#Boy listening to music meme full#

Referring to a tweet that read, 'asian boys with fake hood accents make me laugh like okay kevin nguyen,' Kevin Nguyen, the artist and graphic designer, said, 'It calls out Asians that use the N-word. Memes like that one, which is underscored by the reality of anti-Blackness in Asian communities, can be a way of calling out one's community in a way that's easier to parse.

One Twitter user associated the generic Kevin Nguyen with Asian American men who ' do hard drugs, say the n-word.' Used like that, 'Kevin Nguyen' can be a jab, used to differentiate one's self from others, a dynamic that isn't surprising in a place like SAT, where individual identities can be compressed by virtue of group affiliation. The silly stereotypes might poke fun at some people's realities, but according to others, the stereotype can be a way of also highlighting something more problematic. 'The fact that my name is basically a trademark, community, whatever you want to describe it, that in itself is pretty cool to me,' he said. To Kev Nguyen, adding a specific name can make memes sound 'more personally attacking,' which 'makes funnier because we all know a Kevin Nguyen, or at least a Kevin.' For Kevin Nguyen, the Master's graduate, it's not just funny, but flattering. The responses to Kevin Nguyen memes from people named Kevin Nguyen were overwhelmingly positive. 'I actually got tagged by a random person once, and they didn’t realize that they tagged the wrong Kevin Nguyen.' 'I get, on average, seven people tagging me on any Kevin/Kevin Nguyen post,' Kev said. Kev Nguyen, a fourth-year college student, goes by the shortened moniker due to 'there usually being multiple Kevin's in immediate setting.' Kev has seen jokes about his name on Facebook's Subtle Asian Traits and Subtle Asian Ravers since last year. 'It’s also really funny to make jokes about because you see it so often that you just HAVE to comment.'įor people who share the name, the memes are unavoidable. The meme represents the 'whole Kevin Nguyen lifestyle,' he said, inspired by people at a local boba shop late at night. 'I think the Kevin Nguyen name is symbolic for the flexing, Supreme-wearing, raving, and partying Asian boy that you see all too often,' Daniel Chong, who made the 'Kevin Nguyen starter kit' meme, told VICE. But having one big inside joke that's shared in a group of 1.5 million people who are kinda like you creates a feeling of belonging that can be hard to find. Sure, plenty of people, Asian and non-Asian, are ravers and fuckboys but aren't named Kevin Nguyen, just as plenty of people named Kevin Nguyen aren't rich or into EDM or drive a Lexus or even drink boba. Kevin has long been acknowledged as a common name in the Asian community, but not just that: since June 18, 2011, an Urban Dictionary entry for 'Kevin Nguyen' has stated, 'Most common name in the Asian world for males.' Interest in that entry skyrocketed in September 2019, per a graph on Urban Dictionary's site, which seems to line up with the popularity of Kevin Nguyen memes across Twitter and Facebook.

'The Kevin Nguyen memes are all about being a stereotypical fuckboy,' one Twitter user named Kevin Nguyen told VICE. One might say Kevin Nguyen is the Asian party boy others might use other terminology. In online spaces for diasporic Asians, the name became shorthand for stereotypes of a specific subset of Asian men: young Vietnamese dudes who party, slurp boba, and show off their expensive things, while probably having a thing for vapes and EDM festivals. That analysis seems almost entirely dedicated to validating the group's memeification of 'Kevin Nguyen.'

#Boy listening to music meme full#

Per one member's own, voluntarily-done name frequency analysis, Subtle Asian Traits boasts over 12,500 members named Kevin near 39,000 members with the last name Nguyen and at least 307 members with the full name Kevin Nguyen, the highest frequency of any single name. The group's popularity has no doubt fanned the flames of Kevin Nguyen's online notoriety.