Gold medal skier Gu Ailing, a San Francisco-born 18-year-old Stanford university student, has attracted both praise and criticism as she represents China rather than the US at the Winter Olympics in Beijing. Also known as Eileen Feng Gu, she is the daughter of a white US father and a Chinese mother, Gu Yan, who raised her child as a single parent.

She earned her BS and MS degrees in chemical engineering at Beijing University before moving to the US to further her studies, concluding with Stanford Business School. She worked as a venture capitalist for some years and since 2013 she has run her own company as a “private investor and expert in China investment.” A speed skater and avid skier, she encouraged her daughter to take up skiing and saw she had expert instruction. A high achiever like her mother, Gu also plays the piano and works as a fashion model. She and her mother spend summers in Beijing where Gu has taken courses in Chinese.

Gu Ailing has had a Chinese upbringing. While she was a baby, her grandmother, now 85, Feng Guozhen, a retired senior structural engineer at China’s Transport Ministry, emigrated to the US to help with childcare. Sports run in the family, Feng was a champion basketball player while at Shanghai Jiaotong University. Feng has had a major influence on Gu by inspiring her, teaching her Mandarin, and providing a Chinese cultural context in their home.

Gu told the Nanjing Daily, Feng “is healthy and invincible. She still runs one kilometre a day.” Residents of Nanjing, in particular, celebrate Gu’s victory since Feng hails from that city in the eastern Jiangsu province. Nanjing has a long political and cultural history as it was the capital of several Chinese dynasties, kingdoms and republics going back to the third century.

Gu skied for the US from 2019-21 in six competitions in the US, Austria and Canada before requesting a change of country from the International Ski Federation, with the aim of representing China in the Winter Olympics. She refuses to reveal her nationality. Although the US allows its citizens to have other nationalities, China does not. For non-Chinese, Beijing requires permanent residency before inclusion on sporting teams. As Gu has been a frequent frontrunner in competitions, China may have made an exception of her.

While refusing to comment on the Chinese political scene, she has criticised US anti-Asian feeling which has peaked since the advent of the global covid pandemic that spread from a market in the city of Wuhan in China’s Hubei province. Gu was horrified by an incident in a shop where she and her grandmother were abused by a customer who blamed them for  covid. As an Asian woman, she has faced not only racist but also misogynic abuse. She campaigns against anti-black racism and for gender equality and women’s participation in sports.

More than 10,000 anti-Asian taunts and assaults have taken place between March 2020 and September 2021, according to Stop AAPI Hate, a national umbrella group that gathers data on racial attacks caused by the pandemic.

Skier Gu and California-born figure skater Zhu Yi, a former US sportswoman on a Chinese team, have been castigated by conservatives for switching sides.

A right-wing podcaster said in an interview with Fox news that it is “ungrateful for [Gu] to turn her back on the country that not just raised her but turned her into a world-class skier.” She dismissed such remarks on TikTok: “Cry ab[out] it.”

Justin Peters writing on slate.com, criticised Gu because she did not “bring home a bucketful of gold for good ol’ Uncle Sam” but instead won for China with the aim of inspiring, as Gu put it, “millions of young people where my mom was born” and promoting the sport Gu loves.

She responded to negativity at a press conference by saying, “If people don’t like me, that’s their loss - they’ll never win the Olympics.”

According to BuzzFeed.News, Zhu Yi, also known as Beverly Zhu, 19, gave up her US citizenship, an expensive and complicated process, to compete for China. After failing to earn a medal, she was accused by Chinese bloggers for, allegedly, stealing the place of a Chinese-born woman who might have won and for her lack of fluent Chinese. US critics accused her of treachery, BuzzFeed revealed.

It quoted William Tran, vice president of the Pasadena Figure Skating Club and a figure skating judge, who stated, “It’s completely within the rules, and something many sports are used to.” Three white US men have joined the Chinese men’s hockey team and have taken Chinese names to do so but they have not attracted the abuse heaped on the women.

Slate’s Peters made the point, “It is not unprecedented for American athletes to compete for other countries. But the athletes who do so typically would not have made the US team.” However, he admits, “Without expatriate athletes, a lot of countries wouldn’t field Winter Olympics delegations; without these countries welcoming them in, a lot of athletes wouldn’t be going to the Olympics.” He argues, “Eileen Gu does not fit into that rubric. In 2019, when she made the switch, she was already a rising star and growing into a dominant force in her sport.”

While he suggests that she could be motivated by modelling for Chinese firms and being featured in Chinese-language editions of key fashion magazines, he fails to mention anti-Asian prejuce and abuse in the US was widespread before covid and has increased exponentially since its spread in 2020.

Despite anti-Asian behaviour by some US citizens, there are a number of other US nationals of Chinese origin who are competing on US teams and winning medals in the Winter Games. Like female skater Zhu Yi, male skater Nathan Chen, who has taken both gold and silver, has been criticised by Chinese media. The Chinese version of Twitter said he is too Americanised and told him to”get out of China” because he has refused to speak Mandarin in interviews since he is not fluent.

Photo: TNS