Vang: The Olympic loyalty test no one asked for

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This winter, two Asian American women, Alysa Liu and Eileen Gu, soared across Olympic ice and snow. One wrapped herself in the Stars and Stripes. The other chose to compete for China. And suddenly the country had very strong opinions about Asian daughters.

I learned the quickest way to make America nervous is to let an Asian American woman make her own decisions, especially if she wins a gold medal.

Liu beamed beneath the American flag and we exhaled. There she was: prodigy, child of immigrant success story, good daughter who did her homework and her triple jumps. She fits neatly into the national scrapbook — patriotism with creative-colored hair and sequins.

Gu, raised in California and skiing for China, has been cast differently: calculating, opportunistic, suspect. Cable news panels furrowed their brows. Politicians, including Vice President JD Vance, questioned the loyalty of globally mobile elites in ways that landed hardest on bodies like hers.

The subtext was louder than a starter pistol at the Olympic finals. There is apparently a right way to be Asian American. And there is a wrong way.

When Eileen made a sovereign choice — financially strategic, personally complex — she disrupted something older and uglier. She did not bow her head and whisper “thank you” to her Western masters. She won her medals, cashed her endorsements and skied beautifully.

The audacity.

Asian American women are navigating race wrapped in misogyny: the “China doll,” the ingénue of “Miss Saigon,” the obedient daughter with a slight tilt of the head. Step out of line and you become “Suzie Wong.” Or worse, the “Dragon Lady.”

When we win, America claims us. When we make decisions that surprise some people, America audits us. What strikes me most is not the outrage. It is the assumption of ownership.

The moment an Asian American woman wins, she becomes “ours.” Our immigrant success story. Proof that diversity pays dividends. Evidence the American dream is still alive.

Possession.

Asian American women in this country have long been treated as trophies, brides, symbols and cautionary tales. Rarely as sovereign.

We do not ask white athletes who play abroad to prove they still love us. Their Americanness is presumed durable, internal and unquestioned. Their choices are framed as pragmatic. Strategic. Cosmopolitan. Rarely treasonous.

Perhaps what unsettles us is not which flag Gu carries. It is the realization she was never ours to begin with.

I learned early in my life that belonging here comes with terms. I grew up in Minnesota, the daughter of Hmong refugees from the Secret War in Laos. Gratitude was our inheritance. We were told America saved us from death. Less discussed was America’s role in the war itself and the CIA’s recruitment of Hmong men and boys into a conflict most barely understood beyond promises of shoes and rice.

Today, Asian immigrants are celebrated as high-achieving contributors — until geopolitical tensions rise. Then we are eyed with suspicion. We belong until we are no longer convenient.

There are more than 24 million Asian Americans in this country — and roughly 300,000 in Minnesota alone, with Hmong residents making up a significant portion of that number. We are your neighbors in Edina, your children’s classmates in St. Paul, your doctors in Rochester.

Here is the part that makes me angry in a calm, well-articulated way: Gu and Liu are young women building lives. They are not metaphors. Not Cold War chess pieces dressed in Lululemon. Not vessels for our unresolved fears.

Who gets to claim an Asian American woman? The country of her birth? The country of her mother? The loudest voice on cable news?