In episode 40, we sit down with Tik Tok creator Lily Lei as she shares her jourrney to obtaining Tik Tok fame over the last year. As we are all well aware, Tik Tok is an incredibly influential video platform. As a podcast interested in how Asian Americans portray ourselves across any creative medium, we were really fascinated by how Lily employed many elements of her Asian upbringing into her skits, and how those skits helped contribute to her rise. Lily also gives us insight into her versatile background as a design researcher and entrepreneur and how those experiences helped her gain over 700K followers on Tik Tok.

Before we get to Lily, we also have a 20 minute segment discussing the 2021 Oscars with Katie Quan from This Asian American Life. This year's awards marked many firsts for Asian Americans in Hollywood and Katie broke down her feelings about the necessity of the Oscars in 2021 and how she felt about the three movies that most prominently featured Asian Americans: Minari, Nomadland, and Sound of Metal.

Editors note: Sorry about the sound quality in some parts, some of these recordings were done while traveling!

Katie Quan's This Asian American Life Lily's Tik Tok

Notes:

1) Start of Oscars segment: (1:52) 2) General reactions on the 2021 shows (5:00)
3) Deeper dive into Minari, Nomadland, and Sound of Metal (10:23) 4) Do we (as Asian Americans) need the Oscars in 2021? (20:47) 5) Lily's background and how she decided to become a full-time Tik Tok creator (27:51) 6) How she identified what worked for her audience (35:27) 7) How she outgrew her initial Asian American Auntie/parent skits (38:15) 8) Accents or no accents? (43:06)

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