San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
NICK CHO: THE TIKTOK CELEB
Nick Cho didn’t set out to become a social media celebrity during the coronavirus pandemic. It just happened that way
The coowner of Wrecking Ball Coffee Roasters had quit Facebook and was looking for a new way to connect online, so he turned to his daughters, ages 15 and 17, for advice. They told him to get on TikTok.
Cho, 47, has always made home videos, but after taking a look at the app, he decided he could never crack the crowded field of cute teenage dance videos. He was just a dad of Korean descent, so that became his handle: @ yourkoreandad.
“We needed a diversion during corona and I thought, ‘ What if I create a character of sorts?’ ” he says. “What if I am the Korean dad and what if I am your Korean dad?”
In April, Cho posted his first video, a 20second introduction. “I’m your Korean dad,” he said, approaching the camera as if he were looking over the shoulder of a student. “You’re doing homework? You’re working so hard. You need a coffee? I’ll make you a coffee.” Then he turned away from the camera and turned back holding a perfect cup with a leaf imprint in the foam, a skill he developed at Wrecking Ball, which he opened in Cow Hollow with his wife, Trish, in 2014.
Cho’s calming voice and latte artistry earned a few thousand views. In his next video he left his home in the Outer Richmond neighborhood of San Francisco and went shopping for snacks at Walgreens, a mundane task he tried to make funny to take the edge off the lockdown. That jumped to 1.2 million views.
“I stumbled upon something I did not plan for or intend,” he says. “I was getting a reaction of people crying while watching my video, sometimes wrapped up in a blanket. They were using my content as a cathartic outlet.”
Cho now has 1.5 million followers on TikTok, and over the last nine months he has posted dozens of videos, all beginning with a handwave and the line
“Hey, I’m your Korean dad.” He has discussed his support of LGBTQ kids, and he has taken viewers shopping at Costco. A clip of him buying and tastetesting a $ 30 bag of grapes at a Korean grocery store got 9.2 million views, a personal best. His hashtag # yourko reandad has been widely shared on Facebook and Instagram.
What started as a break from the pandemic has grown into much more. Cho says Your Korean Dad is now bigger than he is — and that online persona brings with it a lot of responsibility.
“Anyone can go viral on TikTok,” he says. “The hard part is consistency and longevity.” While his popularity lasts, Cho is using the platform to tear down stereotypes. At first, he was going after the narrow caricature of Korean dads being as “stoic as samurai overlords.” Now he is after the broader stereotypes of Korean culture.
“People just assume that all we do all day is watch Kpop videos, eat giant bowls of kimchi and watch ‘ Parasite’ ( the Oscarwinning 2019 Korean thriller) all day on a loop,” he says.
Cho does not have time for any of those pursuits. Wrecking Ball has three locations — one in a tech office and cafes in San Francisco and Berkeley. The cafes have both stayed open during the pandemic. On top of running those, Cho is holding himself to a schedule of three videos a week.
Sometimes ideas come to him while he is serving a customer or cooking dinner or out walking with one of his daughters. His TikTok posts have hit such a chord that TV producers have hunted him down and are dangling the idea of a show.
“What I am struck by all the time during this pandemic is that there is a lot of pain and heartache out there, and our consumer culture in America is not meeting those needs,” he says. “An app can’t cure someone’s heartache, but a person can by working through an app.”