Why the "Ling Ling 40 Hours" Meme is Racist

And other problems I have with TSV

[Note from April 2024: I have not watched any TSV in three years or so, and plausibly quite a bit of this is out of date, both in terms of accuracy and in terms of how I feel now. Read on with that in mind.]

I’ve had reservations about TwoSetViolin for a while. I’ve watched quite a bit of their content, and it’s funny and relatable to amateur musicians. Unfortunately, I also believe they make some problematic content. Few seem willing to acknowledge this.

Bluntly: while I doubt Brett and Eddy are racist or classist people (in terms of what they think and believe), I do believe that they both enable and benefit from the racism and classism of their fans. (I suppose that makes them just as bad as people who actually believe that others are inferior for their race or class, and perhaps even worse, given their platform.)

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The Ling Ling meme stems from this video.

TwoSet parodies an interaction between a child and his strict Asian “tiger mom,” in which the mother berates her son for not practicing enough. She claims that Ling Ling, a child who beat her son in a prior violin competition, practices 40 hours a day. Later, she yells at him for his imperfect intonation. It’s clearly satire.

Thus the Ling Ling 40 Hours meme was born—a caricature of a child prodigy violinist who practices 40 hours a day. The video was quite popular, and since then TwoSet has released many variants on Ling Ling: reviewing a child prodigy's performance in the jokingly-dubbed “Ling Ling Violin Competition”, creating a "Ling Ling Workout" with weird and difficult exercises, and claiming that they've found the real Ling Ling, an 11-year old prodigy named Chloe Chua. Even their subreddit is called lingling40hrs.

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I think the original parody is tasteless.

It’s clear that TwoSet is making fun of the idea of an Asian tiger parent who tells their kid that the kid down the street is practicing 40 hours a day. As an Asian American young adult, I’ve heard similar from my parents—“[X] is so good at his schoolwork, why don’t you have straight-A’s?” “[Y] got into Harvard, why didn’t you?” So I understand the desire to parody our parents, who make these baseless comparisons with the intent to motivate us. (It just makes us feel worse.)

The numerous follow-up videos on the theme—capitalizing off the success of the original parody—cross the line from “tasteless” into “enabling racism.”

First: TwoSet makes plenty of videos about child prodigies. There’s nothing wrong with this by itself, but it becomes an issue when they constantly bring up the “Ling Ling” meme while discussing their playing. Of course, the prodigy is almost always an Asian child.

To take so many gifted, hardworking children, to eliminate their individuality as people and performers, to reduce them to a single, insensitive caricature of an Asian child, to call each and every one a Ling Ling who practices forty hours a day—such is undeniably problematic.

Doing so gives their supporters free rein to act in more explicitly racist ways. I find this thread to be a good example of how TwoSet can unintentionally perpetuate toxicity. A teacher claims her student wants to avoid viola because they’re afraid of getting bullied—there are a lot of jokes out there about how violists are tone-deaf and incapable of playing in time. TwoSet actively propagates these jokes. One commenter writes:

Twoset didn’t come up with any of these jokes. They’ve been around for quite a while and they won’t go away just because Twoset stops making them.

Yes, TwoSet didn’t come up with the stereotype of a young Asian kid who’s a musical prodigy. TwoSet didn’t create the model minority myth. TwoSet didn’t ever claim that a child is Asian, so of course they’re good at school. What TwoSet did do was enable a whole generation of kids and viewers to believe that a phrase that literally contained an Asian-name caricature (think J.K. Rowling naming a character Cho Chang) was not an issue, and was in fact a funny joke that everyone could partake in.

The moniker Ching Chong is unacceptable, and yet Ling Ling isn’t? Taking a syllable that sounds Asian, repeating it, using it to refer to Asian prodigies—someone pinch me, or maybe shoot me in the face, but I can’t believe that TwoSet has been getting away with this nonsense for four whole years!

I know Brett and Eddy are Asian. People of Asian heritage joke about themselves all the time, in a self-deprecating way. We mock the stereotypes we know to be false. But there’s a difference between doing it among one’s friends and spreading it among one’s three million subscribers.

I used to stream piano practice on Reddit quite often. I don’t expect Reddit to be the nicest place, and I expect racist comments and take them in stride. Yes, we get it, you think I’m just another Asian prodigy (this speaks more to people’s inability to identify good playing than anything else.) You think whatever you do, an Asian kid somewhere will do it better than you. But it’s the comments like “We found Ling Ling!” and “Ling Ling 40 hours” which annoy me the most—the ones that make me feel like the commenter saw an Asian guy playing piano and automatically thought, there’s Ling Ling!

It’s the most obvious case of stereotyping I’ve ever encountered, and yet it’s coming from well-intentioned TwoSet fans who want to compliment me for my piano playing.

This is how TwoSetViolin enables racism. Not by telling their fans to write comments about Asian child prodigies, but by eliminating the perception of difference among Asians who study music. Look at some of the comments under this video:

When this girl grows up she's either gonna hate violin with a burning passion or be a god damned legend

It's a little known fact but these prodigies are just fragments of Ling Ling, only through joining all these prodigies together does Ling Ling finally become whole again.

*Asian child becomes 2 years old*

Parents : “here’s violin. Only talk to me when you’re better than Joshua Bell”

The stereotype that prodigies lack any autonomy. The Ling Ling reference. The overtly racist presentation of the Asian parent’s English and their attitude towards their child.

Here’s the real story, an English translation of what the prodigy herself says.

Violin gives me support when I feel lonely. I feel happy while playing violin and when I can't do some technique, I would keep practicing until I could do it. When I finally able to do that I feel very proud of myself.

That’s what I mean by eliminating the perception of difference. Somehow “Ling Ling,” this mythical prodigy, became an umbrella term for this young kid who loves playing violin because it makes her feel good, and me, a washed-up 19-year-old amateur pianist who has an incredibly complicated relationship with music and maybe a fraction of her talent.

I wrote a quick note on this topic on my Instagram story a while back, and a few of my Asian American musician friends responded positively. None of us wants to be Ling Ling. We’re our own people, with diverse sets of interests and passions and problems.

Asian Americans struggle to be perceived as anything but a bloc. On the surface, it’s very difficult for non-Asians to differentiate between Asian faces. Beyond that, there’s a stereotype that Asians are good at math, that they all play piano and violin, that their alcohol tolerance is low, that they’re followers rather than leaders—we always struggle with trying to be our own person.

The Ling Ling 40 Hours meme actively hurts any Asian kid who wants to be seen as more than just a kid who’s good at piano or violin, who gets good grades and studies hard. Just another Asian kid, another Ling Ling. Just another prodigy who works their ass off and gets yelled at by their parents if they miss a note or fail a test.

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TwoSet’s classism problem is actually pretty similar to their racism problem, and it’s an example of the classism prevalent in classical music circles. (Of course, there is also a good deal of racism involved here.)

Adam Neely already made a pretty good argument, shown below, regarding this TwoSet video.

Neely makes a few assertions:

• The video is making fun of rap music in a very disingenuous way;

• A lot of young classical musicians already look down upon non-classical music, and that this video reinforces those beliefs;

• Complexity is not quality;

• Classical music is an elitist institution.

Of course, there’s a lot more than four points in a ten-minute video, but I think those are the most important things he discusses.

There’s not that much more I can add to his already-excellent argument, but I’ll go over a few thoughts I had: first, the general idea that TwoSet doesn’t really care about any toxicity they might spread. It’s the same idea as in the Ling Ling meme: TwoSet will make videos reinforcing any belief they think their young, classically-oriented fanbase holds, whether that means stereotyping Asian kids or cheapening the value of rap music.

Second, and more importantly, it would be so easy for TwoSet to avoid this problem, or at least alleviate it, if they still wanted to create this classical vs. rap video.

It would be so easy for them to add a simple disclaimer to the end: there’s shitty rap and great rap, there’s shitty classical and great classical, and the reason all the classical music everyone has heard of is great is because the shitty ones have been filtered out through hundreds of years of history. They could talk about the value in musical elements other than melody and harmony—like the rhythm and lyrics. They could direct their viewers towards exploring new types of music by linking to great rap music. They could even explicitly tell their fanbase that classical music is cool and all, but there’s a lot of value in other types of music. They didn’t do any of these things.

The message they’re sending is that they don’t care that their audience is being turned off to great music, that they don’t care that they’re reinforcing racist and classist stereotypes—that what matters is only that their younger and more immature viewers laugh at their content, no matter how problematic it is.

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If you’re reading this and you’re a TwoSetViolin fan, I’m not attacking you. I’m providing you new information, and you can do whatever you want with it: continue to support the channel, try and call for change, expand your horizons, find a different set of content creators to watch. But if you continue to consume TwoSet’s content, it’s important to understand what values you’re supporting.

I know how easy it is to reject information that contradicts your core beliefs — regarding how you feel about classical music, or which people you idolize. (Hell, I’m certainly guilty of it.) But please do consider at least thinking about the ideas I’ve presented in this post, and if you change your mind on anything, do leave a comment—I’d love to hear some input from others.