Eileen Gu will be the grand marshal of the Chinese New Year Parade in San Francisco on Saturday. The most decorated freestyle skiier in Olympic history, Gu is a native of San Francisco who competed for China at the recently completed Milan-Cortina Games.
Gu medaled in all three of her events — a gold in the freeski halfpipe, and silvers in the freeski slopestyle and freeski big air — repeating her feat from the 2022 Beijing Olympics.
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But her reception in the Bay Area might be more muted compared to that of figure skater Alysia Liu, the gold-medal winner in the women’s competition in Milan.
The nearby city of Oakland, where Liu is from, revealed it will hold a celebration rally on March 12 to welcome her back.
Gu, by contrast, “might not get the kind of hero’s welcome Liu received when she landed at SFO, nor will her face be scrawled across a mural in Oakland, even as it’s plastered on billboards around China,” Marisa Ingemi reported March 6 in the San Francisco Standard.
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The reason is both simple and complex. Gu competed for China, Liu for the United States.
Liu’s individual figure skating gold was the first by an American woman since 2002. That promptly thrust Liu into a frenzied media circus after returning home. Yet while she was universally embraced, Gu faced backlash in the U.S. media after winning gold for China.
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In San Francisco’s Chinatown, where American and Chinese cultures have coexisted side-by-side for more than a century, blurred lines between these national loyalties are normative. But this is the exception to the rule in the United States.
“Sadly, she’s faced unfair hate online,” Jonathan Wen of the San Francisco-based anti-hate group Dear Community, told the Standard. “Some haters seem obsessed with her precisely because she’s intelligent, talented, and beautiful. The intensity isn’t really about her choices; it’s tied to resentment toward China as a global power. Other American athletes who’ve competed for different countries haven’t faced anything close to this vitriol.”
Gu, 22, will have private security and SFPD officers on hand during the parade, according to Ingemi.
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