This past Friday, Northeastern’s Chinese Student Association (CSA) held an online event with CantoMando, a group of three Asian-Canadians with a large following of 450k on Youtube and 150k on Instagram. Having started off their channel a few years ago, Sheldon Ho, Mike Wu and Edward Leung have evolved along with their audience, portraying their passions and experiences in the most comedic and relatable ways. Their content varies, including videos like speaking only Cantonese in day, kpop makeovers and documented blind dates, to their parents’ reactions to memes, parodies, and more. CantoMando is a unique Youtube channel as it caters towards an Asian American audience. CantoMando is comparable to the older wave of popular Asian American YouTubers like Ryan Higa and WongFu Productions (although still popular) who dominated the platform. These influencers had a tight-knit and supportive community captivated by their ability to portray relatable experiences with such lightheartedness and humour.
The online live event with CantoMando was hosted through Microsoft Teams. Students were able to inquire the guests via the chat feature and the questions with the most likes were then communicated by the CSA e-board. The Q&A session was the perfect opportunity to get a glimpse of what Sheldon, Mike, and Edward are like behind the cameras. Furthermore, the students were able to ask about the behind-the-scenes of how their content creations are born. They responded that they typically try to take trending YouTube challenges and destroy it in the most dramaticized way possible. This technique is often found successful as their viewers become a part of the CantoMando community for their consistent goofiness and spontaneity.
One notable fact about CantoMando is that they all quit their jobs to pursue YouTube. This was not well-received by Edward’s parents in particular who had the more common experiences of immigrating to Canada and wanted him to take on a more safer career path. Originally as an accountant, Edward disliked his job with a burning passion. To see how he started off from there and is now so successful and happy in what he does was very cool to see. In addition, he opened up about his struggles of gaining the support of his parents. They all brought up how doing so was not easy, but was possible by providing them with tangible evidence of success which inevitably came later on in the process.
Overall, the event was very entertaining, especially when they ended it off with a live performance of their original song, Korean Fried Chicken. Having been a religious viewer for about a year, it was such a cool experience seeing CantoMando in such a more intimate setting and learning much more about them as individual people. If you want to check them out click here.
