Earlier this week I posted about the Gold House Gala, celebrating AAPI stories and creatives, that happened in LA last weekend. More and more western media outlets are covering this event, as more and more AAPI talent is being recognised on a global scale, including Billboard – they devoted several posts on their social media channels to Gold Gala guests.
And what popped out to me from their content is that the post that has generated the most traffic, a huuuuge amount of views (currently sitting at over one million at the time of this writing), is a clip from their red carpet interview with Chinese idol Esther Yu Shuxin.
Esther is most well known for her work in Chinese dramas. She is super famous in the East, starting her career as a member of a pop girl group before transitioning to acting although, as she said in that interview, she still makes music and often sings a track or two on the OSTs for her dramas. At least three of her dramas have reached mega popularity status over the last few years: Love Between Fairy and Devil, Love Game in Eastern Fantasy, and more recently, Speed and Love, which ran during the holidays last December. It was, in my opinion, terrible. But I also binged the whole thing, so I’m the donkey in this situation, since I contributed to its massive viewership, especially overseas. The show was extremely viral, due to the chemistry between Esther and the romantic lead actor, He Yu in his breakout role, ridiculously hot as a generic racing car bad boy with a tragic past, this is obviously why I kept watching.
Esther is polarising with some C-drama viewers because she’s been in so many roles that require her to act like a baby, in a baby voice. But she has an intense and increasingly global fanbase and is very high-profile… which explains all those views and all the engagement on Billboard’s post. Which Billboard will no doubt have clocked. Social media managers are constantly tracking numbers – and if they were surprised by the numbers that their Esther post has been doing, well then they aren’t paying attention to the C-drama invasion that’s been steadily gaining momentum over the last year to 18 months, and especially in 2026.
We’ve seen how Korean pop culture has travelled west and dominated entertainment spaces in the last decade, now Chinese culture is experiencing another wave for and by a new generation. From fashion to food, China-maxxing has been trending for months, and that includes C-dramas…with one C-drama in particular breaking through on another level,
Esther Yu purists would say that there’s a drama I missed when I was listing off her biggest hits: My Journey to You, which co-stars Zhang Linghe as the male lead. His latest drama, Pursuit of Jade, premiered on March 6 on East Asian streaming platforms but also on Netflix, “becoming the first Chinese title to reach No. 5 on Netflix’s global weekly top 10 (non-English) chart and stay there for four consecutive weeks”. Pursuit of Jade has been mega-viral outside of China and it’s been a trip for me to see how many westerners have discovered it and are rewatching it and talking about it.
Zhang Linghe had already gone viral, just before Pursuit of Jade premiered, during one of the Lunar New Year galas when he walked down a long runway and broke the Great Firewall of China, lol, and the rest of the internet.
@friedbeignets_ zhang linghe iconic walk 🙇🏻♀️ #zhanglinghe #cdrama #cdramaedit #fyp #fyppppppppppppppppppppppp ♬ original sound - shv
There are people now booking trips to China because they’ve become so obsessed with him and with the show. There are some street corners in China where everywhere you look, on every screen, there’s an advertisement with his face on it.
@yourluna950 Follow for more cdrama and China content 🫶🏻 #pursuitofjade #cdrama #china #fyp #zhanglinghe ♬ âm thanh gốc - Aries cỏ dại - Lạc Lạc
Overexposure is not a thing in other parts of the world. But speaking of parts of the world…
Zhang Linghe is expected to be in New York this weekend because he’s a Gucci ambassador, and the Cruise 2027 presentation is happening there on Saturday. International fans of his have been organising for days to buy up billboard space for when he’s in town.
So NYC for a couple of days might look like Shanghai. Beyond his fans and C-drama fans, though, this is worth paying attention to because given what we just saw with Esther at the Gold Gala and how much focus she was able to pull, and the hysteria surrounding Zhang Linghe right now on a global scale, let’s see what that looks like when he shows up in person in the United States. And, by the way, heads up to the media outlets who’ll be covering the Gucci fashion show – because if you sleep on getting good footage of him, you are sleeping on what could be your most highly trafficked content from that event.
Esther Yu attends the 2026 Gold Gala at The Music Center on May 09, 2026 in Los Angeles, California
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