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Margaret Cho’s All-American Girl at 20 and the evolution of Asian Americans on TV….
Some of my white friends have told me that I haven’t experienced racism, that Asians aren’t people of color, and I can’t call myself an immigrant anymore because I don’t have an accent. One of the reasons it’s hard to talk about all this is because I’ve only recently become enraged, and I’m nearly 40. For most of my life, I enjoyed the attention or “uniqueness” of being an Asian woman or the token Asian offered me in certain circles and situations. I laughed along with the “tight vagina” jokes, and back in college, I used to wear a tight T-shirt that says “Everyone Loves an Asian Girl.” If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em!
As well as posting discussions on topics such as sexual assault, contraception, and popular culture, Yao also uses Rodoko to interview younger students. On menstruation, she found that boys and girls were at first “very shy,” becoming “more open” after reading Rodoko’s posts. She knows that some high school students are having sex, but “they don’t want to talk about it,” she says, explaining that “slut shaming” is a more common response to news of sexual encounters than the bravado found in many Western classrooms.
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Marcella is eighteen and lives in a Texas suburb so quiet that it sometimes seems like a ghost town. She downloaded TikTok last fall, after seeing TikTok videos that had been posted on YouTube and Instagram. They were strange and hilarious and reminded her of Vine, the discontinued platform that teen-agers once used for uploading anarchic six-second videos that played on a loop. She opened TikTok, and it began showing her an endless scroll of videos, most of them fifteen seconds or less. She watched the ones she liked a few times before moving on, and double-tapped her favorites, to “like” them. TikTok was learning what she wanted. It showed her more absurd comic sketches and supercuts of people painting murals, and fewer videos in which girls made fun of other girls for their looks.
TikTok is available in a hundred and fifty markets. Its videos are typically built around music, so language tends not to pose a significant barrier, and few of the videos have anything to do with the news, so they don’t easily become dated. The company is reportedly focussing its growth efforts on the U.S., Japan, and India, which is its biggest market—smartphone use in the country has swelled, and TikTok now has two hundred million users there. ByteDance often hacks its way into a market, aggressively courting influencers on other social-media networks and spending huge amounts on advertising, much of which runs on competing platforms. Connie Chan, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, told me that investors normally look for “organic growth” in social apps; ByteDance has been innovative, she said, in its ability and willingness to spend its way to big numbers. One former TikTok employee I spoke to was troubled by the company’s methods: “On Instagram, they’d run ads with clickbaity images—an open, gashed wound, or an overtly sexy image of a young teen girl—and it wouldn’t matter if Instagram users flagged the images as long as the ad got a lot of engagement first.”
After I had watched TikTok on and off for a couple of days, the racist lip-synchs disappeared from my feed. I started to see a lot of videos of fat dogs, teen-agers playing pranks on their teachers, retail workers making lemonade from the lemons of being bored and underpaid. I still sometimes saw things I didn’t like: people in horror masks popping into the frame, or fourteen-year-old girls trying to be sexy, or rich kids showing off the McMansions where they lived. But I often found myself barking with laughter, in thrall to the unhinged cadences of the app. The over-all effect called to mind both silent-movie slapstick and the sort of exaggerated, knowing stupidity one finds on the popular Netflix sketch show “I Think You Should Leave.” Some videos displayed new forms of digital artistry: a Polish teen-ager with braces and slate-blue eyes, who goes by @jeleniewska, makes videos in which she appears to be popping in and out of mirrors, phones, and picture frames. Others drew on surprising sources: an audio clip from Cecelia Condit’s art piece “
