"being chinese" will not solve your identity crisis

In the fall of 2025, I was asked a very telling question.

Kiss, marry kill.

White guy obsessed with Japan, white guy obsessed with Korea, white guy obsessed with China.

I grew up on K-pop stan Twitter.

So inevitably I also grew up with Japan loving mutuals and I grew up being Chinese.

So I know 10 years ago, even five years ago, people's answers to this question would have varied.

But now I know probably 30 people who have been asked this question from varying genders and ethnicities.

And there has been one consistent answer.

Kiss the white guy obsessed with Korea, kill the white guy obsessed with Japan, and marry the white guy obsessed with China.

It's the Chinese century baby.

Who's waging wars in foreign countries and spending trillions on innocent people in tents.

China was using money to actually build their own cities instead of destroying other people's cities.

I laughed at these memes.

Heck, I even guffawed.

But as time went on, the meme spread to a point where I began to wonder more about its function.

Who can use this paradoxically ironic and sincere meme in its intended manner?

As with all popular memes, the spiritually Chinese meme has taken on a life of its own.

And life is full of contradictions.

Memes are memetic devices.

They spread ideas, behaviors, beliefs, and expressions in our culture through imitation.

But from psychoanalysts to postmodernists, philosophers know that imitation does not simply repeat the same thing over and over.

Repetition creates new, sometimes contradictory meanings.

This is especially true when the signifier, in this case the word "Chinese," does not have static referents.

Chinese refers to me, Angela baby, to hotpot, to the Qing Dynasty, to the Mandarin language, and to the opium wars.

Chinese can mean a personal ethnicity, a nationality, a political census category, a cultural vibe, a language, and a historical time period.

When a word can mean so many different things, it's no wonder that its meaning constantly changes and is debated.

Does Chinese include every ethnic minority in China, or populations in Taiwan Singapore or Hong Kong?

Does it include people like me?

Or should the signifier be qualified by things like diaspora or Chinese Canadian?

Is Wong Kar Wai a representation of Chinese cinema or not?

What makes chop suey a Chinese dish if it was invented for American taste buds?

In order for a signifier to carry so many different and sometimes conflicting meanings, the signifier becomes a metaphor.

China, or being Chinese, is now used as a metaphor.

Quote, metaphor becomes a sort of proclamation of identity, a baffling and spurious one since it represents two things at once.

It merges two identities that are similar and dissimilar.

Once we understand that metaphors are the merging of paradoxical meanings, we can understand the paradoxical and evolving meaning of being spiritually Chinese.

As a Chinese Canadian, I originally enjoyed this trend.

To understand why, I turned to James Baldwin's reflection on appropriation.

It was extremely difficult for Baldwin, as a Black American, to understand his Blackness in the West, because Black people were systematically excluded from Western history.

Yet, as a resident of America and then later Paris, he was also different from his ancestors.

I think many racialized immigrants in the West relate to feeling like they don't fully belong to any one heritage.

If we don't want to assimilate, then appropriating Western culture can feel like the only way to assert ourselves.

Quote, when I followed the line of my past, I did not find myself in Europe, but in Africa.

And this meant that in some subtle way, in a really profound way, I brought to Shakespeare, Bach Rembrandt to the Stones of Paris, to the Cathedral at Chartres, and to the Empire State Building, a special attitude.

These were not really my creations.

They did not contain my history.

I might search in them in vain forever for any reflection of myself.

At the same time, I had no other heritage which I could possibly hope to use.

I had certainly been unfitted for the jungle or the tribe.

I would have to appropriate these white centuries.

I would have to make them mine.

Otherwise, I would have no place in any scheme.

For me, the being spiritually Chinese trend felt, at first, like an act of positive appropriation.

I am ethnically Chinese, I was raised with Chinese cultural practices, but my ties to Chinese heritage remain limited.

I've only ever lived in Canada, undergone Canadian schooling, internalized Western social norms. Sometimes, it can feel like what I eat is all I have to show for my Chineseness.

The being spiritually Chinese trend felt like an opportunity to appropriate these limited expressions of my heritage and give them new meaning.

Like yes simply wearing slippers inside and preferring warm water doesn't make someone Chinese.

But what if the Chinese diaspora framed these practices, not as detracting from, but affirming our heritage?

Despite being integrated into Western society, all these cultural practices and preferences have remained with us.

Maybe we can think of them as a testament to our Chinese identities persisting.

And despite something like wearing slippers or drinking warm water feeling superficially Chinese, they still made us deeply Chinese in the eyes of others.

Wearing hanfu does not make you Chinese.

Yet, when I was the only one in my class to wear traditional Chinese clothing in fourth grade, that boxed me into the Chinese category for other students.

As many people of mixed heritage might know, there is the paradox of not being Chinese enough and being wholly, inescapably Chinese at the same time.

The theorist Frantz Fanon describes this like being backed into a wall.

Society forces an awareness of one's ethnicity or color.

The only thing we often can do then is to appropriate the meaning others have given to our identity.

But appropriation is very context dependent.

It matters not just what is said, but who says it and for what purpose.

In the paper Who Reclaims Slurs, Bianca Cepollero and Dan Lopez de Sa find that the authority to reclaim a derogatory term can depend on sharing common relevant values directed at a specific purpose.

For example, in 2012, slut walks were organized to protest the belief that how women dress is relevant to sexual assault cases.

In the specific context of these walks where attendees congregated around a single specific goal, men were able to appropriate the word slut too.

But that doesn't mean all men in all circumstances could now say slut in a you-go-girl way.

The success of appropriation can also depend on two groups' unique relationship to each other. For example,

each other. For example, in the 80s, gay men championed the slogan in support of...

in a reclamatory way because gay men stood in a special political relationship with lesbians.

Now, I'm obviously not saying that the being spiritually Chinese trend is manifestly derogatory.

Otherwise, I wouldn't have found the trend funny and even empowering at first.

But as many other Chinese creators have voiced, the meme has developed to a point where it can feel fetishistic or minimizing.

It's a very white time of my life right now, and I've decided to try a new dish called peanut butter and gellie sandwich, I think is how you pronounce it.

I went to the supermarket to look at some gellies, the white supermarket, and I'm a pretty open-minded person, but there were a lot of kind of exotic and out there flavors, so I picked the safest option, which I think is strawberry.

I'm like so in my Asian era right now.

Why aren't chopsticks easier to use than forks?

I can't wait to try Courtney Cook's marinated eggs.

She's so creative in the kitchen.

I'm like so lazy to use that right now.

I don't know, it's just weird because like growing up, everybody made fun of us for being Asian and now it's trendy.

I mean, isn't that what you wanted?

Cue that one reel.

Would you rather be Chinese during COVID or be Chinese in 2026, while someone who learned everything about your culture on TikTok explains your traditions to you?

Just as a sidebar, I had someone DM me like new xenophobic insults every time I posted for two years.

So it is a funny feeling to see that anyone who can pronounce lao gan ma is just as Chinese as me now.

But I digress.

As the context around and the groups using the meme has changed, the ability to positively appropriate the meme also changes.

And indeed, a lot of the context has changed.

The being Chinese trend began within a specific community and with a specific political meaning.

The trend's purpose was not to increase China's soft power for its own sake.

It was to increase China's soft power in order to destabilize the West's supremacy in our social imagination.

Hence, the spiritually Chinese memes first gained traction in online lefty spaces that already saw China differently from the stereotypical portrayal by the West.

The political compass on Instagram has made fun of anti -Chinese propaganda years before posting about this trend.

And cue more memes as examples so I don't have to like explain every single one.

In a way, we can think of the trend as responding to something similar to Mark Fisher's claim that it is impossible to even imagine a coherent alternative to Western capitalism.

To be Chinese, then, is to expand our imagination.

As a continually growing superpower, China has become a metaphor for alternatives to Western imperial capitalism.

Of course, drinking Qingdao doesn't actually change the global order.

Early adopters of the meme knew this, thus engaging in Chineseness ironically.

The trend promotes things like smoking Zhonghua cigarettes, drinking Tsingtao, reading Mao, Gua Sha.

These are accessible and palatable commodities for the Western imagination.

It is still China through a Western lens.

To claim that these made you Chinese was obviously ironic, but that was the point.

China being a symbol of broader anti-West sentiment.

It is a purposeful fetishization, and the hope was to appropriate that fetishization.

Normalizing non-Western food and media, normalizing non-Western health practices, these were low -barrier ways to legitimize non-Western societies.

But there are problems with this approach, evident now from the growing distaste for the trend.

First of all, internet trends are cultural products, and at some point, culture can't compensate for material reality.

We can increase China's soft power all day, but people aren't going to want an actual change to Western power, so long as they benefit from it.

When I see Trisha Paytas dress up for Lunar New Year and hand out red pockets, something tells me she's claiming Chineseness for a quick fun TikTok, and not for broader political goals.

I don't know though.

Comrade Trisha, if you're out there, leave me a comment, prove me wrong.

Many people's praise for China is still a reflection of their Western patriotism.

It's like when your parent talks about how Jenny's GPA is a 4.0, and she washes the dishes without having to be asked, and she never complains about curfew.

Your parent doesn't want Jenny.

Your parent secretly hates, or at least is jealous of Jenny, and wish you were like Jenny instead.

As Tian Yufeng, a History of Science PhD student says, the current trend tells us more about what Americans feel about America than what Americans feel about China.

Now you might be wondering, how can a trend that focuses exclusively on China be a reflection of the West?

Well, this is possible because the meaning of Chinese identity and the meaning of Western identity inform each other.

China and America in particular frequently define themselves in relation to each other.

Ask ourselves, what has the globalist economy gotten the United States of America?

To make it a little bit more crystal clear, we borrow money from Chinese peasants to buy the things those Chinese peasants manufacture.

China needs to make a deal with us.

We don't have to make a deal with them.

Take a look at what he's actually done.

He's done very little.

His trade deals are the same way.

He talks about these great trade deals.

You know, he talks about the art of the deal. China's made,

the deal. China's made, perfected the art of the steel.

We have a higher deficit with China now than we did before.

If you want to do business in China with a Chinese company, you have to transfer your technology to them.

And you can see how close China is to catching up.

Thus, when people start to reject the previous Western meanings surrounding China, it's not like we've now uncovered pure Chineseness.

Western meanings can now reinvent itself by making China a fun trend that anyone can participate in.

Hence, China can be assimilated into Western imagination instead of being a threat. No,

no, no. You

don't have to leave the States.

You can consume labubus and read communist theory, and gua sha, and do tai chi.

I'm running out of stereotypical Chinese things to list, but you can do all of those things in America.

All the things you like about China are compatible with a Western hegemony.

It's always interesting how history repeats itself.

In Jean-Paul Sartre's preface to Fanon's Wretched of the Earth, Sartre distinguishes the Frenchman's criticism of Europe from Fanon's criticism of Europe.

Quote, When a Frenchman, for example, says to other Frenchmen, the country is done for, which has happened, I should think almost every day since 1930.

It is emotional talk, burning with love and fury.

The speaker includes himself with his fellow countrymen.

And then usually he adds, unless.

His meaning is clear.

No more mistakes must be made.

If his instructions are not carried out to the letter, then and only then will the country go to pieces.

In short, it is a threat followed by a piece of advice.

And these remarks are so much the less shocking in that they spring from a national intersubjectivity.

But on the contrary, when Fanon says of Europe that she is rushing to her doom, far from sounding the alarm, he is merely setting out a diagnosis.

This doctor neither claims that she is a hopeless case, miracles have been known to exist, nor does he give her the means to cure herself.

He certifies that she is dying on external evidence founded on symptoms that he can observe.

As to curing her?

No.

He has other things to think about.

He does not give a damn whether she lives or dies.

Just saying, if you actually wanted the Chinese century, you would not give a damn about the state of America.

It's people, sure, but not the country.

A further issue with the being Chinese meme's political task is its use of irony.

I talked about this in my video, Your Humor Is Inherently Political, but there is always a risk that comes with resistance through irony.

You have to give credibility to the very ideas you oppose in order to then subvert those ideas in non-explicit ways.

For the trend to serve its political function, then, we're banking on participants of the trend to be self -aware of this irony.

And self-awareness is hard, guys.

Especially when the internet is a nightmare for communication.

As being Chinese spread out of its original lefty spaces, more people only saw the fetishized image of Chinese culture.

These ironic jokes are sincere to them.

Cracking a cold Qingdao open with the boys is what China is.

This attitude treats China and America as ahistorical entities that just go through, we are so up right now, and it is what it is, without any underlying logic.

China is up right now because trains fast, food yummy, and city cyberpunk.

America is down right now because evil man and ugly buildings.

This attitude fails to treat Chinese identity with the complexity that humanity requires.

To only view Chinese as a generic denies the rich diversity in Chinese experience, and the great and not so great initiatives that China has taken.

It's basically modern orientalism.

Yes, some cities in China look like cyberpunk fantasies.

Yes, they have great infrastructure in many, many ways.

There also are many smaller towns and rural villages.

People over there do struggle to pay their bills.

A whole identity cannot be homogenized.

I think about what the poet Mahmoud Darwash once wrote, quote, The enemy is capable of infiltrating us, constructing my imaginary, dictating to me his own version of things, becoming my memory.

It's clear enough that the enemy is not happy merely with confrontation at a distance.

He wants to be me and speak in my name.

The nature of American identity lends itself to escapism.

Americanism is one of those identities that people are asked to prove over and over.

There is an obsession with what a true American is, or making America great again, implying that there is an authentic America to return to.

And we've seen what happens if you haven't proven you're a true American.

Americanness is also a suffocating identity.

If you are a true American, then you should be American first, even if you have ties to other heritages.

Quote, The making of an American begins at that point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land.

This problem has been faced by all Americans throughout our history.

In a way, it is our history.

And it baffles the immigrant and sets on edge the second generation until today.

The ability for people to prove their red, blue, and white blood is waning.

As more and more people are excluded from Americanness, or is having their American identity regulated, it becomes more apparent that the center of American identity is a myth of excellence and freedom.

The real foundation of American identity is exclusion and stolen land.

Thus, people start looking for other identifiers to construct their self.

Being spiritually Chinese may be most in fashion, but the lax treatment of identity traits is a wider phenomenon.

We've got spiritually lesbian boyfriends, spiritually Israeli ops, and Filipino fall?

In the Overthink Podcast episode on personality, the hosts talk about how the way we understand ourselves has changed.

Before the rise of personality as a concept in the 19th century, people got their self -understanding largely through literature.

The self was thought about through narrative arcs and character development like in novels.

When we read literature, we watch a character develop over hundreds of pages, people get to understand all the nuances of their decision making, and how those decisions affect other people.

We get immersed in the particularity of someone's subjectivity.

This makes the concept of character have an inherently moral dimension.

You can't talk about someone's character without bringing in value judgments.

Comparatively, the modern concept of personality reflects the capitalist impulse to categorize.

Each individual is not a unique particular.

Each individual can be labeled and traded like commodities.

The big five, BuzzFeed quizzes, MBTI, aesthetic categories, these give us descriptive traits that everyone can fit into.

Unlike character, which is always developing, personality focuses on a static essence.

And I guess we're at a stage of self -understanding now where we reduce complex political and national identities into personality traits?

I think this actually comes from a good place.

People are realizing how limited traditional personality categories are.

Somehow, five different MBTI results sound like they could be you.

And surprise, surprise, lots of people don't really fit neatly into the introvert-extrovert dichotomy.

But the impulse to categorize nevertheless remains strong.

Instead of allowing for nuances in every individual's self-understanding, we need to know if you're spiritually Chinese or spiritually Israeli.

Aside from not -so-great effects on our psychology, I find this kind of simplification politically irresponsible.

By reducing identity traits to loose vibes, it erases the material conditions that shape what that identity means.

Sure, being spiritually Israeli is bad, but why is it bad?

It's not because some people are just bad vibes the way long division is bad vibes.

Israeli identity is constituted and sustained by dispossessing Palestinians.

And Americans are forced to put their hard -earned money into sustaining Israeli violence.

Quote, As Israeli weapons, surveillance systems, and counter-surgency models are integrated into India's governance of Kashmir, Kashmiri lives are reorganized through checkpoints, raids, land seizures, communication blackouts, sexual violence.

Yet this material reality does not anchor public discourse.

Instead, the relationship is flattened into cultural theater, allowing a shared project of militarized control to proceed largely unexamined.

Okay, to be completely honest, I wish I could expand a bit more on that last section, but I don't have time.

What I hope is I've gotten across the complex meanings that this being Chinese trend raises.

Importantly, I hope I've gotten across the dynamic nature of meaning.

The trend started off funny, perhaps empowering, an act of appropriation.

Then, as it disseminated, its meaning also changed.

Perhaps what it means to find me at a Chinese time of my life will change yet again.

For the better?

Perhaps we will find people in an oriental time of their life.

Because yes, surely, if we add one more layer of irony to it, everything will be good.

That was the video for today.

Please leave in the comments if you have any thoughts about this.

I would love to hear what you say.

Thank you so much for watching, let's keep talking, and I hope to hear from you soon.

Bye!

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