'I didn't need to apologize for being Asian:' Since its start, YouTube allowed creators to celebrate Asian joy

Today's Asian American twenty-and-thirty something's understand Michelle Phan's beauty advice to be the law of the land.

With Phan's modulated voiceover on their heels, they waded headfirst into the glittery world of beauty. They smeared egg whites onto their skin and carved their eyes with white liner, following Phan's bathroom-lit webcam tutorials to a T.

Phan said the egg whites could cure oily foreheads and brighten dull skin. And the white liner trick key to her character transformation videos, creating Lady Gaga, Barbie, and Sailor Moon's doe-eyed faces.

Phan, boasting now more than 8 million YouTube followers and 1.1 billion lifetime views, is largely credited as the one of YouTube's first A-list beauty gurus. Her clout comes with both the expertise in which she painted sunsets on her eyes and the ethnicity in which she graced user's screens.

As a Vietnamese-American woman, Phan revolutionized a white beauty industry and galvanized a generation of Asian Americans who, for the first time in their lives, saw visions of themselves on screen.

"We could see ourselves and our skin and our eyes and our features that were not Western, and were flatter, and rounder, as something beautiful. Like a playground of discovery and creativity," said artist and incoming graduate student in Asian American studies student Jocelyn Chung.

Phan was not the only creator.

Wong Fu Productions, Ryan Higa, Kev Jumba, Jenn Im, Cassey Ho, Clara C, Kina Grannis, and many more.

Household names filled a void left in entertainment: an empty space to be colored with Asian greatness. While Crazy Rich Asians sparked a renaissance for Asian representation in media, early Asian YouTubers projected online the multidimensionality of the Asian American experience for millions.

And that impact has not been lost.

"There's a legacy here. I think about Kina Grannis being featured in Crazy Rich Asians, and that made me cry," Chung told Insider. "Asian Americans grew up with Kina, and so to see her on screen, it was like this huge, chilling moment where I was like this is our connection point.".

YouTube didn't have any red tape

All they needed was a camera and a computer. And suddenly, they could speak to the world.

"YouTube is such a low barrier to entry, unlike mainstream media where it is so hard to break into," said media strategist Vanni Le.

Some actors attend hundreds of auditions before landing a 10-second role in a commercial. The same goes for musicians, before hundreds of sparse crowds before getting approached by a prospective manager - if they're lucky.

"In the traditional Hollywood sense, it's either because you're a legacy Hollywood family, or you get represented through a major talent agency," Le said.

With YouTube, Asian creators didn't need to be scouted or discovered by industry big-shots. Singer CLARA C's YouTube start was simple: she covered songs that she liked and recorded videos with her friends.

Philip Wang, co-founder of Wong Fu Productions, said it was initially all for fun. He and his friends bought a website and posted videos for their friends around the University of California, San Diego's campus.

When their site's bandwidth ran out, Wong Fu moved their videos to YouTube.

Health and fitness influencer Cassey Ho wanted to find a way to connect with her real-life pilates students as she moved from Los Angeles to Boston for college.

"When I first started, I wasn't paying attention to the rest of the scene that was going on in YouTube because my goal wasn't to become a YouTuber," Ho said.

What began as a passion project for her and other creators blossomed into what many Gen-Z and millennials remember as their first taste of representation.

A line of Pidgin or Vietnamese. Creators who shared the same intergenerational trauma passed on from the Southeast Asian diaspora. And short films featuring first dates in boba shops.

"I didn't feel like I needed to apologize for being Asian," said Wang. "And I think people were really empowered by that because it just was the most authentic that there could be."

Showcasing Asian life in all its complexity drew audiences towards these early-2010's Asian YouTubers.

"It was the first time I saw people like me or who lived similar lives to me," said Trang Dong, 23, an Instagram content creator. "There was no one way to be Asian or Asian-American."

This representation, the warmth in your heart when your story is shared. The empowerment that uplifts communities through storytelling that resonates with forgotten souls - this is what drove Asian American YouTubers to viral success.

"I think it was so fresh and it was so strange for them to see an Asian face, even though it wasn't on TV and it was just on a YouTube screen or a computer screen," Wang said. "That was already such an impactful thing for them."

Filling a void

Sitting at the top of Wong Fu Productions most-popular videos: "Strangers, Again." The short film is a love story starring an Asian couple, Wang himself and actress Cathy Nguyen Banaag.

The piece's ubiquity aside, "Strangers, Again" accomplished what movies, sketch comedy and television in 2011 did not. It cast a regular Asian couple, going on ice cream dates, taking walks on the beach and playing video games until dawn.

Mainstream media of that era, and even today, struggles to produce well-rounded Asian characters. A 2018 study notes that even films set in Asia, like "The Last Samurai" or "Godzilla," feature white characters as their leads,

"Wong Fu Productions and the YouTube space greatly shaped what it meant to be Asian American before mainstream media created space for us," Chung said.

"At that time in Hollywood, most portrayals of Asian-Americans were background extras or nerdy, or socially awkward, best friends."

As these romantic shorts skyrocketed Wong Fu's channel popularity, Wang felt a duty to his audience: to empower Asian Americans through storytelling: made by people like them, for them.

This responsibility, he said, pushed him to create more content and produce Asian "role models and representation" for his viewers.

Young Asian musicians found a role model in CLARA. Cultural and social pressures often push Asian Americans into pursuing higher-paying, dubbed "safer," jobs. Music and art don't typically fall into this category.

"I get so many emails about how [fans] want to pursue art, but their parents are pressuring them to do something more academic or more lucrative," CLARA said. "I am so fulfilled to be there for someone, to be a beacon of hope for someone to do what they wanted to do."

A work in progress

On April 1, 2021, Wong Fu Productions announced "Strangers, Again 2," a sequel to their acclaimed short. On May 2, 2021 they released another video.

A screenshot fills the frame: "Dear Ryan, can you make anti-Asian hate stop?" Ryan Higa chuckles. Exasperated, Higa says, "I don't even know how to start."

From there, 28 Asian YouTubers, all stars in their own right, speaking out against anti-Asian racism.

The world may not celebrate Asian stories just yet.

But, for its famous creators, YouTube still provides channels where they can be unapologetically Asian.

For many of these creators, YouTube was not initially meant to be an outlet that highlighted Asian voices. It existed as a space to create.

"When I was in college, a lot of these issues actually weren't even that familiar with me in terms of representation and where the community is at," Wang said. "So I was really just trying to make things that I thought were funny, that I thought were meaningful."

"I wasn't cognizant of the boundaries out there," CLARA echoed. "I just kinda knew that nobody looked like me on TV, but I still wanted to do this."

But as web statistics translated into fame, the racial gravity of their success mattered.

"I did see Wong Fu and Michelle Phan and the other creators," Ho said. "But when I crossed from social media to media, I realized I was the only Asian female in the fitness space that had recognition."

YouTube success did not translate to the silver screen.

After years of success, Wang and his team attempted to break into Hollywood. They wrote scripts and contacted producers. But companies told them that Asian leads would not create profitable films.

USC researchers found that across films produced from 2007 to 2019, only 5.9% of speaking characters were Asian or Pacific Islander. 39% of all films failed to depict even one Asian character.

Feeling voiceless fuels CLARA's activism.

"I'm firing on all cylinders," CLARA said. "All the knowledge that I've acquired so far is rippling out of me to everyone. [I want to] help people heal, to share our stories, to keep the community going and the conversation going."

It's difficult, Le said, to imagine a world in which Asian activism can take a pause, when the work can stop. When celebrating Asian joy becomes embedded into the everyday.

Le believes society must change to make space for not just Asian identities, but all underrepresented groups before this can happen.

"The entertainment industry is a microcosm of what this world thinks," Le said. "Before entertainment has to change, politics has to change. Society has to change."

Media representation is just one of many starting points to thinking about the pain Asian communities face.

"There's a reckoning of who we are and how we want to be, and that is happening right now," Chung said. "Unfortunately around our own communities' pain. We went from invisible to being visible because of our pain as a community."

Blockbuster films like "Crazy Rich Asians" help prove that Asian talent is not a liability. Eradicating that perceived risk is progress. Wang "heard for a long time in the early-2010's that there were no bankable Asian stars.""It took a long time to convince people to take risks on Asians. I'm really excited that we're going to get more chances to play ball."

Editor's note: This story has been updated to reflect the correct spelling of Philip Wang's name. Insider regrets the error.

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