Infinite first times
An introduction to Wang Yibo, this newsletter, and me
A few years ago, I experienced one of those extended periods of social media backlash that intermittently hit me. In the middle of it all, I chanced upon a conversation between two people who were dissecting a comment I’d made somewhere about how I’d upgraded my Google Drive storage space in order to hold more photos of Wang Yibo and Xiao Zhan — specifically a backup of an enormous publicly shared folder full of 4gb worth of photos of Yibo that had found its way to me.
This comment struck the bystanders as egregiously obsessive, which struck me in turn as a really weird thing to get hung up on. After all, what even is 4gb in the age of enormous high-res photoshoots? Furthermore, I was absolutely surrounded by fans for whom this sort of shared digital archiving was second nature. I am the kind of fan who’s spent well over a decade bookmarking links across fandom — mainly of fanfiction, but also of everything else fandom-adjacent under the sun. I’m a huge supporter of projects like the Archive of Our Own and the OTW, the Audiofic Archive, Yuletide. (Yuletide season started this week! Hooray!) For the last 18 years or so I’ve been carting around an ancient Seagate external hard drive full of Prince of Tennis fanart. Of course I have a giant archive of Wang Yibo photos. What, like that’s weird?!
All of this should tell you why I was never going to start a normal proper journalist newsletter. For one thing, compared to other culture writers in my sphere, I have whatever the opposite of a loyal reader following is. For another, a large part of my career has gone to normalizing fannish obsessions like these because I do think they’re normal, even though clearly some people still think fans, at least fans who move in the spaces I do, are creepy and inappropriate. The tools that once helped me gain acceptance for my fandom activities — an insistence on putting my name to my online identity and treating it like it was no big deal — have weakened in this era of social media. Fan collectives have grown more and more toxic. The recent cultural turn towards fascism has revived all kinds of social shaming, including fanshaming. And honestly, I’ve grown jaded about many things in fandom.
Except, that is, for Wang Yibo.
I assume if you’re reading this, you’re familiar with either me or Yibo or both of us. But just in case you need a refresher: I’m a culture writer for Vox; before that I was a fandom reporter (my actual title) for an internet culture outlet called the Daily Dot for a few years; before that I was a geek media freelancer and a longtime participant in transformative fandom. That’s the mostly female-dominated side of fandom that makes fanfic and other creative works, as opposed to the male geek-trended side that focuses on curating knowledge. (That said, the “transformative” vs “curative” distinctions have become very blurred and less relevant in recent years, and those sorts of fan practices have waned in importance relative to the activities of “stans” and “antis” as social media has compressed fandoms into ideologically-driven factions and enclaves.)
As for Yibo, he’s…. tough to describe in a nutshell. He’s a 27-year-old Chinese pop star (had his birthday earlier this month!) who’s had an almost entirely self-determined career, to put it extremely mildly. He decided around age 8 that he wanted to seriously become a dancer. Because he is preternaturally good at absolutely everything, he soon was not only dancing, he was competing and performing well in national hip-hop competitions — well enough that in 2010, when he was still just 13, he went to Korea to train with YG, one of Korea’s major K-pop studios. By 2015 he was actively prepping for his forthcoming debut as the lead dancer and rapper of the Chinese-Korean band Uniq, produced by Yibo’s agency/studio Yuehua. Uniq got as far as putting out a handful of singles and were on the cusp of debuting properly in Korea, when, in early 2017, the Chinese government issued a ban on K-pop, sending Yibo along with many prominent K-pop idols (Jackson Wang and the Chinese members of Exo among others) skedaddling back to China, their careers upended.
For the properly established K-pop stars, this probably wasn’t a make-or-break moment. For Yibo, however, it meant effectively restarting his entire career after years of effort.
Wang Yibo isn’t the kind of idol who screams “stardom.” He sneaks up on you. Maybe it’s the first time, or the third time or the fourth time, you see him dance, and realize how his limbs seem to move in this constant paradox of effortless liquid motion punctuated by crisp, sharp, precise accents. Maybe it’s the eight or ninth time you notice him dancing with his tongue stuck out like a taunt or a come on because he’s feeling himself that much. The way he radiates joy.
Or maybe it’s the way you gradually realize that Yibo is probably, actually, a polymath in the literal sense — someone unnaturally gifted at everything he puts his hand to, from dancing to rapping to acting (holy shit, his acting! ahh, we’ll get there, we’ll get there) to bike racing (he competed — and won — against pro racers after just a year or two of training) to a long litany of sports to whatever the hell this was.
Maybe it’s his level of commitment to the bit. He’s known for pulling off unlikely dance routines and regularly smoking his opponents in hip-hop battles by taking them all seriously, even when his audience and his competitors don’t. He’s an accomplished model and absolute fashion maven. His personal style is wide-ranging and smart, tending to veer between high-end street fashion and rich-widow Chanel. Yet when he’s modeling for his sponsors, he commits to the most ridiculous looks until they become, somehow, utterly iconic.
Maybe it’s the many ways he demonstrates consistent and enormous loyalty towards the people close to him; the way he lights like a lantern when he sees an old friend. Maybe the way he’s constantly surprising you — from dance performances that range from krump to folk dance and everything in between, to his current career choices, which… well, let’s just use this week as our example.
This 7-day stretch has been a big one for fans of Wang Yibo. He began it with a fanmeet with a corporate sponsor for whom he had designed a couch, like had actually come up with the design for a couch, on a whim, that the engineers were then inspired to make for real real. Because that’s just the kind of thing that he does. ?!?!
Then he dropped the news that for the last year, when news of his activity was kept very hush-hush, he’d been working on an extreme nature docuseries with the Discovery Channel (yes, that Discovery Channel) — an idea that he’d created and pitched himself that involved spending a year doing a variety of extreme sports like mountain climbing, paragliding, and fucking freediving, just to experience it all for himself. Then he capped it all off at the annual Yuehua concert by debuting a brand new song and a new dance performance all in one go. The official video is fine, but the fancams are where the real magic is, all for the way he moves. The way he moves.
And all of this has just been one dizzying week in the life of a man (though calling him a man instead of a kid always seems so bizarre; he’s been so young for so long, how could he be aging?!) who seems to never stop working, never stop developing his skills and trying new things, never stops never stopping, you get the idea.
Have I mentioned yet that he garnered the equivalent of an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor last year — a Golden Rooster — for his first major film release?
All of this is to say that absolutely none of this is readily apparent at first sight. Yibo is brusque, taciturn, just shy of rude in his interactions with fans and media outlets — unless you get him on the topic of something he loves. His obsessive loves and delighted hyperfixations, as well as his adaptability and sheer cleverness, make him a source of inspiration and joy for legions of neurodivergent fans. His embrace of the homoerotic and apparent disregard for gender roles has made him a queer icon. But you can’t exactly squeeze all of that into an elevator pitch. His face is full of angles that shouldn’t work until they do; until they redefine all your standards of beauty. But nothing about this screams “pop star.”
In 2017, it didn’t even scream “variety show host.” After he returned from Korea, Yibo struggled to find work. At his rock bottom, Yuehua submitted him to audition for the popular Chinese variety show Day Day Up, to become a jack-of-all-trades young host. Yibo wasn’t even their first choice for this gig. They’d intended to submit a different idol instead, but when the other idol backed out, they sent Yibo instead, thinking he might be a good fit since he spoke Korean.
The audition period took the form of a loosely structured sub-show in which all of the hot young would-be hosts took the stage together and performed a variety of stunts until only the finalists remained. Or at least that’s probably how it was supposed to go. In reality, almost from the beginning, the “competition” is just… Yibo. Yibo this, Yibo that, Yibo just gradually and organically taking his place among the show’s regular hosts while the other dudes awkwardly stand around and gradually exit, until the announcement that he’s joining the show feels like an afterthought.
Day Day Up’s main host, Wang Han, has a story about Wang Yibo. As he tells it, one day early in the competition show’s run, he walked into the lounge to find all of the would-be hosts laughing and chatting and socializing — all except for Yibo. Yibo was in the corner, silently working on his dance routine. According to Wang Han, who’s since become a second father to Yibo, he knew at that moment that Yibo would be their next host. Day Day Up, after all, wasn’t looking for an idol. They were looking for a hardworking, respectful young man who’d be diligent and disciplined and show up every single week to handle whatever the show threw at him.
Yibo not only became the perfect, dedicated host, he was so loyal to the production that he stayed on as a weekly member of DDU for over four years —arguably at least a year after he should have left. Because what no one was really anticipating was that while all of those qualities I ran through didn’t make Wang Yibo an easily translatable pop idol, they did make him someone it’s incredibly easy to fall into endless fannish obsession with. In meritorious China, where hard work and humility help you travel at least as far as networking and nepotism, Yibo, it turns out, wasn’t an average pop idol at all.
He was a superstar.
The moment the public really noticed Wang Yibo — really noticed him, first in 2019 with his turn in The Untamed and then even more seriously a year later with his stuff-of-legends stint on Street Dance of China — they couldn’t get enough of him. A 2020 China Project article about him described it as “Wang fever.” When he did “Versace on the Floor,” one of China’s most popular influencers turned on the performance in the middle of his own livestream so he and his millions of viewers could all watch Yibo dance. His career skyrocketed so high, so fast, that in 2021 he was listed as the second most-powerful person on Forbes’s then-annual list of Top 100 Chinese Celebrities. (That list hasn’t come out since 2021, I can only assume because they don’t have a rating system high enough to map Yibo’s subsequent trajectory.) A report from 2022 Q4 revealed that Yibo brought in over 80 percent of Yuehua’s entire revenue. Since then, that number has only increased.
I know all of this because I have spent the last four and a half years nurturing my own Yibo obsession. I’ve managed to write about Yibo properly no less than three times for Vox (plus a fourth article about his 2023 film Born To Fly that I wound up shelving). I’ve shoehorned other mentions of him into pieces here and there. I’ve written multiple pieces around Yibo, pieces that touch on the complex, cutthroat entertainment industry that he has both conquered and yet still fights to stay on top of, as well as the complicated relationship between C-Ent, fandom, and the Chinese government.
On the whole, I feel I’ve been very restrained! Still, my editor has been very indulgent, but I can tell even she is losing her patience. Yet here I sit, exactly four years, seven months, and nine days since I first began acclimating myself to Wang Yibo’s face, and he’s still all I really want to talk about.
I’m not new to idol fandom. My first brush with pop fandom came around 2005 with the J-pop band KAT-TUN and associated members of the now-notorious Johnnys Entertainment stable of idols. From there it was easy to become a casual K-pop fan. At the same time, I wrote RPF — real person fiction, the fandom term for fanfiction about celebrities — about everyone under the sun, from Robert Downey, Jr. to Frederic Chopin. RPF may be the most demonized form of fan media there is, but to me, it’s just a branch of the most common and normalized form of pop culture there is — speculating harmlessly about the private lives of celebrities. Oh, yeah, I talked about that for Vox too.
None of this past fandom prepared me for Wang Yibo. I’ve just truly never seen anyone like him. On paper, my fixation makes no sense. I’m not personally into any of the things he’s into — he’s an athlete, an all-rounder, a fidgety devil-may-care adrenalin junkie; I studied dance for most of my childhood, but not street dance, and these days I prefer to stay home with my cat and my computer. He likes guy movies like Pulp Fiction and Joker. He loves LEGO. I don’t not love LEGO, but I haven’t played it since I was a kid.
Still, with Yibo, the appeal isn’t about the things he loves, but the way he loves them — passionately, intelligently, with endless curiosity. That’s not a parasocial bias speaking. Every interview ever given by the people Yibo works with goes along these lines:
1) They were expecting Yibo to be an aloof celebrity, but once he warmed up to them they realized he was kind and eager to learn.
2) He learned more quickly and with more efficiency than anyone was prepared for.
3) He worked tirelessly until he got the thing right.
4) Now their whole production has adopted him.
And on and on.
This doesn’t mean he’s a flawless figure to stan. You can’t talk about Wang Yibo in 2024 without talking about the garish and appalling scenes of blackface that the entire cast including Yibo wore in Formed Police Unit, a violent, ill-timed movie filmed in 2020 and then shelved for four years before its spring release this year. The film purported to depict the benevolence of a Chinese U.N. deployment in Africa. It was, obviously, horrifically misguided.
Though some Asian fans have argued eloquently that education on this subject is a complex and slow process for Chinese citizens who just don’t understand that it’s an inherently harmful practice, many fans including myself have also spoken out against it — have tried to bring it to his attention and get him to acknowledge the problem. For all we know, Yibo hasn’t even seen those protests, nor any of the considerable, justified backlash from fans around the world. Sometimes stanning Chinese pop stars reminds one exactly how closed-off we still are from Chinese culture; often it reminds me how very, very similar China and the U.S. are.
And yet, despite having to contend with that deeply shameful moment in his career (as well as the many fans who, even more shamefully, tried to write it off as no big deal), I wouldn’t be here, writing thousands of words about Yibo, if I didn’t believe he offers us not only a fascinating window into C-Ent, but an endlessly joyous view of a life lived fully and without any self-imposed limitations. Yibo, somewhere along the way, told himself he could do absolutely everything he wanted. And somehow, brilliantly, while constantly upending our expectations of “idols” and “celebrities,” he’s done it. And look how happy he is when he gets away with it:
In one trailer for his new docuseries, the one he’s so thrilled about, Yibo talks about how he was afraid to lose the thrill of doing something for the first time:
“I feel like every time I do something new, the number of first times in my life becomes less and less. But after trying it, I discovered that there are infinite first times.”
I just want to give this kiddo the world. Failing that, I want to write reams of text about him. Over the last four years I have written a book’s worth of meta about Wang Yibo (unlike Yibo, my hyperfixations are still niche), but it still feels like a worthy project to write more about him, for still more people, possibly as a way of getting to something deeper about fan culture and the fragility of parasocial relationships. The timing may have something to do with the demise of Twitter; I still want to connect with other fans, but now that the central platform for international fandom is slowly, inexorably going to pieces, that’s harder than ever to do.
I envision this newsletter being mostly conversational and probably a mix of fannish blather and actual updates about C-Ent news, fandom news, and/or whatever Yibo did this week (or this month; we'll try to stick to a schedule but don’t hold our feet to the fire). The question in the title, What would Yibo do? is, I think, a harder question to answer than you might expect. On the one hand, our taciturn king wears his heart and his passions on his sleeve. On the other hand, he’s rarely doing anything you’d expect him to.
Where does this leave the rest of us — we who are caught in the gap between our fannish love and understanding of the Wang Yibo we think we know now and the ever-evolving princeling who’s constantly leveling himself up?
Sitting on our couch writing introspective parasocial newsletters about it, maybe.
Shoot me an email at aja.romano at gmail.com if you have a specific Yibo-related or Yibo-adjacent topic you’d like me to discuss! C-drama recs also welcome! In the meantime, come join us Yibo fans over at Bluesky — we have #WYBWednesdays!