Posted by Who is Eileen Gu? In case you didn’t know by now, she is the current darling of the Chinese media as Beijing kicks off the 2022 Winter Olympic Games. As the Global Times puts it, “Freestyle ski star Gu Ailing a super idol among Chinese young people for representing true spirit of sport“. Yes, her Chinese name is Ailing and following Chinese norms, the family name or surname always comes first. “Gu decided in 2019 to compete for China in the 2022 Winter Olympics, as she wrote on her Instagram at age 15. Just two months later, Gu clinched her first world title in the women’s slopestyle for China. ‘My mom was born in Beijing and emigrated to the US. So, I have very very deep roots in China. I was in China when it was announced that the Olympics would take place in Beijing and being able to feel the energy in the atmosphere. That just made me start thinking at the time when I was 10 or 11 years old. I started thinking about competing for China,’ Gu said during an interview with CCTV.”
So far its a pretty simple story of an athlete of mixed race and nationalities choosing which country she wants to play for. North Ireland professional golfer Rory McIlroy does it every time he picks to play for Ireland over the United Kingdom in the Olympics. Even more similar is the case of far more famous Japanese tennis star Naomi Osaka as pointed out in this Sun article, “Why does Naomi Osaka play for Japan?” “Osaka was born in Chuo-ku, Japan in 1997. Osaka moved to the United States with her family when she was three years old. She was raised mostly in the United States between Florida and New York. Even though Osaka had an American citizenship, her parents decided to have her and her sister represent Japan, a decision made when they were still young. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal in 2018, Osaka’s parents said, ‘We made the decision that Naomi would represent Japan at an early age.’ The article pointed out that the US Tennis Association attempted to recruit Osaka when she was 16 but she was already committed to the Japanese Tennis Association. Osaka, who was reportedly ‘overlooked by everyone,’ found the Japanese Association to be more supportive. Her parents stated: ‘She was born in Osaka and was brought up in a household of Japanese and Haitian culture.’ ‘Quite simply, Naomi and her sister Mari have always felt Japanese so that was our only rationale. It was never a financially motivated decision nor were we ever swayed either way by any national federation.'”
And while there are some haters of Osaka’s decision to play for Japan instead of America (but not surprisingly near zero comments why she didn’t play for Haiti even though her father is from there), it was generally muted. “According to Insider, the build up to her Olympics decision was met with some controversy among U.S. fans. There was a push for her to represent the country, and some of those involved were instead met with disappointment at her choice to represent Japan. To do so, she had to definitively relinquish her U.S. citizenship. Beloved in Japan as much as in the U.S., it will be her longtime Japanese supporters who will enjoy her representing them at the Olympics.”
But in the case of poor Eileen Gu, we get all these recent (and by recent I mean in the last week) headlines like this from the American media, “America up in arms over Winter Olympian’s shock defection to China.” OK, remember that she made this decision public almost three years ago in 2019 so it should hardly come as a shock so this sudden resurgent interest in her now from the media can only be seen as posturing due to the start of the Beijing Winter Olympics. Like this NY Post article, “Olympian Eileen Gu ruffles US skiers with decision to compete for China“. “It is not my place to judge, but Eileen is from California, not from China, and her decision [to ski for China] seems opportunistic,” said Jen Hudak, a former Winter X Games gold medalist for the USA women’s team. “She became the athlete she is because she grew up in the United States, where she had access to premier training grounds and coaching that, as a female, she might not have had in China,” Hudak told The Post. “I think she would be a different skier if she grew up in China.” Gu is not the first American to cross from West to East. Beverly Zhu and Ashley Lin, both figure skaters, were both born in the US and now compete for China. But neither is at Gu’s level in their sport. “Most people compete for other countries because they can’t make the American team.”
Oh how typically American. First she says its not her place to judge and then proceeds to do exactly that in a tirade basically saying that Gu would be nothing without America. But the last statement is the most patronizing; it basically asserts that people play for other countries only because they aren’t good enough for the American team. Or as the article points out, “Instead, in a move that’s baffled members of the American skiing community, San Francisco-born and -bred Gu has joined Team China. Others in the sport are questioning why Gu, an ultra-athletic free-skier and favorite to claim as many as three gold medals when the games begin Friday, would side with the host nation, which is accused of abusing human rights and engaging in unfair trade policies.”
Now are getting to the heart of the matter. Americans’ absolute zero ability to understand why anyone would side with China; especially someone as talented as Gu. But Gu’s “betrayal” is worse because most Americans think all Chinese are force fed propaganda by the Communist Party 24/7 in a totalitarian dystopian police state (complete bullshit but why ruin a good American propaganda trope) and Gu being born and raised in America should know better. She is also not some vapid stupid teenager, “Gu notched a nearly perfect 1580 SAT score, speaks fluent Mandarin and has already been accepted to Stanford.”
Where is the backlash and indignation about “China’s” Olympic hockey team where most of the team is foreign born? As this Washington Examiner article puts it, “Seven Americans to play against USA on China’s hockey team.” “Eighteen of the 25 players representing China on its men’s ice hockey team at the Beijing Olympics were born or raised in North America, and many have no Chinese ancestry or connection to the country. Seven of the players are American, 11 are Canadian, and one is Russian, according to a report.” How come nobody calls them “traitors” and is raising a stink? Well, probably because, as that woman said earlier, it doesn’t matter as China is not expected to win and these guys are “second-rate”. Mind you, with the NHL players not showing up due to Covid restrictions and protocols and a desire not to interrupt their current NHL schedule, China’s team may actually do better than originally expected.
I got on this issue because The Economist, which has been trending further and further down the rabbit hole of Sinophobic anti-China tropes and editorials ran this very long opinion piece of the subject, “Cold warrior: why Eileen Gu ditched Team USA to ski for China“. As the article is hidden behind a paywall, while talking about all the usual background which I outlined above, it went on to state, “But here’s the rub: China is a far darker place today – and its relations with the West far more contentious – than when Gu changed her affiliation in 2019. It’s not just the shadow of covid-19, which has led the Chinese government to ban Olympic spectators and keep athletes in sealed bubbles. In the two and half years since Gu made her decision, China has crushed civil liberties in Hong Kong, imprisoned journalists for reporting on covid-19 and expanded the systematic oppression of the Uyghurs. The American government says the brutal crackdown in Xinjiang amounts to genocide.” I’m surprised they didn’t add Taiwan, Tibet and the South China Sea which is what most brainwashed members of the Western press do when writing anti-China propaganda pieces.
In other words, they politicized what would normally be just another young athlete making a choice that she (and maybe her family) felt was best for her career. How far does The Economist’s racist and Sinophobic views go? Well, even they thought better about their original illustration and changed the graphic (see below) to one that is less overtly racist and more in line with the now normalized “we don’t hate the Chinese people, we just hate the Chinese Communist Party” message that is pervasive today (although in my view it really takes some mental gymnastics to see how you can divorce those two concepts in reality and practice as opposed to some intellectual exercise to preserve your moral high ground). But even the removal of the chopsticks (that by the way would be more offensive to the Japanese as they typically use pointy tip ones while the Chinese use rounded ones; but I doubt the brain trust editors at The Economist know that – for their future reference, the Koreans use the metal ones in case you need to make a racist slur at Koreans), they added a subtle dig by changing the vest colour from red (damned communists) to yellow (the colour of the yellow umbrella insurrections in Hong Kong).
Well I get Gu’s decision because I too am a product of Western birth, upbringing and education. I had top scores in my GMATs and attended McGill University (turning down an unsolicited scholarship to Texas A&M which I can only assume was offered to me because of my GMAT scores) as well as attending the prestigious Stockholm School of Economics in Sweden. The only difference is that, like Gu, I don’t fall for the garbage propaganda and blatant lies coming out of the Western media. I spent nearly two decades in Asia and China and am also fluent in Mandarin as well as Cantonese so I can see the reality from the lies that the media wants us to believe. Regardless, Gu is an athlete; let her compete as such and leave goddamned geopolitics, human rights and trade issues to the experts.
But unlike Osaka and all the foreign players on the Chinese hockey team, poor Eileen Gu not only gets brandished a “traitor” and has received death threats on social media; she also constantly receives bad media coverage like this trash segment from Fox News with Tucker Carlson. One can only assume that is because the country she has chosen to represent is China and American insecurity and flailing foreign policy has decided that China is the new enemy of the day.
Tucker’s guest (another Fox hack) characterizes Gu as being “ungrateful for her to betray and turn her back on the country that not just raised her but turned her into a world class skier”. Yeah, both of you can go fuck yourselves. Gu doesn’t owe America anything, especially not to two entitled, obnoxiously self-righteous, white douche bags like you guys. She made the decision and announced it when she was 15 years of age; long before she was a world class skier although the great potential was obvious for anyone to see if they chose to. Here there are parallels again to Naomi Osaka who “the U.S. Tennis Association tried to recruit her, but not until she was 16 years old. By that time, Osaka had already committed to the Japan Tennis Association—even though it didn’t provide her with any loans, coaching, equipment or conditioning.” Gu has been winning as a world class skier as a representative of China for the past three years so why are you making it an issue now? Well, I guess the thought of three more gold medals to China and three less to the USA would be a slap in the face to the concept of undisputed American superiority; especially considering that China only won one golf medal in the entire 2018 Winter Olympics. God forbid we given the Chinese a propaganda coup to their rising China declining America message.
Gu’s story strikes home to me because, on a personal note, I graduated as the top Finance student of my undergraduate BComm class at the University of Calgary. In my third year, I tried out for the intercollegiate business team and was not chosen (they picked a white guy) so I went and did other things and did not try again in my fourth year (I was on the executive of the Toastmaster’s Club and the Entrepreneurs Association instead). Now at the University of Calgary, they prided themselves for winning those business competitions nearly every year but they failed miserably in my final year in the Finance field. Afterwards, I was berated for not joining the team (and being the top student the implication was their loss was due to my absence) in my final year. I pointed out that they had made their choice to pick their golden boy the year before so I wasn’t going to try out again. And if they wanted me so badly, why didn’t they actually recruit me instead of making me have to sign up to prostrate myself again just so they could slam the door in my face a second time. Maybe they would have picked me the second time around, maybe they wouldn’t have. I don’t know but I sure as hell had other things on my plate at the time and wasn’t going to waste time on them again.
Gu Ailing, you owe America and these self-righteous twats NOTHING. Go live your life, compete and do your best as you see fit. I, for one, will be rooting for you during the Olympic Games and hope you bring back three gold medals for China. If you don’t, there’s always 2026.