After a strong season of Yoghurt Bowl Summer, I wanted warm breakfast ideas for winter. Something that would help me reach the same euphoric flow state as when I dust ground flaxseeds on some raspberries and think I’ve created art. I came across a video of an earthy concoction using Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) ingredients – the creator of the video was a white American girl living in Paris. While I listened carefully to how she soaked the snow fungus for 20 minutes before adding it to her bubbling soup of black sesame, jujube and lotus seeds, I looked down at my peanut butter oatmeal, beige and unworldly by comparison, and thought: damn, this white girl is more Chinese than me.

There’s a big absurdist joke online right now that everyone is Chinese. It all began when Sherry Zhu, a 22-year-old in New Jersey with family roots in Shandong and Zhejiang, China, decided to assertively tell everyone on the internet, regardless of their race or ethnicity, that they are Chinese. People gleefully ran with it. The joke has continued to evolve to the point where ostensibly non-Chinese people are showing off habits that would make my grandma’s eyes water with pride: drinking hot water and teas with TCM ingredients, eating congee, wearing house slippers and starting their mornings by whacking their armpits and doing fifty jumps to get those lymph nodes moving. This cohort of newly inducted Chinese people are taking their cultural identity seriously.

This ‘everyone is Chinese now’ trend reflects a general growing interest in wellness practices rooted in Chinese culture and TCM – a health system stemming from thousands of years of East Asian medicine that encompasses food therapy, herbal medicine, acupuncture, cupping, movement (qigong) and massage. Zoey Xinyi Gong, a TCM food therapist and registered dietitian whose work focuses on bridging Eastern and Western medicine, and Dr Felice Chan, a Chinese medicine doctor and educator in Los Angeles, have both seen a recent uptick in interest for TCM, which Chan says is “both online and in clinic”. While Google searches for TCM in the UK and US have been steady for the past five years, this shot up and doubled in December 2025.

Why have people been so enthusiastic to start eating and moving like a Chinese grandma? This new interest in TCM may be an inevitable progression of existing beauty and wellness trends that already stem from TCM, like gua sha, acupuncture and eating your skincare. However, while those trends have health benefits, they ultimately have aesthetic goals in mind, feeding into an always-growing and increasingly-complicated list of things we can do to optimise our appearances. The new interest in TCM feels like a welcome, and accessible, deviation from this. The barriers to entry are low – everyone has apples and water at home, slippers are easy to buy and no equipment is needed for qigong, just your own body.

Crissa Jewel, a 30-year-old therapist based in North Carolina who hopped on the ‘becoming Chinese’ trend, says TCM-inspired practices feel like an antidote to our current demanding beauty and wellness culture. “Traditional Chinese practices are a lot more accessible than what our ways of getting healthy tend to be in our culture,” Jewel says. In Western wellness culture, fitting in regular gym sessions while being a full-time worker is the mere baseline, a standard that Jewel says feels strict to the point of being a “moral measure”. TCM has shown her ways to look after herself that are simpler to achieve: drink hot water, slap on some house slippers so your feet don’t touch the floor, add jujube to your oatmeal. “I’m like, OK, not a huge adjustment.”

While this movement might make it seem like every Chinese person is deeply in tune with ancient healing methods and begins their day with a longan and goji tea, Chinese people are also learning something new here. Emma Peng, a 27-year-old “witch’” and creator of spiritualist content, responded to the ‘everyone is Chinese’ trend by welcoming non-Chinese people to her culture and sharing her everyday practices that stem from her upbringing in Henan, China, like eating sweet potato congee and doing lymphatic jumps. However, she admits to prefer drinking room temperature water rather than hot water and for a long time associated TCM with the bitter herbal stews her mum made her eat when she was a kid.

“​​I’m Chinese, but I don’t cook those meals,” she says of the TCM-inspired food she’s seen making the rounds online. “But I see these Americans that are obviously not Chinese taking it so seriously and getting their snow fungus, their goji berries, their dates. They know what jujube is now.” Through this trend, Peng has felt motivated to learn more about TCM. “It’s reminding me, dang, I need to go back to my roots. I need to really lock in and learn how to make snow fungus and pear stew. When people were saying they were making that, I was like, what? I've not had that for ten to 15 years.”

Gong says a big portion of the new interest she’s seen in TCM through her work comes from Chinese people. She hears from people like Peng who grew up with vague notions of what TCM is through their parents and grandparents. “Probably grandma would be like, OK, drink this, good for you – but no explanation.” Gong says in the last few years, however, TCM has become “trendier”. In Shanghai, you can now find a gelato shop serving TCM-inspired flavours like mung bean lily bulb and sweet porridge coix seed. TCM night markets popped off across China this past summer, with crowds of young people lining up for moxibustion therapy, pulse readings and herbal teas. “I think there is this new pride around having Chinese heritage,” Gong says. “They become very interested in regaining the knowledge that they were exposed to from their family.”

Whoever first said they were in a very Chinese time in their life right now maybe wasn’t making an absurdist joke but commenting on the current culture. China was ranked second in the 2025 Global Soft Power Index, placing it ahead of the UK for the first time. Gong, who has consistently dealt with hate comments about China on social media since she started posting TCM content in 2024, says those comments have gone down by about 90 per cent in just the last few months. The mass migration to RedNote or Xiaohongshu during the ‘TikTok is banned’ panic and the expansion of visa-free entry to China, both occurring last year, has meant people in the West have had more direct contact with Chinese culture than ever before in recent history.

Alongside the interest in TCM, there’s also been an increase in interest around the Chinese New Year, and what the year of the horse will bring. Jewel, who’s been inspired recently to pick up some goji berries and jujubes, says “we all really just enjoy connection”. If someone is sharing their culture and enthusiastically including you, as Zhu did when she told everyone on the internet that they’re Chinese now, then Jewel says, “absolutely, we’re going to jump on board”.