The ALIA
Volume I. Issue XIII. Oct. 27, 2020.
Dear Readers,
Welcome to the thirteenth issue of The ALIA, a weekly newsletter dedicated to the lives of Asian women in America, and beyond, where we bring you the latest news and insightful conversations with industry professionals. In this volume, we feature women in fashion, media and arts. Find us on Instagram. Subscribe for free here.
Letter from the editor:
Hello! It’s so good to see you again, and a warm welcome to our new subscribers. This week we’re bringing you a very special issue featuring Jen Chae, also known as “From Head To Toe.” Jen was one of the first beauty bloggers on Youtube to create makeup tutorials designed for Asian features, paving the way for Asian makeup artists.
I remember when Jen’s monolid smokey eyeshadow tutorial was the only video I could find on Youtube for monolids, and I studied her technique meticulously to recreate the look for a school dance. Fast forward 1.2 million subscribers on Youtube, she’s still as down to earth as when she started 12 years ago.
Now, as a mom to Aria, 4, and Ezra, 2, she juggles parenting and her career while renovating their new home. I spoke to her about her journey, being a mom, facing racism growing up, and opening up about emotional experiences.
Exclusive: I want to share with you all an exclusive email subscriber issue, which will be released on Friday, where Jen shares her favorite beauty holy grails, daily routines, her dream home, and what she’s currently watching on Netflix. As a way to thank you for subscribing and continuing to support this newsletter, I’m truly so grateful.
As always, I hope you enjoy!
Sincerely,
Annie Lin
Founder of The ALIA
If you could like to learn more about this project, please contact us at contact@alia.news
Asian Creatives
Clockwise from top left: @lai_tiffany, @ricejasminee, @vivid, @katiecung
Community News
For an Asian • In a powerful piece for The Guardian, Matthew Salesses tackles the statement “good-looking for an Asian” and how he shed white ideals of masculinity as an adoptee with white parents. Unearthing historical contexts of the model minority myth and challenging stereotypes of Asian American men as “weak,” his message is far from weak. Read: The Guardian
Divided • A new documentary, “First Vote,” by director Yi Chen, “examines the shifting politics and allegiances of the Asian American electorate – the fastest-growing voting bloc in the country.” With election day approaching, the film profiles Asian American voters from both ends of politics. Read: NBC News
Raya • The official teaser trailer for Disney’s “Raya and the Last Dragon” was released six days ago. The animated film marks the studio’s first Southeast Asian inspired lead, voiced by Kelly Marie Tran as Raya and Awkwafina as Sisu, the last dragon. The U.S. theatrical release is set for March 12, 2021. Watch the trailer: Disney
Reality stars • In reality show news, Crystal Kung Minkoff is the first-ever Asian American cast member to join “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” for its 11th season. She’s the founder of Real Coco, a coconut-based beverage and snack company. Her husband, Rob Minkoff, is a filmmaker and director of the original “Lion King.” Read: Variety
In Conversation with Jen Chae
This week, we’re joined by beauty blogger and Youtuber Jen Chae, 35, aka From Head To Toe. If the Asian American beauty community had founders, Chae would be part of the squad. In this interview, Chae reflects on her childhood in Kansas, raising multiracial kids and her parent’s support in her blogging pursuit. Subscribe to our email newsletter for a bonus subscriber-exclusive issue releasing this Friday with Chae’s favorite beauty products, hair treatments, and more.
This interview has been edited for clarity and conciseness.
What was your experience of growing up Korean American in Kansas?
I was born in the suburbs of Kansas City, Missouri. Growing up, I would be the only Asian person in class year after year. When I graduated from high school, there were only two other Koreans in a class of 450 kids. That was the culture I was surrounded by. My friends were mainly Caucasian. It’s never easy when you’re different. You get bullied and picked on because you stand out. When you’re culturally alienated, it can go one of two ways. You could grow to hate the fact that you’re different and try to assimilate with whichever culture they’re in. Or, you get so used to being the different one that you march to the beat of your own drum – that was me.
Because I was so different, I embraced the fact that I was Korean. There were times growing up when I was confused about why everybody looked different from me, but I loved being Korean. I grew up listening to K-Pop, I went to Korean school, I did a traditional fan dance in elementary school. My parents went to a Korean church, which was my only exposure to any sort of Korean community. My mom always cooked Korean food at home. I think my parents really developed pride in being Korean.
How did you get your start in blogging?
Where and how I grew up laid the path for me to do what I did. At the time, there were no makeup tutorials for how to do makeup on monolids. I have a degree in industrial design, with an emphasis on psychology. With my background in art and my understanding of how light and shadow played, I made my own technique for putting on eyeshadow. Now, monolid girls take for granted how to put makeup on monolids. But nobody taught me how to do that. You see girls everywhere using that technique, not knowing where it came from. It wasn’t a thing back then.
I didn’t wear makeup for the longest time until I was doing interviews during and after college and wanted to be taken more seriously. That’s when I developed a love for makeup. I started by posting tutorials on Soompi’s beauty and fashion forums. One time, someone commented that I should start a blog. So I did. Back then, there was no such thing as a beauty blog. A few months in, I thought it made more sense to make videos showing how to recreate the looks rather than taking photos and typing it out. That was the beginning of my journey on Youtube. From then on, it took off in a way I hadn’t expected it to. I had no idea anyone else on Youtube would be watching my videos, other than the people who visited my blog. It was just a super fun hobby that I was passionate about. I didn’t know what it held for my future.
How has your upbringing shaped the way that you parent?
It’s fascinating reflecting on your parents and assessing how you were raised, and then being in those shoes to guide your children and instill those values within them. My parents were traditional Asian parents with high expectations of my sister and me academically, but they weren’t super strict comparatively. They would let us know that it was our obligation to do as best as we could, but I don’t remember them telling me to do my homework. I just knew I must. My sister has the opposite viewpoint of that. Maybe they weren’t as hard on me because I was the younger one.
Having married someone who doesn’t share that cultural background and seeing how my husband’s parents raised him, their academic expectations and how they communicate with each other – it’s very different. My husband, Ben, is Caucasian. We started dating when we were both 16-years-old in high school. People who follow me probably know him very well. He’s an extremely kind and generous person, which I think is a value he learned from his parents. I think it was shocking for me that their parenting approach was going with the flow. There were four kids in his family, so I think they also didn’t have time to harp on them about homework. While he didn’t have that pressure, Ben did very well and is a very intelligent, smart guy.
I’m thinking about my daughter, she’s four, and she’ll be starting kindergarten next year. I want her to do her absolute best, but I also don’t want my children to get nightmares about not remembering a pop quiz or having test anxiety. I’m 35 years old, and I still have those nightmares to this day. I think there are many things our parents didn’t have the benefit of knowing when raising us. We have so much more information on parenting techniques. The way I parent falls in between mine and Ben’s culture and background. We try to take the best of both worlds into how we raise our kids.
Teaching my kids Korean is a major priority of mine. I don’t want them to experience cultural confusion. I want them to embrace both sides, to feel fully Korean and fully American. Growing up, I always felt like I didn’t quite have a place. I wasn’t Korean enough for the Korean community. Yet, I wasn’t American enough for the American community. I experienced a lot of microaggressions. I want my kids to be capable of responding to that rhetoric from a place where they’re comfortable with who they are and are open to talking about any uncomfortability or racism that might arise along the way.
From the beginning, I’ve spoken both languages to them. I took them to a Korean daycare, and now they’re in a Korean preschool. They will inevitably learn a lot of English, so I want them to have that Korean language exposure from the start. The whole reason we bought a new house was to move to a district that has a dual-language program so half is taught in Korean and half in English. Having grown up in Kansas with so little diversity, I want to surround them with a diverse community.
Were your parents supportive of you changing careers to pursue your passion?
Before switching careers, I balanced my full-time job alongside blogging and Youtube for three years as a hobby on top of work. Every night when I came home from work, I would take photos, edit, write, and on weekends, I would film and create content for the upcoming week. I didn’t have a social life and I didn’t get to do many of the fun things my peers might have done at the time, but it gave me an opportunity to grow my content. When I was switching from my post-college job to the next full-time job, I had a big decision to make. I wasn’t making enough money from blogging to quit my job. But it was enough to question if I could be financially stable if I dedicated all my time to it.
My next job was a well-paid position at a highly regarded Korean company. But as you may know, Korean companies own you. They own your schedule, your activities. It’s very demanding. Culturally, there are high expectations. If you’re Korean American, you have to assimilate into the Korean business culture. I took that job and worked there for about a month before I started breaking down mentally as a human being. I was withering away. Looking back, it caused me to be depressed. I was so torn on what to do. On the surface, it had all the checkmarks of meeting societal expectations and making my parents proud. I was so afraid of disappointing my parents.
I finally made a huge list of pros and cons and decided I was going to quit. I went over to my parent’s house prepared to tell them. Before I could get the words out of my mouth, my dad said, “I’ve been praying about it. I think you should quit and pursue blogging,” and I bawled my eyes out. It’s a very emotional story for me. I get emotional every time I talk about it. To my parent’s credit, they believe that God has a greater path than for us than our societal expectations. I really appreciate that. My parents didn’t raise me to become a doctor or lawyer. I was always artistic and they wanted me to pursue that. The most important thing was to be able to make a living from it. As my Youtube was growing, they would ask if I’m getting paid.
So that moment with my dad was one of the first times I knew I had their support. That I’m really going to quit after three and a half weeks of working at the perfect Korean American job to pursue blogging. From then on, I focused all my energy on it. I prayed really hard about it. I felt like God was telling me, if you quit, I will make you more capable than you were in your previous job. It was still difficult and I wasn’t making as much money as I would’ve at my safe job. But if I hadn’t taken those risks and listened to my gut, with the blessing of my dad, I would never be where I am now. I worked twice as hard for three years to reach that point. It was a transformative experience. When Asian parents say they approve or they’re proud of you, those words don’t come frequently, but when they say it, you know it means everything.
Jen with her children, Ezra and Aria, and husband, Ben.
Has the current racial justice movements brought back any experiences or emotions for you?
To be honest, it hit me really hard. I was emotionally extremely affected by the Black Lives Matter movement because it brought back so many traumatic experiences from my past. I have been cornered at lockers in junior high by three boys who were a foot taller than me shouting racial taunts at my face. I didn’t say anything back. I just put my head down and took it. I feared getting beaten up. I’m 4-foot-11, what else was I going to do? I didn’t tell anyone because I didn’t know who I should talk to or how to ask for help. I thought this is what I get for looking different.
I’ve had hundreds of experiences like that growing up, and I would try to brush it off. I think many of us were faced with the burden of not speaking up. As Asian women, we’re taught to act like things aren’t problems because you shouldn’t cause a fuss. But just because conflict happens to me, doesn’t mean I’m creating the conflict. By being quiet, I’m allowing these conflicts to continue. I think that’s not right. Personally, I went through a big internal change of reprocessing these past experiences and doing so much crying, talking to my friends and reanalyzing things from this 2020 lens. It gave me a new passion to be more vocal about posting on Instagram about the racial injustices that are happening around us.
I think about my husband’s family or friends of theirs, where I might be the only quote-unquote diverse person they are exposed to. If I’m not saying, this hurts our people, this has hurt me in the past, then they won’t know. It’s not about making people feel uncomfortable. It’s about increasing everyone’s wisdom to be more empathetic and compassionate to each other. If we don’t share our stories, we can’t further other people’s compassion.
Now more than ever, I feel the urge not just to shut up and look pretty. I want to use my voice to let other people with similar experiences to know they don’t have to pretend like it didn’t happen. Those feelings are valid and important to talk about so we can educate others – our children, relatives and the people around us, including our own families. Being Asian, there’s a lot of racism within our community as well. The first step is to have the bravery to talk about what has always been happening. I don’t know many Asian Americans who haven’t faced significant racial aggression in some way. We’ve been taught to act like it’s not a big deal, we start to believe it and that’s a sad thing. It is a big deal.
With over two million followers across all social platforms, how do you present yourself online?
I am someone who 90% of the time does not have makeup or hair done, and I’m running around after a couple of screaming kids. I try to stay true to who I am as much as possible. It’s tricky balancing perfection and reality as an influencer because you know the quality of your photos will get you more likes. Truthfully, I don’t have the greatest third-person perspective of my content. I do get comments from people who are offended that I set unrealistic expectations. I have been posting more about working out. If I make any comments about my physicality at any stage and I’m not happy with it, people will project their own challenges onto me. If I say I have extra skin on my stomach, somebody will say, that’s not extra skin on your stomach, I am dealing with extra skin on my stomach.
As the person creating the content, it’s almost like I’m not allowed to be honest and vulnerable about my struggles because someone else will say their struggle is greater. When I posted about my traumatic labor history with my daughter’s birth. I had an awful recovery, an infection after I gave birth, and a lot of tearing. I couldn’t sit down for months afterward without being in pain. In the comments, people would say things like, women have been having babies for thousands of years with no medical help, so you need to stop complaining. But I could have died, seriously.
I think people have to focus on their mental state. We can only control our actions and the words that we speak, not anyone else’s. When someone else says something hateful, we have to give them empathy. I find that’s the only way to disarm that kind of defensiveness. I try my best to be open and honest in all shapes and forms. I know many other accounts that are successful by having a picture-perfect Instagram, but I’m choosing not to intentionally. There’s that quote from Dita Von Teese, “You can be the ripest, juiciest peach in the world, and there’s still going to be somebody who hates peaches.” The best you can do is be yourself and be authentic to your own experiences. Try to approach what you go through with grace and compassion. It’s just not who I am to clap back to haters. I’m not always quiet, but when I do respond, I try to respond with grace.
Having been in the blogging sphere for 12 years, how do you maintain creative content?
I always look back on the styles and content shifts I’ve had throughout my career. I think what remains at the end of the day is honing in on what you’re passionate about at that moment. One of my biggest challenges is being my own hype man. As Asian American women, we’re taught to downplay our achievements, not seek attention, or be too conceited. I have a lot of imposter syndrome. When things happen, I think I don’t deserve it. When I go through a hard time, I blame myself for being not creative enough and falling off from trends. You don’t have to follow someone else’s path. As long as you care about what you’re doing, that’s more important than following a trend. Even if you’re not chasing numbers, you’re putting something out there that will have a positive impact on someone else. We’re all influencers, we all have people seeing our content. We need to remember that.
I went through a phase of shopping hauls on Youtube. Then I realized it doesn’t bring me happiness. It doesn’t contribute to people being conscious of the environment or their mental health. Recently, I have been more passionate about proactively talking about mental health. That has been so rewarding because I’m excited about people having a positive perspective of themselves and being in a better mindset to interact with others, especially during the pandemic. That is what I care about.
Asian-owned Brands
Weekly Thoughts
Last week: What is your favorite street food?
Your responses:
“Stinky tofu is probably one of the most underrated street foods in my opinion. My parents told me when I was young that some shop owners exaggerate the smell for the gimmick. But when it's sold on the street, it's great! Every time I go to a night market in Taiwan, I always make sure to get it for just the complexity of flavors since it's usually served with a chili sauce and a Chinese-style pickled cabbage. The funk, with the sweetness of the chili sauce and the cabbage's tanginess, go together to create something I find delicious.” – Michael Lee, Chicago, Illinois.
This week: What is in your everyday bag?
#ALIAtalks and tag us @alia.news to join the conversation and we will feature the best submissions in next week’s newsletter. For email submissions, please email contact@alia.news
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