What ‘Wasian’ is really selling (Part two)
What started with a voice note about Laufey’s “Madwoman” video, ended with a question: What is “Wasian,” actually?
Over time, Wasian has evolved beyond a label and become a brand—a form of visual currency.
Photos by FloweringDagwood/ CC BY 4.0 & Frank Sun/ CC BY-SA 4.0; Graphic by Ryan Quan
Words by Victoria Vouloumanos
Mixed Asian Media: JoySauce is proud to present something very special—a partnership with the ultra talented team over at Mixed Asian Media. In JoySauce’s mission to cover stories from the Asian American and Pacific Islander diaspora, we’ve always considered it incredibly important to include mixed AA+PI perspectives. Since their team already has that piece on lock, we’re delighted they were willing to join forces to help us share even more fresh, funny, interesting, irreverent stories each week. Take it away, MAM!
Editor’s note: This is the second in a two-part series examining the term Wasian, how it differs from some of its predecessors, including the terms luk kreung, hapa and Eurasian, and its implications. Check out part one here.
Wasian filled a gap no other mixed group was left to fill in quite the same way. Yet no other mixed-race portmanteau has reached comparable traction, either. The closest contender is Blasian, which has real currency of its own—a lineage that runs through hip-hop, Tiger Woods-era discourse and decades of Black and Asian American cultural exchange, rather than through a face-reveal trend. But the comparison clarifies more than it complicates.
Part of the gap is pure scale. Mixed white and Asian people make up roughly two-thirds of all mixed Asian Americans, whereas mixed Black and Asian people account for only about six to seven percent. The rest is valence. Blasian doesn’t trade on proximity to whiteness. Wasian is the only mixed-race shorthand that can—which is why the centering-whiteness critiques I’ve seen across social media are sensing something real, even if the linguistic argument misses the mark.
From stigma to brand
The deeper discomfort critics feel is that the identity has been commodified. From luk kreung to Wasian, the shift from stigma to aspiration wasn’t driven by a progressive acceptance of mixed people as a whole. It was driven by Eurocentrism, global markets, and beauty standards rooted in colorism—the preference, both within and across racial communities, for lighter skin, higher and thinner nose bridges, straighter hair, height and generally European-adjacent features. Whether it’s comfortable to acknowledge or not, mixed white people are often seen as more “palatable,” especially in Western societies, from Zendaya and Amandla Stenberg to Henry Golding and Hudson Williams. Consequently, the explosion of the term Wasian doesn’t just reflect the globalization of American racial language—as seen in the displacement of terms like Eurasian—but the globalization of the American colorist hierarchy that comes with it.
Naturally, social media amplifies this. Through the screen, Wasian has evolved beyond a label and become a brand—a form of visual currency. The trend that arguably started it all, #WasianCheck, is nothing but a face reveal. The most legible thing about it is an aesthetic—or, more aptly, a phenotype—not a lived history. It’s a sort of trendy, modern eugenics, in which creators hop on TikTok to effectively say, “Look at what my genes did,” which would be strange—nationalist at best, supremacist at worst—in any other context. And the scale of the hashtag suggests just how many people are tuning in for it. There are more than a billion views against, in the United States at least, fewer than three million people. Even allowing for repeat viewers and global spread, the disproportion points one way. The hashtag works as a mass spectacle, performed for an audience far larger than the group it names. In other words, Wasian isn’t just about making a claim, it’s about being watched.
Obviously, this is not to say mixed white and Asian people should feel guilty for being mixed white, or for being read as palatable. That’s systemic. But treating that palatability as inherently interesting—as something to showcase rather than unpack—is worth examining. Even proximity to that rhetoric draws backlash. Sydney Sweeney faced criticism for her American Eagle ad in which she said, “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color. My jeans are blue,” before a voiceover stated, “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.”
Social media rewards identity that can be understood instantly and visually. That’s a critique of the platform, not the users, but it doesn’t absolve them. If a format explicitly rewards users for showcasing their genetic makeup, then those users are making a choice about what they showcase and why. That’s why Wasian feels so performative and shallow to many of us. Whether intentionally or ignorantly, the term trades on proximity to whiteness under the guise of an inclusive hashtag. At that point, Wasian isn’t describing mixed white and Asian people. It’s describing the moment a mixed identity becomes legible enough to become a commodity.
The royal family problem
Which brings me back to Laufey’s “Madwoman” music video. It didn’t take long for fans to recognize that Laufey and her four castmates “share a similar cultural background,” to quote director Warren Fu. While various publications, including The Hollywood Reporter and People, described them as “Asian and Asian American” or “half-Asian,” the Internet simply dubbed the lineup “Wasian.”
But consider the actual geographic and cultural composition of the cast: Laufey is Chinese and Icelandic and grew up in Reykjavik; Hudson Williams is Dutch, British and Korean and grew up in British Columbia; Alysa Liu is Chinese and white and is from Oakland; Lola Tung is Chinese, Swedish and Eastern European and was raised in New York City; Megan Skiendiel is Chinese Singaporean and Swedish and was born in Honolulu. Yet the “Wasian” umbrella flattened their distinct ancestries into a single, visual data point.
Laufey herself never positioned the video as a Wasian manifesto. She said she wanted representation for people who looked like her. The video’s internal world—from the mahjong, to the egg tarts, to the Wong Kar-wai lighting—draws specifically on Chinese and Hong Kong visual language. But the institutional framing told a different story. Gold House, the API nonprofit that coproduced the video, embraced the Internet’s label, with its general manager of studios, Christine Yi, celebrating the “all-Wasian” cast as “one of those firsts” and “another unique and beautiful facet of the Asian diaspora.” That friction is the point. Laufey made a video about her heritage. Gold House and the Internet processed it as a demographic product.
To be fair, Hollywood representation has always relied on a certain amount of ethnic and national approximation. Professionally and pragmatically, casting often works through proximity. German characters aren’t always played by German actors; Italian characters aren’t always played by Italian actors; and Asian characters aren’t always played by actors of the same heritage. We accept that aggregate visibility requires broad strokes.
Spend the two syllables
However, Wasian isn’t doing what casting does. It isn’t an approximation in the service of visibility. The defense of it usually lands in one of two places: convenience or identity.
The convenience argument is simple enough: Wasian is shorter than “white and Asian.” But shorter by how much? Two syllables? If language shapes perception—which is the whole reason words and labels matter in the first place—then two syllables are a strange place to suddenly surrender precision. It’s not as if Wasian compresses neutral categories. It fuses two terms that are already products of historical compression: whiteness, which absorbed difference to consolidate power, and Asianness, which compressed difference to build political solidarity.
Wasian does neither. It doesn’t organize people around a shared struggle or a coherent historical experience. It produces something else: legibility.
So if Wasian is just TikTok’s crowdsourced racial elevator pitch, then the pitch is bad. “White and Asian” already says the thing plainly. And if the claim is that Wasian isn’t shorthand but identity—community, affiliation, belonging—the problem only gets clearer. Because the criticism from many non-white mixed Asian people is usually not “Where’s our version?” but “Why can’t we attend yours?” It’s the thing my friend named in her voice note—that Wasian isolates the rest of the mixed Asian community—made literal.
That shifts the burden back onto the term. A real affinity space can explain what shared condition its boundaries protect. A Korean adoptee group exists because being a Korean adoptee is a specific lived experience. A Black-and-Asian group can point to the experience of navigating anti-Blackness in Asian spaces, and Asianness in Black ones. Press Wasian the same way and the answer collapses. If people with overlapping experiences of mixed Asian identity can be denied because they don’t fit the category visually, the exclusion stops being incidental and becomes a tell.
The question is no longer whether the boundary is fair. It’s what the boundary is tracking.
The blunt answer is appearance.
That’s what makes the “royal family” jokes and the meetups relevant. The category sorts people in and out by phenotype, and a narrow one at that. Not every white-and-Asian person reads as Wasian—the specific WASP and East Asian look. An identity built around a shared history or politics can explain its borders. A category built around a face can’t.
That doesn’t mean the loss people feel is imaginary. But it’s worth being precise about what was actually lost, because there was never a lack of language or community. “Mixed” has always existed. So has “white and Asian.” I’ve spent my entire life as a Greek and Korean woman without some umbrella portmanteau, and I'm not holding out for "Korgreekan" (big yikes) to feel seen. UCLA has had enough mixed students for a Mixed Student Union since 2010. Though the club was heavily composed of mixed Asians, nobody in my years there used Wasian. We all just identified as mixed. Even Mixed Asian Media, the publication I edit, has been around since 2017—two years before the hashtag. We’ve been here.
So if what Wasian adds isn’t history, politics or a shared condition—just membership in a category organized around legibility—then the category itself is the problem.
I understand the pull. When you grow up being othered, recognition can feel like relief, and rejecting the term can land like the oldest problem mixed people face: being told there still isn't a word for you. But there was always a word, and there were always rooms to say it in. What Wasian offers is not community itself, but a version of it that can be searched, branded and recognized on sight.
So if what Wasian adds isn’t history, politics or a shared condition—just membership in a category organized around legibility—then the category itself is the problem. If mixed people are already flattened for other people’s understanding, the answer isn’t to make the flattening catchier. It’s more language.
After texting me the Mochi Mag repost, my friend ended her voice note with a question: “What are your thoughts?” Though it took me hours of messy notes and research and thousands of words since, the short version fits in a simple text:
Spend the two syllables.
Published on July 15, 2026
Words by Victoria Vouloumanos
Victoria Vouloumanos is a writer and editor based in New York. Her work explores how identities and narratives are constructed and consumed across culture, media and politics. She is the editor in chief of Mixed Asian Media and a former culture editor at BuzzFeed. Victoria is also the founder of Parallax, a newsletter analyzing geopolitical events through shifting perspectives. She holds an English degree from UCLA, where she also studied physics until she realized she did not want to work in a lab, and approaches storytelling with a systems-first lens. Recently, she spent a year traveling through Asia and Australia, where she trained in Muay Thai in Chiang Mai, drove a boat along the Yarra and bungee-jumped in Macau. Find more of her work at victoriavouloumanos.com.
Art by Ryan Quan
Ryan Quan is JoySauce's social media manager, associate editor, and all-around visual eye. This queer, half-Chinese, half-Filipino writer and graphic designer loves everything related to music, creative nonfiction, and art. Based in Brooklyn, he spends most of his time dancing to hyperpop and accidentally falling asleep on the subway. Follow him on Instagram at @ryanquans, and check out his work on his website.