Name: I Was That Awkward Asian Girl From BuzzFeed • This Is That Story
Uploaded: 2025-11-29T16:51:18.000Z
Duration: 17 min 6 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I used to be that awkward Asian girl at buzzfeed, and now I'm blonde.

Everybody, everybody can hear you down the street.

If you clicked on this video, you probably recognize my face.

Maybe you're like, wait, did that girl from buzzfeed have a brother?

You may have missed a few chapters, but let's get into it.

And I grew up very, very conservative, super Christian, went to a school where my graduating class was 19 people.

And I just remember thinking my life was gonna be so small growing up.

Unfortunately for me, I always knew I was gay.

My childhood was marked by dealing with a secret from the very, very beginning of not being able to be who I was.

And I was like, this is going to be a rough life.

I went from a very conservative Christian background to a conservative Christian college.

And then from there, I moved to South Korea to teach English because I was so lost, I had no idea what I wanted to do.

And during that time is when buzzfeed started blowing up.

Someone said that in order to keep hired at buzzfeed, you have to write for their community tab.

Anyone could sign up and you could write BuzzFeed articles, and

So I wrote one and it got like 3,000 views, which was crazy to me to have 3,000 people read something.

I was like, oh, great, they're gonna call me tomorrow.

I wrote another Post for the BuzzFeed Community Post While I was in Korea called what it's like to be a Girl, as told by Girls, Mean Girls and Bridesmaids.

And I went from like, you've gotten 500 views to you've gotten a thousand to overnight having over a million views in my whole bank of emails telling me that I had gone viral.

And that's how I ended up at Buzzfeed New York in 2013 as a 23 year old with a dream.

I eventually moved out to buzzfeed LA and got my job at video on accident.

And Ze Frank, who was the president of buzzfeed video at that point said, hey, you're loud.

Then I was in a few taste tests, and people liked me or gravitated towards me.

They were like, hey, that awkward Asian girl's funny.

I made a video called if your phone was your boyfriend with Andrew Gaultier and Ella Mielnoshenko.

I didn't know why he needed to be so handsome.

And I think that led to the whole dynamic of me being awkward because I didn't know how to do be anything in front of this model man.

But at that point, buzzfeed video was not really scripted content.

And so we realized, like, we have to create a new ecosystem for this scripted content.

And so we came up with buzzfeed Violet, which would be feeding female centric scripted content that's identity based.

And then it kind of just exploded in this way that we did not ever anticipate happening.

And my whole life changed from that point.

We were releasing one to two videos a week.

We started to need to bring new producers on because we couldn't produce fast enough.

We went pretty quickly, I think, to like, a couple million subs on the channel.

And with each video, more and more people were relating to me as a person, which was both an honor and terrifying.

So at that same moment that YouTube was taking off in the way that it was Instagram was taking off, which meant that people were watching our YouTube videos and then following us personally on Instagram.

I remember going from, like, I don't know, 30, 40,000 followers to 700,000 within a couple of months.

It had been my dream for so long to get in front of camera and get famous and be an actor.

And when it actually happened, it was in this kind of semi confusing way of I was acting, but

I was using my real name and my character's name was Ashley.

And very quickly, my character got shipped with another one of my co workers named Andrew, who was in a real relationship.

So Andrew was the weird guy and I was the awkward girl.

And there was, like, natural chemistry on screen.

It kind of just kept building and snowballing until it became something called Ashtru, the ship name for me and Andrew.

Like, it was part of our thesis of why BuzzFeed Violet was working.

Because no matter what videos we did, we would always try and keep this continuing thread of a story.

And Ash Drew, you know, Like a sitcom, a classic.

Keeps you watching through all the episodes.

That was what it's like when you're sick.

Because in it I have a fever dream about Andrew.

And so in order to stay in on the whole buzzfeed Violet lore and to keep up with this ship, you had to watch all these videos.

So everything was going according to plan.

Except for that inside I was 24 year old who was starting to feel the dissonance of not actually being who I was.

It's not that I didn't like men, but it was like a 9010 split.

I'll say that that was definitely coming out on camera.

But it all kind of culminated or crashed with Astru getting a little too big and getting to the point where people were expecting us to kiss.

The T is just that it was confusing for us too, because it's not what we signed up for.

And it was such a mind because I knew I was gay and I was starting to feel what I now know is gender dysphoria underneath all of that.

I didn't really know who I was at that point.

You know, when we did the you do youo series, I remember when we started doing makeup tests for my character, it was so femme and I hated it.

And I remember having to tell the makeup artist, like, I can't have my hair like this.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

I Was That Awkward Asian Girl From BuzzFeed • This Is That Story

awkward

weird

episode

mental