“It’s crazy to think u started all this with posting a video where you didn’t want to go to work,” chimed in another. It’s true: On January 28, 2023, Fang was on call for her job as a hostess at a chain restaurant in Vancouver. “I was having a bad day. But I was like, ‘Okay, it’s rainy. They’re definitely really slow; they won’t need me,’ Of course, they called,” she says. “I was bawling my eyes out as I was getting ready, and when I saw myself in the mirror I was like, ‘Wow, this looks so ridiculous.’” So, as teenagers do, she decided to document it.
Before Fang started her shift, she posted a sped-up, two-and-a-half-minute version of the 15-minute video on TikTok and added the text: “POV: I got called into work.” When she picked up her phone a few hours later, “the video had just completely blown up,” she says. “The views were in the millions already. It was terrifying.”
It’s hard to say exactly why and how the video picked up such momentum so quickly; the TikTok algorithm works in mysterious ways. In any case, because of that video (which, as of this moment, has north of 40 million views), Fang’s follower count jumped from somewhere in the hundreds to somewhere in the thousands. So what did she do next? Absolutely nothing. “I didn’t post for a whole week,” she says. “I was scared.”
Instead, Fang decided to let her account “marinate a little” and a week later—inspired by the fact that many of the comments on the previous video were about how flawless her makeup looked even as she cried—she posted a beauty tutorial. The rest is history: “After that, I did a get ready with me every single day before school,” says Fang.
By “school” she means high school—Fang was a senior at the time. She had already applied to college and decided on her major—journalism—before her TikTok following suddenly ballooned. She signed on with a talent management company (United Talent Agency) in June, and headed to college (the University of Victoria) that summer.
She lived in a dorm on campus for her first semester, but found it difficult to adjust to the slower pace of life on Vancouver Island. “Because I’m such a city girl, moving to an island… I mean it was a gorgeous island, don’t get me wrong,” says Fang. “But if I wasn’t in class, I was just in my dorm.” Or the mailroom: Fang says she used to have to borrow a dolly to cart her PR packages—boxes filled with beauty products that brands hoped she would feature in a video—from the mailroom to her dorm room each day.
