Vinida Weng performing with backup dancers behind her.

Rapper Vinida Weng is bringing the Fuzhounese community together

Also known as China's Queen of Rap, she's repping her hometown with pride and inspiring others to do the same

Vinida Weng at her first international concert in New York City's Central Park.

Demi Y. Guo

Words and photos by Demi Y. Guo

“Do you know what ‘yaba’ means?” Chinese rapper Vinida Weng asks the crowd at her first international concert in New York City’s Central Park, the Fuzhounese word—and name of her concert—flashing on the big screen behind her.

“AMAZING!” her fans roar back in Mandarin.

As China’s Queen of Rap, Weng’s music has traveled the globe, but she always puts her hometown of Fuzhou, China front and center. This has resonated not only with the people in Fuzhou, but its diaspora—and has built a bridge between the two groups.

Yiming Lin, a Fuzhounese American content creator from Florida, is present at the concert, but this isn’t his first time seeing the star in person. While visiting his grandmother in Fuzhou last year, he cooked for Weng. “My family all loves Vinida and my cousin pitched the idea of having her on the channel,” he recalls. “So we reached out.” In Lin’s video, I cooked for China’s Queen of Rap (ft. Vinida Weng), he presents the rapper with her favorite dish, a soup made of dried scallop and wintermelon harvested from his uncle’s farm.

Vinida Weng performing with her name displayed on the screen behind her.

Vinida Weng performed her first solo international concert on Sept. 19 in New York City.

Demi Y. Guo

Qixin Zhang and Shuyu Fang, co-founders of Fuzhou Sisters, an organization that promotes Fuzhounese culture, are also at the concert, having put together a party of friends through WeChat to see the rapper perform. When they first came to the United States from China, Zhang and Fang were surprised by the sheer size of New York’s Fuzhounese diaspora. More surprising to them was that the Fuzhounese dialect is spoken freely among its members, whereas in Fuzhou itself, Mandarin has become the standard language for schools and business.

Many of the Fuzhou Sisters’ videos and events feature the Fuzhounese dialect and other traits specific to Fuzhou, including qinghong, a rice wine that many families from the diaspora make in their homes. At a recent event, Accent Night Club, they plied their guests with qinghong wine and taught them Fuzhounese phrases.

At Weng’s concert, Fang and Zhang gather with a large group of Chinese people—some from China, and others from the diaspora, often asking each other if they are “FJ,” slang for the Fujian province where Fuzhou is located.

New York is behind only Los Angeles, with the second-largest Asian American population in the United States. Amongst Chinese Americans, data suggests that Fuzhounese people make up the largest growing subgroup of Chinese people entering the country. Allen Cao, co-founder of the cultural group Fuzhou America, notes that this is not the first time a single geographic location has made up the bulk of Chinese immigration to the United States.

“We’re the ones going through what Cantonese people probably went through 150 years ago,” Cao says, referring to the railroad workers. To this day, the Toisan dialect—the city most Cantonese immigrants hailed from—is preserved in Chinatowns across the United States. And now, New York’s Chinatown even includes a district known as Little Fuzhou.

Due to a number of Chinese immigrants being undocumented, there is no single reliable census on how many Fuzhounese people are in the United States, but one cannot walk through New York’s Asian American enclaves without passing a Fuzhounese-owned restaurant.

The wave of Fuzhounese immigrants coming to the United States can be traced back to the 80s, when China and the United States loosened migration policies. Like the first Cantonese immigrants, Fuzhounese people during those early days were less likely to be educated due to being in a coastal rural province. “This limited education likely contributes to this population’s inability to participate in China’s economic boom and their need to seek employment elsewhere,” psychologist Cindy Hsin-I Feng writes in her dissertation for Rutgers University. In the 80s and 90s, one of New York Chinatown’s most notorious snakeheads—human smugglers—Sister Ping, opened the pathway into the United States for people. As a result, when she died in 2014, thousands of mourners lined the street to attend her funeral to pay their respects to the woman who made their new lives possible.

Vinida Weng at her concert.

Weng is inspiring other Fuzhounese people to share their culture with pride.

Demi Y. Guo

Fuzhounese people continue to immigrate to the United States, creating multigenerational households, often with humble economic beginnings in restaurants. In Brooklyn, bilingual Fuzhounese American artist Khantrast, who signed with New 11 Records, raps about growing up as a working-class child of immigrants. “My bro got a cig and a straw hat/Came from a village of scammers and killers,” he raps in his 2024 song, “Landed in Brooklyn,” underscoring Fuzhou’s reputation as a rural backwater. He continues with a reference to the low-income New York neighborhood he grew up in: “This for the homies I broke bread with/Split a fifty when we was still on EBT/I'm tryna move the whole gang out the hood/’Til the family good, whole team gon' eat.”

“A lot of the restaurant kids in America were raised by their grandparents, so they needed to speak to them,” Cao says. This is the context through which he grew up speaking Fuzhounese. Hearing Weng rap in the language in rhythmic tones, backed with Afrobeats, is a novelty. “That really hit a nerve with younger people,” he says, “seeing the culture develop beyond what we’re used to.”

Upon releasing Weng’s EP One Life Only in 2022, her producer and boyfriend Harikiri—the Black British force behind some of China’s biggest rappers—writes, “It started when I first overheard Vinida conversing with her family in their native Fuzhou dialect, and I couldn’t help but feel that the intonations in the language would be a natural fit for Afrobeat.” The music video for her latest Fuzhounese song, “WAIYA!” has almost a million views on YouTube.

For Cao, who is part of the generation of “successful,” college-educated Fuzhounese Americans, this is what makes Weng such a beacon of change. “I think art is the last thing FJ Americans envision their kids doing unless they’re like a classical pianist,” he says. “The fact that she made it and came to America and is onstage speaking FJ, it’s like, ‘Yo, where my FJs at?’ It was a very emotional moment.”

Published on January 21, 2025

Words and photos by Demi Y. Guo

Demi Y. Guo is a journalist from Flushing, the largest Asian enclave in New York City. She has reported for The Wall Street Journal in Hong Kong and Journalism Without Walls in Ecuador. She has also reported extensively on Chinese culture for Goldthread and Polygon. An avid martial artist, she is currently directing New York Jianghu, a feature documentary about New York City’s kung fu community. Follow her on Instagram @demi.guo.