Jenn Tran on why a 'Love Island' star's slur 'struck a nerve' with Asian Americans
Tran, a 27-year-old physician assistant student who is also the most recent "Bachelorette," quickly took to TikTok to explain why the word was "demeaning and demoralizing." Tran's video has since accumulated 1.8 million views.
Cierra Ortega, 25, a frontrunner removed from the show, had used the epithet as recently as 2024 to describe the shape of her eyes – a look she had gone to a medical spa to fix with "a mini brow lift to open up my eyes."
"For me, it was more upsetting in which the context (the word) was used," Tran tells USA TODAY in a conversation about her reaction to Ortega's post.
"For someone to be using that word and being like, 'I am doing this to my eyes because I don't like the way that it looks' and the word that she used (refers to) Asian people – that struck a nerve with me because growing up, it was really, really hard to learn to love my features."
'A lot of people made fun' of Jenn Tran for 'the way my eyes are'
Tran, who is Vietnamese American, is outspoken about how a lack of Asian American representation affected her childhood.
"A lot of people made fun of me, the way that I looked, the way my eyes are, the way I brought smelly lunches to school, the way I speak a different language. So obviously that led into a bit of an identity crisis," she says.
She internalized this messaging and briefly considered blepharoplasty, one of the most common cosmetic procedures in the U.S. Among East Asian people, the so-called "double eyelid surgery" creates a crease in the upper lid and achieves the appearance of wider eyes.
"I definitely Googled getting that eye surgery. I definitely bought double-sided tape to give myself more of a double eyelid," Tran says.
"When everyone around you has big eyes ... you start thinking, 'Oh, I'm not beautiful. My eyes aren't beautiful,' " she says.
How Jenn Tran's season ended: A franchise empowered its Asian American lead — then tore her down
Jenn Tran: 'I shouldn't have to fix (my eyes)'
To see this message perpetuated decades later appalled Tran.
"I mean, these are my eyes. And I was born with them, and I shouldn't have to fix them. There's nothing to be fixed," she says.
"That's not the message we should be telling people – to go fix themselves."
'I'm very familiar' with the slur, Jenn Tran says
Most of the comments on Tran's video are supportive.
But a scroll through the remarks also reveals many people weren't familiar with the slur prior to the controversy. Ortega herself said in a video apology that she "had no idea."
'Incredibly offensive': Cierra Ortega opens up about slur use after 'Love Island USA' exit
The slur seemingly originated around 150 years ago and is believed to have originally been used in the 1800s in relation to Chinese immigrants, who were systemically excluded by the Page Act and Chinese Exclusion Act .
Tran is "very familiar" with the offensive word. "I've been called it on my social media recently. So, yeah, it's still out there," she says.
Addressing those who say the slur is 'not that serious'
In numerous TikTok videos about Ortega's controversy, there are comments from users who say the outcry is an overreaction by people who are "too sensitive."
Any time Tran speaks up about racism she encounters online, commenters dismiss her with statements like, "Why are you making everything about race? It's not that serious. Shut up," according to Tran. The solution, she believes, is a willingness to learn "about our cultures" and "open your heart" to others' experiences.
She also clarifies that her video is intended to raise awareness about the harm the slur can inflict, rather than "perpetuate this cyber-bullying" of Ortega, which she describes as having "gotten out of hand."
'I very much love all my features now'
For Tran, this conversation about anti-Asian racism has arrived during an era of self-acceptance.
"I've definitely been through that journey and thankful to be on the other side of it," she says. "I very much love all my features now."
She doesn't attribute the mindset to a singular reason. But "I grew up, and I realized rather than hating myself and getting a surgery to change myself, I just decided to accept myself," Tran says.
"And there's also a lot more Asian representation now and more people that look like me that I'm like, 'No, they are beautiful, and so am I.' "
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A professor's hunt for the rarest Chinese typewriter
It went into a suitcase and he took it back to California, where it joined a growing collection of Asian-language typing devices he'd hunted down. But there was one typewriter that Mullaney had little hope of ever finding: the MingKwai. Made by an eccentric Chinese linguist turned inventor living in Manhattan, the machine had mechanics that were a precursor to the systems almost everyone now uses to type in Chinese. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Only one -- the prototype -- was ever made. Advertisement 'It was the one machine,' he said recently, 'which despite all my cold-calling, all my stalking, was absolutely, 100 percent, definitely gone.' Mullaney's mania for clunky text appliances began in 2007, when he was preparing a talk on the disappearance of Chinese characters and found himself contemplating the disintegration of everything. Among the vast number of characters in the Chinese language -- around 100,000, by some estimates -- there are hundreds that no one alive knows how to pronounce. They are written down, plain as day, in old books, but their sounds, even their meanings, have been lost. Advertisement Sitting in his office, wondering at how something seemingly immortalized in print could be forgotten, Mullaney went down a mental rabbit hole. It would have been physically impossible to build a typing machine to include all the characters that were historically written out by hand, he thought. Some characters must have made the cut, while others were left behind. He sat back in his chair and asked himself: Could he recall ever having seen a Chinese typewriter? Two hours later, he was lying on the floor of his office, looking at patent documents for such devices. There had been, over the last century and a half, dozens of different Chinese typewriters made. Each one was an inventor's take on how to incorporate thousands of characters into a machine without making it unusable -- a physical manifestation of their ideas about language. Never plentiful, the typewriters were now increasingly rare, gone the way of most obsolete technology. Mullaney was fascinated. That evening turned into months of research, which turned into years of searching, as Chinese typewriters became one of his areas of historical expertise. He cold-called strangers and left voicemail messages for private collectors, people whom he suspected, from faint traces left on the internet, of having typewriters. He pored over looking for the next of kin of the last known owner of a particular machine. He called museums and asked, 'Do you, by any chance, have a Chinese typewriter?' Sometimes, they said yes. A private museum in Delaware happened to have a surviving IBM Chinese typewriter, of which only two or three were ever made. Someone at a Chinese Christian church in San Francisco got in touch with him to say they owned a typewriter that they were trying to get rid of. Mullaney took it off their hands. Advertisement The MingKwai is legendary among the handful of people who know about Chinese typewriters. It was invented by Lin Yutang, a Chinese linguist and public intellectual who had begun to worry in the 1930s that without some way to convert ink-brush characters into easily reproduced text, China would be left behind technologically -- perhaps destroyed at the hands of foreign powers. Attempts to create typing machines usually stumbled over the problem of cramming a galaxy of characters into a single machine. Lin's solution was an ingenious system housed in what looked like a large Western typewriter. But when you tapped the keys, something remarkable happened. Any two keystrokes, representing pieces of characters, moved gears within the machine. In a central window, which Lin called the Magic Eye, up to eight different characters containing those pieces then appeared, and the typist could select the right one. Lin had made it possible to type tens of thousands of characters using 72 keys. It was almost as if, Mullaney said, Lin had invented a keyboard with a single key capable of typing the entire Roman alphabet. He named his machine MingKwai, which roughly translates to 'clear and fast.' Lin, who was then living with his wife and children on Manhattan's Upper East Side, hired a New York machinist firm to make a prototype, at enormous cost to himself. He presented that prototype in a demonstration to executives from Remington, the typewriter manufacturer. Advertisement It was a failure. The machine malfunctioned at a crucial moment. Lin went bankrupt and the prototype was sold to Mergenthaler Linotype, a printing company in Brooklyn. And that, as far as Mullaney had been able to find out, was the machine's last known location. When Mergenthaler Linotype moved offices sometime in the 1950s, the machine disappeared. In his 2017 book, 'The Chinese Typewriter,' Mullaney wrote that he believed the MingKwai had most likely ended up on a scrap heap. This past January, Jennifer and Nelson Felix were in their home in Massapequa, N.Y., going through boxes that had been in storage since Felix's father died in Arizona five years before. They were looking at a wooden crate sitting among the cardboard boxes. 'What's this?' Jennifer Felix asked her husband. He'd had a peek in the crate back in Arizona. Oh, he said, it's that typewriter. She opened it, and realized it was not a typical typewriter. The symbols on the keys looked like Chinese. Nelson Felix, who often sold and bought items on Facebook, quickly found a group called 'What's My Typewriter Worth?' and posted some photos. Then they set it aside and moved on to other things. An hour later, Nelson Felix checked on his post. There were hundreds of comments, many written in Chinese. People kept tagging someone named Tom. The couple looked at each other. 'Who's Tom?' Mullaney was in Chicago to give a talk when his phone started going off -- ping, ping, ping. The small community of people he'd encountered in his long quest were sending up digital flares, urgently trying to get his attention. As soon as he saw the post, he knew exactly what he was looking at. It was the MingKwai. Advertisement But he didn't rejoice. He didn't sigh with relief. He was gripped with fear. What if they didn't know what they had and sold it before he could get to it? Someone could buy it with a click on eBay. They could make it into a coffee table. Take it apart and make steampunk earrings. It would be gone, just like that. He posted a comment on Facebook, asking the poster to contact him right away. After a few frantic hours, he got a reply, and the next day he and the Felixes were on the phone. He told them the MingKwai's story. He said that while it was up to them what they did with it, he hoped they would consider selling it to a museum. He was afraid that if it were sold at auction, it would disappear, a trophy hidden in the vacation home of an oil tycoon. Jennifer Felix was bewildered by what was happening. It was just a typewriter in a basement. But Mullaney had made an impression. 'It was lost for half a century,' she said. 'We didn't want it to get lost again.' 'To me it's just a typewriter,' she continued. 'But to other people it's history; it's a story, a life, a treasure.' Instructions and a box of tools were used to cast more Chinese character bars for the MingKwai 9 typewriter. CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK/NYT Mullaney figured out that Jennifer Felix's grandfather, Douglas Arthur Jung, had been a machinist at Mergenthaler Linotype. It's likely that when the company moved offices, he took the machine home. Then it was passed down to Felix's father, who, for more than a decade, had kept the MingKwai with him. 'That's what my dad decided to keep and bring across the country when they moved,' Felix said. Advertisement Keys on the MingKwai 9 typewriter. CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK/NYT Why, of all he had inherited from his own father, did he hang on to this typewriter? She doesn't know. But she feels it must have been a conscious choice: The MingKwai would not have been packed by accident. It weighs more than 50 pounds. In April, the couple made their decision. They sold the machine for an undisclosed amount to the Stanford University Libraries, which acquired it with the help of a private donor. This spring, the MingKwai made its way back across the country. When it was lifted out of the crate onto the floor at a Stanford warehouse, Mullaney lay down to look at it. The history professor could see that it was full of intricate machinery, far more delicate than any other typewriter he'd seen, and he began to imagine how engineers might help him understand it -- perhaps revealing what was going on in Lin's mind in 1947 when he invented a machine he thought could rescue China. Perhaps they could even build a new one. Lying on his stomach, Mullaney began to wonder. The MingKwai 9 typewriter. CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK/NYT This article originally appeared in
New York Post
3 hours ago
- New York Post
'Makeup meal prep' hack goes viral on TikTok: 'I'm influenced'
Her beauty hack is no longer under wraps. UK-based makeup influencer Sam Begum is dividing the Internet with her head-scratching yet speedy makeup routine: a full face of cosmetics applied to a piece of plastic wrap at night, then slapped on her face in the morning. Videos of her technique have racked up nearly 10 million views on TikTok in recent weeks. Advertisement Sam Begum's TikTok videos showing the puzzling technique have wracked up nearly 10 million views in recent weeks. sxmiabegum/ TikTok Begum, 23, starts by sticking a clean piece of plastic to her naked face, then applies foundation, concealer, blush and bronzer onto the film, then sets it aside. The next morning, she finishes the routine by reversing the plastic and placing the side with the cosmetics on her face. Advertisement The warpaint initially appears blotchy and out of whack, until Begum uses a puffy makeup brush to blend it in and applies setting powder over the top. A lip gloss pulls it all together — all while Begum walks out of her apartment building. @sxmiabegum anything for an extra 20 mins in bed🫶🏽 @Lancôme foundation @Saie blush @Diorbeauty stick contour @Huda Beauty lip oil ♬ original sound – Mell ❤︎︎ 'Girl mathing 20 more minutes in bed,' reads the caption of one of her videos showing the technique, which has amassed over seven million views since it was posted June 30. Advertisement The once-viral hashtag 'Girl Math' trend refers to the illogical ways women justify purchases – or, in this case, more time in mattress mode. Some TikTokers are inspired by the glam game-changer. Some TikTokers felt inspired by the glam game-changer, while it 'pissed off' others. sxmiabegum/ TikTok 'Meal prepping makeup,' one person mused in the comments. Advertisement 'I'm influenced,' wrote another. Others weren't as rosy. 'I can't explain it but this pmo [pissed me off],' another said in a comment that's racked up more than 2,000 likes. 'Imagine all the bacteria on that foil and all the bacteria you absorb on the street while blending it all,' one person pointed out, along with the crying face emoji. In a July 14 video, Begum urged her followers to create a hole in the mouth area of the plastic wrap if they decide to test out her technique. 'Don't knock it till u try [it]!' she wrote. Begum did not respond to requests for comment.
