f Eileen Gu’s mother came to America for a better life, she got it. Yan Gu, the daughter of two Chinese government officials, emigrated to the U.S. in the 1980s, just a few decades after the passage of the Hart-Celler Act, which overhauled immigration policies and prompted a massive increase in arrivals from Asia and Latin America. Educated at Auburn University, Rockefeller University, and eventually Stanford Graduate School of Business, she dabbled as a ski instructor and, apparently, in venture capital.
In 2003, she gave birth to a daughter in San Francisco, raising her in an affluent Bay Area neighborhood. What’s known of Eileen Gu’s childhood reads like a caricature of coastal elitism: skiing in Lake Tahoe at age three, educated at a girls’ school where this year’s tuition costs are upwards of $48,000 per year, presented at Le Bal des débutantes in Paris, groomed for Olympic stardom, and now studying at Stanford, modeling, skiing in the Olympics, and juggling multimillion-dollar brand deals.
Her story would be elevated as a saccharine picture of the neoliberal American dream, if Gu hadn’t decided to ski for China. In 2019, she announced her intent to compete for the People’s Republic of China at the 2022 Beijing Olympics. Since then, she has received millions of dollars from the Chinese Communist Party government, according to The Wall Street Journal, and has become one of the biggest propaganda tools in the arsenal of the United States’ biggest adversary.
“I am proud of my heritage, and equally proud of my American upbringings,” she wrote on Instagram announcing her defection. For Gu, her heritage — her loyalty — is Chinese. America was an “upbringing,” a red-white-and-blue finishing school that opened all the right doors but does not elicit national allegiance or anything, really, on her part.
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