During the past few years, Asian ‘trends’ have kept popping up on social media. Examples consist of foods, fashion, and traditions. Of course, most are familiar with the popular Asian foods like sushi, kimchi, and boba. These are great foods with lots of variety fit for many different tastes. Asian fashion has started to become more popular with its streetwear, or special edition clothing, only sold in Asia. Most recently, during Lunar New Year, a trend that consisted of people captioning a post of them doing an Asian tradition saying ‘it’s my first Chinese New Year being Chinese’ is when the lines between cultural appreciation and appropriation became unclear.
To clarify, the ‘first time being Chinese’ trend started out when an Asian girl captioned a video of herself saying, “I’m catching you at a very Chinese time in your life.” Originally, her video series seems to be an attempt to share a humorous take on her own culture while also spreading parts of it around. This is when some people have started to run with it, saying “it’s my first time being Chinese.” The trend started around December of 2025, and during the Lunar New Year of February 2026, people started to say “it’s my first Chinese New Year being Chinese” along with a video of them doing a stereotypically Asian habit: wearing indoor shoes, boiling fruit, making tea, etc.
As an Asian person, I’m not totally sure how to feel about this. I am not Chinese myself, but I share much of my culture and traditions with Chinese people (also, many of these videos portray general things Asian people do). At face value, it seems like people are trying to immerse themselves in Asian culture, if being a trend is what it takes for people to appreciate it, go ahead. It’s when people start to seem like they are mocking and stereotyping Asian people that it becomes a problem.
Along with harmful trends, it starts to seem like people have been starting to glorify being Asian. A term called ‘Asian-fishing’ has been used to describe people who use makeup to exaggerate their features to make themselves look more Asian when, in reality, they are not. Oddly, people seem to be trying to simulate the features that many Asian people get made fun of for looking more Asian (paler skin, aegyo-sal, thinner/longer eyes). Some people even try to say that Asia is so much more advanced than Western areas due to their technology, when in reality, their society is very behind (colorism, gender discrimination, age hierarchy). It’s like people just ignore the systemic issues in favor of the ‘cute aesthetics’ of Eastern Asia. I feel like the glorification of Asia started with the popularization of K-pop and Anime.
Many Asian people have had issues with their traditional foods being gentrified by non-Asian people. Examples are Matcha, Ube, and, most recently, Pandan. The microtrends influence people to buy Asian food, and when it dies out, we are left with high prices that nobody wants to pay. I believe the issue is the fact that people don’t care about Asian culture even when it’s trending. How they consume the one small part of Asian culture without even understanding the history, and then dumping it when the trend is over. Asian culture is almost seen as ‘exotic’ and desirable, but only for a short time, and then it’s off to the next thing.
I also don’t appreciate that the same people who go crazy over matcha and sushi were the same people who didn’t want to be near Asian people during 2020. It’s almost as if people are cherry-picking which parts of our culture/reality they want and don’t want (spoiler alert: they are).
Being Asian-American in Arlington, Virginia, has never once brought me discrimination to the point of violence or ostracization, but it does sting when the same people who asked me in middle school if I was sure I didn’t like K-pop or Anime turn around and grab Korean Barbeque after school. How they make fun of an Asian person and then consume their culture. It’s always nice to see your culture being represented in restaurants or media, but when people who don’t appreciate it get hold of it and strip it of its significance, it’s like a piece of your culture is getting taken away.
