ode to linda dong
+ her many personal brands
Long time, no newsletter! I don’t know how frequent this will be anymore; I got a new job and it takes (almost) all my mental energy to do it and feed myself. Still, I’m hauling my overheated brain through this particular exercise because wow, I need to talk about TikTok superstar Linda Dong.
I love her. She’s probably my favorite person on the platform, which is not a particularly cutting-edge opinion: She has nearly 10 million TikTok followers (at least one of whom makes fan art about her), and she goes viral a lot. Even if you don’t follow her, you’ve seen her face. Substack won’t embed TikToks, but here’s a viralish one she cross-posted to Instagram:
On her TikTok account, she always wears those round glasses^, and she always has her hair in a casual bun like that^, and when she speaks, it’s with a Vietnamese accent that she has sort of gently commodified in her TikTok display name (LeendaDong) and her Shopify store; one of her merch t-shirts there reads “Hello mah frand,” which is how she opens all her best (imo) TikToks.
Usually, those TikToks are duets, where she watches another person’s TikTok with you, narrating in real time. Her sign-on makes them feel ~epistolary~, and they’re great all the way through: She defaults to a tone of wonder instead of judgment (usually lol), and she has a truly poetic way of describing some of her duetees. She says one dancer is “folding herself like an Ikea chair at a backyard barbecue” (she is!); she points out that a seal peering into the camera looks like a chihuahua (it kinda does!).
She helps you (me) to pay attention in a new way — or pay a different kind of attention. What @Samir does for celebrity houses, she does for all of TikTok.
If I had to describe her TikTok brand, I’d say: relatable, pragmatic, socially anxious homebody-poet?
The homebody element is key, and she leans into it. She’s always wearing sweats and robes— home-clothes — and one of her most popular TikToks is about what she’d do if the pandemic ended: she would eat a marshmallow on her veranda, say, “Wow, the pandemic is over,” and go back inside. In another homebody TikTok, she uses a diagram to explain that it’s “awkward” to go outside.
This is important, because as you watch her TikToks, you feel like she’s at home (wherever she lives) watching TikToks, too.
Where am I going with this super-in-depth description of her deal, you wonder? Well! Recently, she mentioned something about her YouTube, and I went and looked her up there and it was JARRING.
Her brand on YouTube is radically different:
The glasses are gone! Her hair is down! She’s wearing makeup! She’s hot, on purpose! She’s the heroine of a short, romantic non-comedy?! Accent: American!
On a practical level, none of this is shocking. She’s I think bilingual, so its doesn’t seem like super-dark sorcery (or appropriation) for her to speak in an accent on TikTok; it’s pretty common to have contacts and glasses and bop between the two; hair is… known to be fluid… idk, I don’t think I need to explain how hair works.
What is super shocking is how shocked I was (and honestly remain) by Linda’s multi-facetedness. I’m 31 years old, but I really thought this woman’s personal brand on her TikTok was her comprehensive self; that because she wore her hair a certain way in all her TikToks, she wore it that way on her YouTube and in real life. Why?!
Mind-boggled, I started looking up her other social accounts. (I am sad to say that yes, I looked at her LinkedIn.) This woman is an ARTIST. She has a separate, dating-and-going-outside-regularly brand on her two interconnected YouTubes; another, hybrid TikTok-Youtube persona on her verified Instagram; and a separate Instagram meme account where she exists only as a curator of memes about (:-/) “girl logic.”
She has at least one distinct personal brand per social media platform.
Why not? This is an established part of the socialmediasphere: how we present ourselves isn’t real or comprehensive. The gap between how people represent themselves on social and how they actually are IRL is a long-standing meme topic.
In fact, Linda herself has made a meme about it, and posted it to her meme account (the NOSTRIL work!):
This ^, I’m used to. When people look hot on social media, I knowwww they get zits and take off their makeup sometimes. And if they still look good even without makeup, I knowwww they spent a ton of money on vaguely Satanic beauty treatments (<<<CW: truly scary) to look that way. It’s social media literacy 101.
But I’m not used to the inverse: people whose whole public presentation is relatable-sweatpants-ness being beautiful in real life! Aspirationally hot women presenting themselves as everywomen?! This feels “new,” to my brain; it’s not the North star women are taught to perform towards.
But it’s really just the same old gap between a faux-consistent public brand and an actual heterogeneous human life, I guess. Social media literacy 101.2.
So… I’ve graduated to that, and what an experience. Linda Dong continues to educate me with her range and vision — I truly recommend clicking on all the links in this newsletter and following her on TikTok, while keeping in mind (if you’re me) that that’s only 10%, max, of her actual self. (It could be way less than that, too — her TikTok could be total performance art.)
Even though you’ll see her in her PJs on her feed, and that feels “unvarnished” and “real.”
Brands — and every popular social account is a brand, even if it seems like a person — are just formally distinct from real people. They have to be consistent, and life is not. No one wears pajamas all the time!
…I say, trying to sound so wise now. But I just watched this roundup of legitimately good, earnest hair hacks from Linda’s YouTube and the scrolling text screen inside my mind is just like: ?!?!?!?!
I’m going to get used to this, but not yet.