By now you’ve heard: Timothée Chalamet did not win Best Actor tonight. Michael B. Jordan did, for Sinners, and the Academy made its choice between two very different visions of American masculine ambition — the vampire blues epic that broke nomination records and the ping pong narcissist who spent the week before the ceremony selling fermented tofu in Chengdu.

In retrospect, it was either one of the most confident moves of his career, or the tell. You don’t skip the guild dinners and the voter screenings and the careful late-season maintenance to go eat hotpot in Sichuan unless you’ve decided the Oscar isn’t the point. He came home from China without a statue and with something harder to name: a week of footage so effortlessly charming it already feels like mythology.

So: What in the Chinamaxxing world was this? Let’s go back to the beginning.

I was minding my own business, scrolling Xiaohongshu, when a thumbnail stopped me cold: a twinky white boy with a mustache, selling moldy tofu from a street stand. Xiaohongshu is one of the only platforms left where you actually have to click before seeing content in full. I did not click. AI-generated slop of Timothée Chalamet, my instinct said. Then I did a double take — because the caption read: Timotee Maimaiti (a common Uyghur name). Maybe a local Chalamet lookalike? I moved on. Hours later, the algo circled back, and I found out the truth: it was an authentic picture of Timothée Chalamet, selling dubious-looking tofu, on the street, in Chengdu.

(Host, Pixel Perfect):

The AI-generated content paranoia is so real. Sign of our times.

IZZY:

Turns out, Sweet Tea (甜茶, his extremely earned Chinese fan nickname) touched down in China and simply never broke character as Marty Mauser. He tracked down a poster of ping pong world champion Sun Yingsha like a true devotee. He took the metro. He ate hotpot until his face turned red. He wandered Beijing alleyways and then showed up at a university to shoot hoops with students. The bar for press tours has been raised, and it is now located somewhere in a Chengdu park at 8am, next to a group of uncles who will absolutely destroy you at ping pong. There's something pointed about a Best Actor nominee choosing to spend the week before the ceremony this way—courting Chinese fans instead of doing the careful rituals of awards season.

Before you read any further, watch these two short clips from this campaign. The editor manages to turn what could have come across as 甜茶新春走基层 into a poetic musing on fame and solitude.

YANG (Host, CyberPink):

I’d like to thank the algorithm for serving me the Beijing metro video before the tofu one. (Also if you’ve ever had moldy tofu, please tell me in the comments what it actually tastes like — I am so curious.) As Izzy said, whoever edited that video did an exquisite job. That Timmy blends so seamlessly into a Beijing subway car has everything to do with the fact that he’s a New York kid. Anyone who’s been ground down by a big city recognizes it viscerally: this is one of those trains just after evening rush hour, when the flood of commuters has thinned to a trickle. Everyone is either sitting with their eyes closed, or plugging AirPods in to drown out train noise with even louder music, or pulling the slot machine on their phone for a hit of dopamine.

YIWEN:

Yes — the metro video jump-cuts from Timmy as your normal soulless Beijing 社畜 to Chalamet as the red carpet star. The one where he bought a Sun Yingsha poster I liked even better; it reminded me of the gritty, street-level filmmaking in Uncut Gems. In both videos, and by extension this entire press tour, the goal seems to be presenting Timmy as just another guy living in China. It worked. Isn’t it a little ironic how easily he blended in?

Fun fact: there have been discussions on Xiaohongshu about the editor behind those videos. A millennial lifestyle influencer (sorry) came out on Weibo to drop the lore of her friend — the unnamed, talented editor finally being discovered by the world through this clip. I’d be really curious to find out who else is on Timmy’s team. Who came up with the moldy tofu scene? Also, in that video, Timmy says to the camera: 你什么意思. That’s the same line Paul Atreides delivers to Dr. Yueh in Dune: Part One. Delicious Easter egg.

YANG:

Timmy has a distinctive urban hooligan/小瘪三/混子 energy. After Marty Mauser possessed him, this energy got more pronounced. New York and Beijing both breed this kind of small-time hustler; the art that comes out of both cities has always had a soft spot for them. They’re portrayed as resourceful, scrappy, quick on their feet, very punchable, but somehow more lovable. This 瘪三混子 archetype is a romanticized, heroic projection of ordinary urban life: sure, I am nobody, but just watch me — if you fuck with me, I will still draw blood.

Watching Marty Supreme reminded me of 老炮儿 (criminally translated as Mr. Six, a title that loses everything). That film caught criticism when it came out. Its director Feng Xiaogang — a cultural icon of 大院子弟, someone who grew up behind the walls of Beijing’s privileged Party compounds — cast himself as 六爷 aka Mr. Six, a bottom-rung Beijing local. The villain is a designer-clad rich kid who, of all things, challenges the old guard to a fight on a frozen lake behind the Summer Palace. Mr. Six dies of cancer on the lake before the fight even breaks out — but achieves the highest form of fulfillment. All of his brothers and his former lover showed up to witness his heroism.

Both 老炮儿 and Marty Supreme share a fierce nostalgia for an urban ethos: way back when, in some not-so-distant past before the rules of the game fully calcified, we weren’t yet the domesticated urban middle class we’ve since become. People didn’t make their living by clocking in nine-to-five, but by their wits and the loyalty of their crew, hustling and improvising their way through. The city was still a 江湖 — the whole world is the underground world — and there’s always room for a hero to write his own story. 六爷 and Marty Mauser are both men chasing something that will probably destroy them, and the films wants us to love them for it anyway.

YIWEN:

The Chinese internet has in recent years placed enormous emphasis on 活人感 — the “vibe of being alive” — among celebrities. It’s a backlash against polished millennial internet culture (sorry again) where everything had to be filtered, flawless, and perfect. This vibe shift is obviously happening on the American internet too, but it would be tougher for most Western celebrities to crack in China. Here, it’s still relatively easy to be authentic and get loved. As many comments about Chalamet’s tour went: 闯中态度很好 — proactive attitude breaking into the China market — a phrase usually applied to K-pop groups trying to build rapport. People notice whether a celebrity bothers to speak Chinese, leans into local memes (moldy tofu), and shows up to everyday activities (ping pong with grandparents). It’s worth saying clearly: the authenticity here was real, and it was also produced — by a skilled Chinese editor, a significant marketing budget, and a team that clearly understood the assignment. Those two things are not mutually exclusive. The seams just happened to be invisible.

IZZY:

I want to step back for a sec — a brief orientation in the semiotics of 甜茶. It’s a phonetic accident that became destiny: the first syllable of “Chalamet” sounds like chá/茶, and the rest is just vibes — he’s pretty, delicate, and has the face of someone who would grace the cover of every gray-market Boys’ Love (yaoi/danmei) novel my generation of Chinese women grew up reading. The origin of his Chinese cult status is Call Me By Your Name, a film that never received a theatrical release in China — and yet was one of the most-discussed, most-screenshotted films on my corner of the Chinese internet at the time. Timmy will forever be the boy weeping into a peach in the Lombardy countryside: the 白月光, the “white moonlight,” a figure of yearning that can’t be consummated.

In the decade that followed, danmei fandom went from fringe subculture to undeniable mainstream. I was recently at a Shanghai shopping mall run by a state-owned enterprise where an entire floor was devoted to homegrown danmei merchandise — buttons, novels, manga. The Communist Party and the boys’ love industrial complex, coexisting peacefully under one roof.

But here’s the thing about white moonlight: it is more beautiful in memory than in reality. When 甜茶 landed in Chengdu — the gayest city in China — in a Marty Supreme Nahmias jacket to sell fermented tofu and get destroyed at ping pong by retirees, he was no longer that boy.

Because the Timothée Chalamet of the American tabloid imagination is not, to put it gently, a figure of ethereal yearning. He’s the guy who dates Kylie Jenner, makes a scene at a Beyoncé concert, and is prone to the specific kind of chaotic self-sabotage that only very beautiful people with very good publicists can survive. Marty Mauser, basically, but with generational wealth.

YIWEN:

Chat, I’m heartbroken.

YANG:

The world mourns with you.

YIWEN:

Talk about my own nostalgia for a not-so-distant past. I’ve watched every one of Chalamet’s early films — CMBYN, Beautiful Boy, Little Women, even A Rainy Day in New York (it’s funny) and a rewatch of Interstellar (he was just a baby). It takes a while to accept the truth: at his core, he’s an American frat boy who has grown up. What I mean by the swag gap is simple: the boy who played Elio has fully vacated the premises, and in his place is a guy who has decided his own celebrity is more interesting than the characters he plays. That said, I’m slightly jealous of this generation of American celebrities’ ability to simply ignore what used to define their careers and move on. How much I missed the twinky boy doesn’t really matter.

The timing of the China tour also coincided with growing backlash against Chalamet in the U.S. Just before the Oscars, he made a controversial comment about the irrelevance of opera and ballet. Hardly out of character, really. The overall reception of the campaign in China has been quite positive — we’ll see if that shows up at the box office.

YANG:

The K-pop fandom has a word for this: namjabyeong — when an idol stops being content as an object of projection and starts asserting his own masculine identity. My feelings about it are complicated. I’m deeply wary of the control East Asian fan culture exerts over an idol’s exploration of their own identity. But Timmy isn’t a teenage HYBE trainee; he’s an A-list movie star in his thirties. The world dotes on him the way Beijing dotes on its 老炮儿, and they won’t miss me in the crowd. Some men simply get to become themselves, and the rest of us adjust.

What’s interesting is that in the whole Chinamaxxing trend, many Western men found in China a very rough, folksy, Beijing-uncle masculinity. Japan is claimed by the sensitive, cultured, artsy bunch; Korean masculinity is already filtered through the female gaze via K-pop. But Chinese masculinity is organic, free-range, grass-fed manhood: lifting your shirt in public as if women don’t exist, smoking in enclosed spaces as if children don’t exist, gaining weight and accumulating chronic diseases as if aging doesn’t exist. It is untainted by the long, grinding negotiation of learning to share the world with others. These guys have stumbled onto a revelation: China is a country where being a man feels great.

China is for the bros. Timmy is a bro — what a perfect match.

New Episodes from Baihua:

EP79 | 伊朗战事、中期选举第一枪、DHS换人 Iran war, midterms fire up, and a DHS shakeup

EP77 | Vibe Shift 三部曲：匮乏时代的流行文化 Popular culture in the age of scarcity

EP18 对话《纽约客》作者刘亦灵：在算法和审查中寻找灵魂自由的舞动 A conversation with Yi-Ling Liu on ‘Wall Dancers’

EP19 存算一体与Agentic AI的个性化之路 Conversation on one of the defining questions of AI in 2026: personalization

EP17 关于照护的故事，电影有更激进的想象 ‘Rosemead’, ‘Take me home’, and telling stories about caregiving

EP19｜妈妈，如果我是蟑螂你会爱我吗 Mom, If I Were a Cockroach, Would You Still Love Me?

I’m a journalist and visual storyteller. For the past eight years, I’ve also had what might be the ultimate luxury of our times: creating a podcast with three of my best friends to talk about American TV, movies, and the cultural products that have shaped our lives. What started as four friends gathering around a microphone became 疲惫娇娃 CyberPink (formerly Loud Murmurs), a show that now reaches hundreds of thousands of listeners across borders—physical and digital alike.

You’re receiving this email because at some point, you joined us on this journey. Maybe you attended one of our book clubs co-hosted with “American Roulette 美轮美换,” subscribed to the fantastic 美轮美换 newsletter, supported us on Patreon, or simply sent us a message that made our day.

Thank you. Those gestures matter more than you know.

What I didn’t anticipate was how much this show would change my life, and from the letters we’ve received over the years, how it would touch others too. Somewhere along the way, I came to believe that high-quality dialogue by and for the Chinese diaspora is a net good—for the creators, for the listeners, for the world. I wanted more of it. And because my work connects me with some of the most creative, perceptive voices among the Chinese diaspora, I thought: why not build it ourselves?

So two and a half years ago, I gathered a few people in my Brooklyn living room with an idea: a podcast incubator for the Chinese-speaking voices. That meeting became Baihua Media.

Long before “Chinamaxxing” became a thing, demand for quality dialogues about thoughts on and about China had been quietly growing, driven by exodus of intellectuals from a closing China, but also by second-gen kids trying to understand their heritage, and honestly, anyone chronically online enough to notice the internet is split in half. When Clubhouse briefly opened in 2021, hundreds of thousands of Chinese-speaking users flocked to it for conversations impossible within China’s controlled internet. The yearning was palpable. It still is.

When TikTok faced a ban last year and Americans mass-migrated to Xiaohongshu, posting “TikTok refugee” videos and trading memes with their fellow Chinese netizens, something became clear: the world is waking up to the fact that there’s a whole parallel internet, culture, and political reality they’ve been missing.

I’d always been straddling both—someone who moved to the U.S. at fifteen, who’s spent a decade as a China reporter, who can code-switch between explaining American politics to Chinese audiences and translating Chinese internet culture for Western readers. Baihua is an aggregation of people like me, a generation that’s digitally native, globally minded, and tired of choosing between oversimplified narratives.

Today, Baihua is a network of six podcasts:

• 疲惫娇娃 CyberPink on pop culture,

• 美轮美换 American Roulette on U.S. politics,

• 新新人类 Pixel Perfect on technology,

• 大波福娃 Dat Beauvoir on queer feminist topics,

• 残言片语 Disabled Talks on disability issues, and

• 选修课 Universus on humanities.

All in Chinese, all unapologetically tackling topics you won’t find elsewhere. We’ve also hosted IRL events – book clubs, documentary screenings, live podcast recordings. We are creating the kind of spaces where you can actually talk about what’s happening without having to dumb it down or worry about being lost in context translations.

This newsletter is part of that. Beyond algorithms, beyond whatever platform drama is happening—just us sharing what we’re building, what we’re reading, and what we’re noticing about the most active public discourse space inside China’s walled internet: the Chinese podcastsphere.

In the following issues, you’ll meet the rest of the Baihua crew—Hua, a habitually online human encyclopedia of American politics; Yang, who opines beautifully on topics from culture to healthcare to tech and is three workaholics rolled into one; Ina, who turns gossip into a serious anthropological subject; and Afra, a brilliant tech writer who inspires me take risks and think bigger. They will be rotating this newsletter with me. We’ll share the latest episodes from Baihua pods, curated recommendations, and observations on everything from Chinese internet culture to diaspora identity to why certain things just hit different when you understand both contexts.

Welcome to Baihua. We’re glad you’re here.

大家好，我是小蓝。

我是一名记者，也做视觉叙事。过去八年里，我做了一件可能是我们这个时代最奢侈的事：和三个最好的朋友一起创建了一档播客，聊美剧、电影、还有那些影响我们人生的文化产品。好友朋友围着麦克风的闲聊最后变成了《疲惫娇娃 CyberPink》(曾经的《小声喧哗》)，一档拥有十万听众的流行文化播客。

你收到这封邮件，是因为你在某个时刻与我们同行。可能你来过我们和《美轮美换》一起办的读书会，订阅美轮美换的新闻通讯，在 Patreon 上支持过我们，或者给我们发过让我们开心一整天的消息和评论。

真的很感谢，这些鼓励对我们来说极其重要。

我之前没想到，这档播客会这么深刻地改变我的生活。从这些年收到的留言里，我也看到它影响了很多其他人。这让我逐渐开始相信，全球华语社群之间的有质量的对谈对播客创作者、听众和整个世界，都是一件好事。我想要听到更多这样的对话。而且因为工作关系，我认识一些在美华语群体里最有创造力、最敏锐的人。于是我想：我们为什么不自己做呢？

于是两年半前，我在布鲁克林的客厅里召集了几个朋友，提出了一个想法：做一个属于我们自己社群的播客厂牌，那次会面后来变成了百花。

在”Chinamaxxing”成为一个梗之前，对于高质量的、关于中国和中国思想的对话的需求就已经在悄悄增长——源于知识分子从逐渐封闭的中国出走，也源于二代移民想要理解自己的文化根源，当然也包括大量长期在线、敏锐到足以察觉互联网其实被一分为二的人。2021年 Clubhouse 短暂开放时，成千上万说中文的用户涌向这个平台，进行在中国互联网上无法想象的对话。那种渴望是如此强烈。现在依然如此。去年 TikTok 面临禁令时，大批美国用户涌入小红书，发“洋抖难民”视频，和中国网友互换 meme。全世界都开始意识到，这里有一个他们一直错过的平行互联网、平行文化和平行现实。

我一直横跨在两边，15岁移民美国，做了十年中国报道的记者，既能给中文受众解释美国，也能给英文读者翻译中文互联网。百花是像我这样的人的聚合：数字原住民、全球互联网上长大、厌倦了在过度简化的叙事之间二选一的一代人。

现在，百花旗下有六档播客：

• 聊流行文化的《疲惫娇娃 CyberPink》

• 聊美国政治的《美轮美换 American Roulette》

• 聊科技的《新新人类 Pixel Perfect》

• 聊酷儿女性话题的《大波福娃 Dat Beauvoir》

• 聊残障议题的《残言片语 Disabled Talks》

• 还有聊人文内容的《选修课 Universus》。

所有播客都是中文，用自然的、毫不退让的方式探讨别处找不到的话题。我们还办线下活动——读书会、纪录片放映、播客现场录制。我们想构建一个让你可以不用过度解释自己、不用在意什么才是主流，也不担心在语境中迷失的讨论空间。

这份百花通讯也是其中的一部分。我们希望能用一种超越算法、超越平台圈地的方式直接和你交流，分享各种活动、我们正在读的内容，以及我们对中文播客（目前中国互联网内最活跃的公共讨论空间）的观察、思考和总结。

在接下来的通讯里，你也会认识百花的其他成员——小华，一个长期在线的美国政治百科全书；小杨，从文化到医疗到科技无所不知的观察家和工作狂；一芳，擅长用人类学的方式研究各类严肃八卦；还有 Afra，总能让我打开格局的优秀科技写作者。他们会和我轮流写这份通讯，我们会分享百花播客的最新节目、精选推荐，从中文互联网文化到跨国界文化的身份认同，以及那些需要理解两边的语境时才会有的共鸣。

欢迎来到百花，很高兴在这里见到你。

Izzy/小蓝