I hate to break it to you, but I’m ahead of the trend. I’ve been in my Chinese era since I was born in 2009 thanks to ancestry on my mother’s side and family from Guangdong. When it comes time to celebrate a holiday or birthday, my extended family always convenes over dim sum or at the same Chinese seafood restaurant we’ve been frequenting for the last ten years, sitting in a circular arrangement to ensure perfect access to the lazy susan. I’m almost religiously obsessed with the 46 cheongsams made for Maggie Cheung in Wong Kar Wai’s “In the Mood for Love.” For me, the real new year doesn’t start until red envelopes emblazoned with gold start coming out, filled with crisp sheets of cash. Yet in 2026, it seems like these traditions are expanding beyond the usual community to a large portion of the internet “in their Chinese era.”

The viral Adidas Tang Jacket, the surge of seven-dollar matchas and boba, trending audios by Chinese artists; they all reveal a recent popularization of East Asian culture both online and in Western society. The hit track “Golden” from popular animated movie “KPop Demon Hunters” received five Grammy nominations and won the award for Best Song Written for Visual Media. Alongside anime, Korean skincare and douyin makeup, countless other trends have popped up in recent years in contrast to the COVID-19 pandemic, when hate crimes against Asian Americans rose dramatically. According to Congress, there were nearly 3,800 incidents involving discrimination against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders between March of 2020 and February of 2021. So what’s up with the sudden switch?

A Western interest in Chinese culture actually isn’t anything new. According to the Victoria and Albert Museum, chinoiserie was a popular style in the 17th and 18th century, involving the interpretation of Chinese aesthetics by Europeans that frequently appeared in art, furniture and architecture. The emphasis in chinoiserie, however, lay in the “exotic” nature of the distant East and was influenced by the import of luxury goods from China, such as porcelain and silk. A common criticism of the style is that it is based in fantasy and Western Orientalism, a style born of fascination, appropriation and fetishization rather than cooperation. Even while appreciating Oriental aesthetics and styles, British Hong Kong was a colony of the United Kingdom from 1841 to 1981, bringing into question whether true cultural appreciation was possible when it was a distilled and reimagined version, separated from its people, who were actively being exploited. The British participation in and promotion of the illegal opium trade, which led to mass addiction among the Chinese and the subsequent Opium Wars, all for the intention of gaining colonies and trade rights, demonstrated a disregard for a people beyond their exports and the superficial layer of their traditional styles. 

Is the popularization of East Asian culture and trends of today any different? It’s certainly possible to make the argument that the West is no longer as exploitative of the East in our current post-colonial society. The question has more to do with whether the internet’s fascination with East Asian culture extends beyond just its outermost aesthetics and glamorization. While embracing milk tea, cucumber salad and tteokbokki might be easy, grappling with the idea of chicken feet and pig ear deli salad as dishes may be more difficult for many due to their perceived unconventionality. In Asian nations, cultural interest in the East by Westerners is often received warmly and with enthusiasm, although increased hesitancy towards foreigners has arisen in nations like Japan, which face the negative effects of overtourism, as demonstrated in a survey by Asahi Shimbun in which 56% of Japanese participants expressed Japan needed fewer immigrants and visitors. Instead, outcry typically arises from Asian Americans, who have dealt with discrimination for the same traditions and practices that are now gaining attention and being popularized, in some cases also being gentrified and stripped of their cultural roots.

Of course, a more widespread interest in East Asian culture can have its benefits, especially if it encourages an interest in Asian and Asian American designers and businesses as well as raises more widespread cultural awareness. But does it? Take the tang jacket, the most viral iterations being the versions released by Adidas, such as their Clot Track Jacket by Edison Chen which costs $200. Their popularity has inspired other brands to draw from neo-Chinese fashion, but mislabeling and selling tang jackets as the ambiguously named “Mandarin jackets” for high prices demonstrates a lack of research and cultural understanding, making said releases seem more like a shallow attempt to capitalize on a trend in a fashion similar to chinoiserie. Taking the effort to understand a culture and its practices in context is often how we delineate cultural appreciation from appropriation, but even widespread well-intentioned cultural appreciation can have the potential for negative effects when supply, demand and profit come into play. This may occur when mass interest in a specific cultural phenomenon leads to gentrification and increased prices, which has the potential to make the item less accessible to the community from which it originates as profit takes priority. 

This is not to say that nobody should ever take an interest in East Asian culture, or culture from any other countries or regions for that matter. On the contrary, cultural exchange is an important part to expanding our perspectives and understanding others, fostering connection across different demographics and social groups. As an American with mixed heritage from Korea, China and Vietnam, I enjoy being able to introduce my friends to a variety of different dishes and traditions, and learning about their own in return. So instead of oversimplifying and limiting our understanding of a culture to drinking warm water and incorporating jujubes into our diet to proclaim ourselves “Chinese,” we should prioritize expanding our cultural awareness and knowledge beyond superficial trends. Because that’s the thing about an era — it always ends.