Factory Tea Bar is a local boba shop in San Gabriel. It is a very popular location for high school students, because it is within extremely close proximity to San Gabriel High School where students often walk to after class. It is also the location for a popular Youtube Group, The Fung Brothers,' original music video, "Boba Life." I take extreme offense to the production of this video. First of all, they have constantly created videos about the San Gabriel Valley, highlighting the food and Asian people of the area. However, they are atrociously misconstruing and undermining the vast, beautiful diversity of the San Gabriel Valley. In conjunction to offending myself and my community, they also highlight and reinforce the model minority myth of Asians that we have worked so hard to deconstruct. They reinforce stereotypes, and quite frankly, drive me crazy. I hope to not give this video any further views, but at the same time, I hope for it to be critically analyzed.

I also take extreme offense to the creation of the 626 video, because it, again, only seeks to represent the Chinese, Taiwanese and Vietnamese population of the San Gabriel Valley. It also only really highlights the San Gabriel/ Monterey Park/ Rosemead/ Arcadia area, when in fact there is more to the San Gabriel Valley than just those cities. Additionally, there is more to our city than food. These people seek to commodify SGV into this exotic wonderland of food, which is undermining to other ethnicities, such as Mexican Americans, Tongva, etc. that really truly represent and contribute to the area. We are not just Asians. It has been known since the 1980s that SGV has a diverse Asian American population and these people actually believe they are doing groundbreaking work in making a new discovery. Instead, to garner, they will play at Asian stereotypes and highlight the Model Minority myth which angers me so much. To add insult to injury, these people are not from the area. They are from Washington, yet they make profit off creating an exposé of my hometime. It saddens me that they reach out to a high school and middle school population, who do not quite understand what these people are doing. Often times, they are excited to see their city being represented in social media.

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