From online parody to mainstream media: The remediation of mock Vietnamese Mandarin in Taiwan

This paper investigates how Ruan Yuejiao—a drag parody of a Vietnamese migrant spouse created by Taiwanese influencer A-Han—becomes remediated from being an online YouTube persona into a mainstream TV variety-show character. I analyse five key extracts from an episode of WTO Sister Show, a program featuring mostly immigrants discussing their lives in Taiwan. My analysis shows that the hosts establish a dominant frame of Vietnamese women as beautiful, fair-skinned, and hyper-feminine, which serves as the co-text into which Ruan Yuejiao’s drag parody is introduced. Subsequent metaparodies—which target her failed femininity and working-class taste—are reinforced by impact captioning, visual effects, and the Vietnamese guests’ distancing acts. Meanwhile, her mock Vietnamese-accented Mandarin is authenticated, and her risqué humour is successfully remediated to align with the show’s entertainment frame. Beyond critiques of class-based femininity, Ruan Yuejiao’s Vietnamese identity is also affirmed when a heterosexual male panellist sexually harasses a Vietnamese actress, prompting Ruan Yuejiao to defuse the moment with comic intervention. These practices together remediate Ruan Yuejiao as a consumable comic figure, masking how her parody may reproduce racialised power asymmetries. I argue that understanding raciolinguistic parody requires moving beyond accent mockery and negative indexicalities to examine the intertextual mechanisms—captions, graphics, and guest reactions—that authorise and circulate it across media.