Eileen Gu

After her outstanding performance at the Beijing Winter Olympics this month, 18-year-old freeskier Eileen Gu has become the definition of “the child next ...

“If China cancels the university and high school entrance examinations, kids definitely can sleep for that long,” said a top comment in response. With an MBA from Stanford and experience working in venture capital, the senior Gu had the financial resources and connections to build a life that allowed her daughter, who was raised in San Francisco, to move fluidly between the two countries, and to enjoy opportunities greater than those available to a kid growing up in China alone. After seeing how interested Gu was in the sport, Gu’s mother would spend eight hours driving her to and from sk parks on weekends and school holidays. Many have pointed to the background of her mother Yan Gu, who came from an elite Beijing family and studied at the prestigious Peking University, before going to the US in her early 20s. US-born Gu is setting a high bar for jiwa parents, and fomenting the anxiety generated by parenting in a country where opportunities for the young are starting to seem limited. Many Chinese parents are known for obsessively trying to raise the perfect child and doing everything possible to ensure their admission into an elite university—the equivalent of helicopter parents in the US. The kids of such parents have been dubbed jiwa (鸡娃), or baby chicks, a reference to a banned 1950s Chinese treatment of injecting chicken blood to increase energy.

Gu became the first action-sports athlete to win three medals at the same Winter Olympics by claiming the gold in Friday's freestyle skiing halfpipe. She ...

China has made me who I am, and I’m infinitely grateful to both.”MORE NEWS: “If people don’t agree with that, then I encourage them to do what they can and make the world a better place in whatever ways they want to. “That never used to be a thing.” So, in that sense, I feel like the U.S. has made me who I am. “That always felt more like the Olympic spirit than having these nationalistic teams.” She learned to ski in the United States and trained with the American team for years. If there’s any animus among the U.S. team for what some view as her abandonment of the people who brought her through the ranks, it’s not openly visible on the mountain. “I’m not trying to solve political problems right now,” she said, offering pushback to those who suggest skiing for China somehow implies her unquestioning approval of the country’s government and its policies. “Maybe she sees someone who looks like her doing it and thinks, ‘Hey, I can do that, too.’”READ MORE: It planted a seed: She would love to see this sport grow in her mother’s home country. I am not tired.”) and how she brought her beloved truffle oil to China. “They say, ‘Is she Chinese? Is she American? Is she a model?

Frankie Huang is a Chinese American writer, editor and illustrator whose work explores diaspora identity and feminism. She is the deputy editor-in-chief of ...

Being Chinese American need not be considered a fractured experience: There’s no division between where the Chinese part of me ends and the American part begins. Like many Chinese Americans, I long to be embraced by the homeland to which I feel a strong tie. It's true that this sort of nationalistic projection, obscuring individual humanity and seeing everything in terms of geopolitics, may be part and parcel of an international sporting event such as the Olympics. But it’s worth contrasting Gu’s reception with the way other Chinese Americans on Team China are treated: Take skater Zhu Yi, who renounced her American citizenship. But the Chinese media frequently takes the liberty to proclaim her decision to represent China as political. Since growing a thick skin against the regular barrage of racism I experienced in the United States, I was surprised by how much this treatment hurt; I felt like a dog walking on two legs. Shopkeepers in Beijing always bragged about how quickly they identified that I had returned from overseas — something about the directness of my gaze and my unfeminine body language.

When it comes to Eileen Gu, the 18-year-old Olympic gold medalist freestyle skier who was born in San Francisco but competed for China, Chinese Americans ...

The Beijing Games have been a thrill for three-time medalist Eileen Gu, but the American-born skier has faced some harsh criticism for her decision to ...

With her halfpipe win, Gu became the first athlete to win three medals in three different freestyle skiing disciplines. China had never won a medal in any of ...

Gu is headed to Stanford after deferring to prepare for the Olympics, something that should make her grandma happy. She definitely had a breakout Olympics and will only be 23 for the Milano Cortina Games in 2026. Gu wanted to show her grandma her sport and passion and did exactly that. The California native added that her grandmother had not yet accepted that she was a professional skier. The American-born skier, raised by her mother and grandmother in San Francisco, switched to compete for China in 2019, her mother’s native land. Outside of winning a medal, her hardest task in Beijing might be convincing her grandmother that she's a good enough skier to do it professionally.