Wasians Are the New Face of Eugenics

Eileen Gu and Alyssa Liu are being co-opted by an extremist mixed-race eugenics movement. What does this phenomenon reveal about our geopolitical moment?

Gattaca (1997) but Wasian.

Something strange happened in the 2026 Winter Olympics. There had been talk, coalescing online, of an illustrious god-woman emerging from the Italian snow. In Lombardy, fresh from her long slumber, she is seen dressed in a white Olympic bib, drifting down a sharply-inclined slope faster than a snow leopard. With her skis, she flies off the ledge, gliding into the air, pirouetting mid-atmosphere, and landing backward on the piste without friction.

The god-woman had won medals in all three women’s freestyle skiing events. Upon removing her helmet, she is captured, in photos, sharp-jawlined and symmetrically faced, holding Gold and Silvers next to teeth of pearly-pristine-white, with her face tilted, optimally-angled for the camera. She is the “most decorated freestyle skier in Olympic history.” She is Eileen Gu. And for many, she is “a human 2.0 prototype”—“a glimpse of what humans [will] look like in a few decades.”

Mythology has always been central to eugenics—a set of prejudiced beliefs aimed at “improving” humanity’s gene pool through selective, “ideal” reproduction. Heinrich Himmler, a leading military figure in Nazi Germany, was obsessed with the myth of Atlantis. The lost underwater civilization was thought to be ruled by beautiful Nordic ‘God Men,’ the kind of society that Himmler and the Nazis would seek out and, through a literal multi-year genocide campaign, attempt to restore.

Now, a parallel myth is emerging, except not for cookie-cutter, blue-eyed “Aryan-race” eugenics. It is instead more futuristic, more technological, and a lot less white; its focus is on Gu as a genetically-engineered Hercules, as an “ideal” human specimen of demigod-likeness.

As one user says, she has “biracial optimization,” on account of her mixed Anglo-Saxon and Chinese heritage, and a “dual-market value” in both the US and China, on account of being multilingual. She possesses “mega generational wealth”—and speculatively, an alleged projected longevity of “120-150 years.” Analyze her with a less cool distance, and the story still stands: She models for Louis Vuitton, studies international relations at Stanford, and makes $20M+ a year in brand deals. In interviews, she quickly shuts down dumb questions from journalists—not with a mean, Trumpian brashness, but instead with words carefully selected and sharply enunciated to make her intelligence obvious. She is perfect. And in this new myth of eugenics, she is of prime “value” in an economy with narrowing opportunities: “permanent underclass score: 0.00.”

But this obsession with Gu did not grow in a vacuum. Over the last few years, eugenics has increasingly averted its gaze away from white “Aryans,” and taken a multi-racial turn instead. On Joshua Citarella’s Doomscroll, podcaster Brace Belden warned of “post-race fascism”: figures like Andrew Tate and Myron Gaines, both of whom espouse white supremacist Nazi ideology despite having African heritage themselves. If you keep up with tech-adjacent circles on the internet, you’d know that their desirable society is one where social hierarchy is determined by high IQ, a trait that seemingly any person of any race can have. Late last year, there were ads encouraging people to “Have your best baby” in the New York subway, marketing the services for IVF and genetic engineering startup Nucleus. The race of the “best babies” in question? Every single kind. The founder of Orchid, a rival baby gene-editing startup backed by the Thiel fellowship, is Indian. And even Elon Musk, who screens embryos for “superior intelligence” and warns of a “white genocide,” is still technically African; his baby mamas span different countries.

In a previous decade, eugenics may have once been ruled by fringe political subcultures. But in 2026, it’s slowly making its way into the mainstream. And the world it imagines is one where “blood [is] the only passport you need” (to borrow a line from Gattaca, a film where eugenics renders race and nationality obsolete). Elites, for this new eugenics, can be of any race, so long as their DNA endows them with the brains, beauty, and brawn that commands a position at the top.

But ideas of who possesses genes worth spreading are often entangled with how they can be passed down. And for the new eugenics advocates, one question still requires answering: How can society ensure more demigod-like “human 2.0s” are born?

This is nothing more than a rumor, but in late February, The National Enquirer, an American tabloid, “exclusively obtained [Eileen] Gu’s birth certificate” and found that “the space designated for the father’s name is blank.” On other parts of the internet, similar speculations on the real story of Gu’s birth run amok. A netizen from China confessed in r/aznidentity, the controversial Asian politics subreddit, that on Chinese social media, “[there’s] a lot of gossip around [Gu’s] birth background, including IVF, surrogacy, and who her father is.”

Eileen Gu is the daughter of Yan Gu, a single mother. And in absence of any public information of her biological father, there is wild, preposterous speculation that Gu was genetically engineered—that, on the grounds that her father did not raise her or does not play an active role in her life, he was functionally a sperm donor.

Conspiracies are even more sticky and persistent when we consider the rising star from this year’s Winter Olympics: the figure skater Alysa Liu.

Liu has custom-made tooth piercings, frequently uses the word “mogg,” and has an alternating blonde and black raccoon hair dye. She is characteristically relatable, possessing the whimsy of a Gen Z woman who spends a lot of time on TikTok. And for these reasons, Liu is often placed in diametric opposition to Gu’s goddess-like perfection. She is not a “striver” in the way that Gu is. She does not attend Stanford. Once, at age 16, she took a long hiatus from ice skating to recover from burnout. And she represents the United States, while Gu represents China.

On the surface, these differences position these women as parallel opposites, and by representing the opposing US and China, both are often caught in online geopolitical debate-slop. But the two women are far more similar than they might seem. Both were raised in the Bay Area. Both are half-Chinese, half-white. And according to widespread rumors on the internet, Liu, like Gu, is an alleged product of genetic engineering: one viral X post reads, “Seems like both of them were lab-made.”

Alysa is the daughter of lawyer Arthur Liu. She has four siblings, all of whom are half-white. None of them were conceived through sex—as Arthur’s only ex-wife is Chinese—but instead through two Caucasian egg donors that the Liu family does not know. According to a since-deleted story in Sports Illustrated, Arthur chose white egg donors because he “felt his children would benefit from a diverse gene pool” and multicultural upbringing. Easily, this is the kind of logic that invites speculation: one widely-read Substack essay has taken the liberty to report that, for Alysa’s birth, “[Arthur] curated eggs from intelligent, athletic white egg donors, and genetically screened them to pick out the best ones.”

No source on the internet that I’ve found can seem to verify that claim. But as with all rumors, truth is beside the point. What’s more important is that these slanderous un-truths underscore a terrifying new idea: that Liu, like Gu, is a proof-of-concept for eugenics. “Alysa Liu was actually made in a lab via an optimized donor and surrogate,” writes another user on X. “[Maybe] the most viral case for eugenics.” Another user on a viral r/changemyview post makes the point more explicit: On account of being high-achieving and allegedly genetically-engineered, “Alysa Liu’s existence proves that eugenics is a good thing.”

“What’s interesting about both Alysa Liu and Eileen Gu to me is not that they are both half-Chinese but a far rarer circumstance: they’re both unconventional babies,” wrote the Taiwan-based business reporter Angelica Oung in February. “In both cases an Asian parent selected a white sperm/egg donor.”

What shift is this signaling? Even after side-stepping whiteness, eugenics finds itself ironically bound up in race again. Old prejudices are simply repackaged for the technological age: This time it is seeking genetically-engineered test tube babies of mixed Asian and white heritage. As one netizen puts it, “Eileen Gu is essentially a lab-grown Übermensch,” fusing genetic selection with “IVFmaxxing + top Asian parenting + Western individualism.” With reproductive technology, egg and sperm donors, the prerogative becomes to reproduce these “Übermenschen” at scale. The Wasian is the new “supreme” “ideal” race. This is the rise of Wasian eugenics.

Wasian-ness might be increasingly in fashion for pro-eugenics subcultures on the internet, but being mixed-race always had cultural cachet. In the 2010s, a number of breakout stars in film, music and TV were Wasian—the list is long, but to name a few: Charles Melton, Henry Golding, Naomi Scott, Olivia Rodrigo, Charli XCX, Zayn Malik, Hailee Steinfeld, Laufey, Conan Gray, Mitski.

Wasian-ness always symbolized the rare ability to straddle between two different cultures, functioning like a cosmopolitan post-ethnicity. To be Wasian was to be post-modern, making concepts like “race” and “nationality” feel tribal, obsolete, and even “backward” in comparison. In a way, the Wasian captured the beauty of the world at the height of the globalization era: no border was too tall, no country too far apart, for love to ever cross over and make a baby.

But now as the world continues to “deglobalize,” the Wasian becomes a kind of remnant, a haunting reminder of a borderless world that we were once hurling towards but now can no longer exist. And when cross-cultural understanding grows in rarity, Wasian-ness is converting into a new currency. Straddling between multiple worlds, after all, has immense economic value—no less when the two worlds in question are the US and China, two countries that Gu and Liu seem to find themselves enmeshed in between.

In an essay titled “Do Wasians hold the key?” cultural strategist Edmond Lau argues that the Wasian’s exposure to both East and West creates a “double consciousness”—“a sensitivity that is particularly useful for navigating this moment.” In a world where the US and China are locked in an AI race, a trade war, and a quest for global political domination, that ability to straddle between two worlds is increasingly necessary. “For those caught between cultures,” Lau writes, “perhaps instead of lamenting the division of two selves, it’s time to recognize it as their greatest power.”

Caught in a sudden death race for global domination, both America and China represent competing visions for the future of the world: the lawyer society versus the engineer society, as Dan Wang’s Breakneck argued last year; “free market” capitalism versus “socialism” with Chinese characteristics; the Protestant ethic versus Confucian values. Uncle Sam or Chairman Mao, Disney’s Mickey Mouse or Kasing Lung’s Labubu, The White House Cabinet or the Politburo, OpenAI and Anthropic or DeepSeek and Manus, Move Fast and Break Things or the 996. The “New Cold War.” Both sides suspended in lockstep, dancing till death. As of now, it is still impossible to know which will ascend victorious.

Or, perhaps we already do.

The winners will be those who don’t have to choose—those who can exist seamlessly in either the East or West; those who, by DNA alone, are innately built to fit within these two competing worlds. No wonder then that pro-eugenics subcultures desperately fawn over the Wasian, of white-American and Chinese heritage: Eileen Gu and Alysa Liu might be representing opposing sides, but both are guaranteed to stand on the podium, medaled in glory. By the mere fact of their existence, their bets are perfectly hedged.