, that all of the women above still fit a very traditional type of cool — skinny, pretty, straight, and East Asian. Perhaps that tells us a bit what cool still means to most of the world. But there are a few folks starting to break onto the scene, like author and artist Alok and hip-hop star Sienna Lalau, who don’t fit these traditional categories at all but have managed to do things like choreograph for BTS and call Demi Lovato a friend (Thank you Saya Jenks for this whole paragraph).
Returning to what Audrey Nuna said, Asian-Americans grow up with a hyphenated identity. They straddle two worlds and two cultures. So multiplicity feels like a way to process that confusion, and it shows through their personas and art.
So if multiplicity is what’s cool these days, then maybe that’s why Asian-American women are resonating.
I don’t know how healthy all this is, though. Yes, Asian-Americans seem to finally be breaking the “good, studious, robotic Asian” stereotype. But when I look at all these women and their media personalities, I see a lot of selfies and self-absorption tied to self-worth:
What I do know is that these women are what’s cool right now — and cool is more important than just provocative. Because people may pay attention to what’s provocative, but people aspire to be cool. People are looking up to, not just at, Eileen Gu and Audrey Nuna. And that’s what changes the status quo.
There are a thousand other threads I didn’t mention — Here’s some things I want to add after doing more research:
- A better definition of what ‘cool’ means — Cool to whom? Cool in a Western sense? Cool in a mainstream media sense? (Thanks to Rina and Benson for bringing this up)
- Fourth wave feminism (or fifth wave?)
- The history of yellow fever in America
- More examples from the huge LA hip-hop scene like this, this, and this
- More examples from tech twitter like this and this
- A deeper dive into ABGs
- More examples of how all of this changes for non-straight, non-East Asians
- How cool Asian women are perceived outside of America: specifically existing phenomenons like K-Pop idols and Japanese maid hotels