"You met me at a very Chinese time in my life."
The future looks Asian
“You’re so white-washed.”
I froze.
My birthday party was the last place I expected to be psycho-analyzed. I stood there in my retro bodysuit, neon-pink tights, and a zebra headband, trying not to let my eyebrows jump off my face. I was probably holding a disco ball, too.
For a split second, I wondered if I should defend myself.
But the comment said more about him than about me.
We’re all addicts of something: validation, certainty, belonging. We move through an uncertain world, managing private insecurities, seeking comfort, seeking a place that feels like ours. And sometimes, in the middle of that search, insecurity leaks out sideways.
“We’re like a capybara. We’re just there.”
My cousin said it to me after our bike ride around Regent’s Park. We were sitting on a bench with cups of coffee in hand, watching other cyclists enjoy their croissants and small talk on a rare sunny Friday morning in London. People lingered a little longer than usual. The city felt softer.
He explained that, as an Asian man, he often feels his existence is harmless and almost invisible. In most settings, he is simply there. People do not mind him being there, but that does not mean he is actively wanted or centered.
There is a difference between being tolerated and being truly appreciated.
It is difficult to accept that our skin, our language, our culture, and everything our parents passed down to us can relegate us to side characters in the societies we move through. That we can grow up watching people who look like us serve narratives that are not ours to own. That we can be overlooked in media, underestimated in boardrooms, and treated as optional in romantic pursuits.
So we learned to be a little bit less threatening, less assertive, less opinionated, telling ourselves that maybe this was the way to fit in, that as long as we adapted, softened, we would survive, and that if we could just become a little bit more “white,” we might finally be accepted rather than merely tolerated.
But something is shifting.
A Chinese friend of mine, who is dating a French woman, once told me that the rise of Korean culture has made him more attractive in the dating market.
“Thanks to K-pop.”
He said it half-joking, but the humor held truth.
What looks like pop music is actually policy. In the late 1990s, after the Asian Financial Crisis, South Korea began treating culture as economic infrastructure. The government invested strategically in film, television, and music exports, launching what became known as the Korean Wave. Culture was no longer ornamental. It became an engine of soft power, national branding, and global influence.
And when perception shifts, desirability shifts.
Suddenly, East Asian men were no longer framed as background characters but emerged as central figures, heartthrobs, and tastemakers shaping the cultural moment.
Attractiveness, it turns out, is not purely individual. It can be geopolitical.
I grew up in post-colonial Hong Kong under heavy British influence, where names like Swire and Jardine shaped the city’s power structures and reinforced an invisible hierarchy of what was considered refined and what was not. Westernization felt less like a choice and more like infrastructure, the default setting for survival in a competitive international city.
There were moments when I wished I could be more British, just to blend in more easily, just to be accepted in a workplace calibrated to Western norms. Moments when, years ago, I mentioned weekend trips to Shenzhen with my mother to classmates and sensed a recoil, an almost invisible tightening in their expressions.
The calibration did not stop in school. It followed us into corporate culture. Happy hour conversations about ski trips in the Alps. Easy references to boarding schools and summer internships arranged through family friends. The comfort of cultural shorthand that did not require translation.
“Why is my life so tough? It’s been so tough.”
After years of trying to fit into elite rooms, I broke down in my mother’s arms, not long after my grandmother passed. The grief felt heavier than I expected. It was not just the loss of a person. It was the weight of everything I had been carrying for years. My mother held me gently and did not say much.
“Your whole family hasn’t made it out to be educated.”
As my aunt folded paper offerings and counted envelopes, she kept reminding me how much I had achieved on my own. She told me that somewhere in second- and third-tier Chinese cities, younger girls were looking to me for hope, that their mothers were sharing my writing and my stories with their daughters. That whether I realized it or not, I had already become an example of what was possible.
In rooms where I felt peripheral, I was central somewhere else.
While I was trying to fit into someone else’s definition of refinement, learning to host gatherings that met every expectation of Western etiquette, presenting myself in ways that made stakeholders feel at ease, internalizing that the safest way to do my job was to respect hierarchy and stay silent, and making calculated moves into new rooms and new cities for the sake of career advancement, I did not realize I was already building something of my own.
“Don’t you want to become a role model?”
As I grieved not just my grandmother but every loss along my startup path, I felt stripped of momentum. She had always been my center of gravity, the one who carried courage for me when mine ran thin.
And yet, even in that unraveling, another woman who shares my heritage reminded me that direction still matters, that where I am going carries weight beyond how I feel in this moment.
For generations, we were guests in someone else’s stories. Our cultures were tolerated more than celebrated, translated rather than understood. Classmates pulled their eyes back with their fingers. “Ching chong” became playground humor. Mock kung fu gestures filled school hallways.
For years, survival meant proximity to whiteness. We sent our children to private schools and boarding schools so they would not have to navigate the same ceilings we did. So they would have more options than opening a restaurant, a takeaway shop, or a corner store.
We were searching for a place where we could feel desired, wanted as we are. We needed proof that we could be visible on our own terms, that we were capable of rising beyond the bamboo ceiling.
Now, we’re in a world where matcha is no longer exotic. Boba is no longer strange. Sushi and bibimbap are no longer foreign novelties. What was once mocked is now mainstream. What was once peripheral is now aesthetic, profitable, and aspirational.
Maybe for the first time in generations, we no longer need to shrink to survive.
“I grew up wishing I were more white.”
You never needed to. The future already looks Asian.
XOXO,
Your cute Asian girl