How French-Chinese influencer J Lou turned her rice obsession into a community, a business, and hope for those struggling with their identity
- YouTube and Instagram influencer J Lou created the #RiceFam community and then a line of merchandise featuring rice-related characters based on her love of rice
- What started as a cute project came to mean much more - ‘It’s about people like me who may not have found a suitable spot in society or fit in a specific box’
While fitness influencers continue to shill the virtues of “rice” fashioned from cauliflower or konnyaku, J Lou is having none of it.
For the 26-year-old YouTube star and Instagram comedienne, rice is a non-negotiable part of life – so much so that her love for the carb has spun into an entire community, an official line of merchandise, and now a pop-up in Causeway Bay in Hong Kong.
“I feel like rice just has a sense of warmth,” she says. “Even the word sik faan, or ‘it’s time to eat’ [in Cantonese], has the word rice in it. There’s a sense that when there is rice, when the rice cooker is on, the family is together and we’re gathered together.”
The idea that rice can create a community led to #RiceFam, the tongue-in-cheek name of Lou’s fan base, coined after her social media followers started noticing how much she would obsess over rice in her videos (she currently has more than 374,000 subscribers on YouTube and 446,000 on Instagram).
That led Lou to create a “Rice Monster” persona in 2019, a soft, white blob tightly clutching a bowl of rice, with the word “Mine” splashed over the top.