In Jensen Huang, I saw their hostility toward Chinese people.

By: Xiaobing, TechFlow

When Jensen Huang was nine years old, he had to cross a suspension bridge every day on his way to school.

Planks were missing from the bridge deck, with deep water below. Boys waited on the other side to shake the bridge violently or call him names laced with discrimination. Small and slight, with poor English, he was one of the few Asian faces in the school. There were no counselors, and no one taught him what “anti-bullying” meant. The only thing he could do each day was walk across it.

In 1973, he and his older brother were sent to the Oneida Baptist Institute in eastern Kentucky. His uncle thought it was an elite boarding school; in reality, it was a religious reform institution for “troubled youth.” Students smoked, carried knives, and showed little interest in learning. Classmates called Huang “Chink,” and he was assigned to clean the boys’ dormitory toilets every day.

His roommate was seventeen, illiterate, and on his first night ripped up his shirt to show him knife scars from fights. Later, Huang taught his roommate to read, and the roommate taught him how to bench press. At fourteen, he made it into Sports Illustrated for his table tennis skills.

A nine-year-old Chinese immigrant boy thus learned how to survive in an unfamiliar, rough, and even dangerous environment.

He did not retreat.

More than fifty years later, Jensen Huang found himself standing on another swaying bridge. This time, however, the abyss beneath was a tangle of private morality, corporate power, national security, geopolitics, and ethnic bias.

From Inquiry to Ethnic Hunt

On November 8, 2026, Jensen Huang admitted in an internal email to all employees that he had been unfaithful to his wife. He wrote: “There are no excuses.”

This was no minor matter.

At the other end of this incident lies national security. The New York Times previously reported that former high-level executive Alice Huang (Huang Le) of Singapore-based data center company Megaspeed was closely associated with Jensen Huang. Between June 2024 and February 2026, Megaspeed’s Malaysian affiliate purchased over $4.8 billion worth of equipment containing Nvidia chips. The case has now been transferred from the Commerce Department to the Justice Department.

Nvidia’s board launched an independent investigation. Three House committee chairs demanded Huang attend a closed briefing on November 18. The FBI intervened. Shareholders filed lawsuits. When markets opened on November 9, Nvidia’s stock plunged as much as 8%, wiping out over $300 billion in market value at one point.

Every one of these inquiries is reasonable. Marital misconduct, disclosure failures, conflicts of interest, and export control violations can all be questioned—and should be.

But often, the distance from inquiry to hunt is just one headline away.

When The Economist covered the story, its headline read, “Jensen Huang is caught with his pants down,” with the subhead “Two Huangs don't make a right,” playing on the shared surname of Huang and Alice Huang to echo the English proverb “Two wrongs don't make a right.”

The New York Post went even further, blasting “HUANG HUANG BANG BANG” in large print across its front page—a title laden with dual metaphors of sexual innuendo and gunfire.

Social media took it even further.

A widely circulated tweet lined up photos of Mark Zuckerberg with Priscilla Chan, Brian Armstrong with Angela Meng, and Larry Ellison with Jolin Zhu, captioned: “I'm seeing a pattern here.”

All these tech executives’ partners are Asian women, yet none have faced intelligence-related allegations. Someone created a flowchart titled “How To Tell If Your GF Is A Spy,” using “Is she Asian?” and “Does she work in tech?” as decision nodes; accompanying posts featured photos of Asian women with captions like “How your Chinese gf looks at you before asking for state secrets.”

Within hours, one man’s scandal had been diluted into a collective scrutiny of all Asian women.

On November 11, the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) issued a public statement calling out The Economist and the New York Post. The statement pointed out that turning Asian surnames into punchlines for wordplay “has the potential to reinforce harmful connections between identity and suspicion, misconduct, and divided loyalties.” AAJA will contact the editors-in-chief of both publications directly to discuss their wording.

At the end of that apology letter, Huang wrote that he loves America, supports U.S. national security, and is proud to be an American. A man who arrived in the country at age nine and has lived here for over half a century; a founder of one of America’s most vital tech companies who staked his entire career on the U.S. innovation ecosystem; a man who personally steered Nvidia to becoming the world’s first company to reach a $5 trillion market cap—still needed to publicly reaffirm his loyalty at age sixty-three.

Of course, Jensen Huang can be criticized. But it is unacceptable to casually turn every person named Huang into a punchline, or every Asian woman into a suspect.

The Hawks' Patience and Long Memory

The outbreak of this scandal was not merely a natural fermentation of a moral incident, but also the release of long-simmering political energy.

Semafor used a headline in its November 11 report: “Revenge of the China hawks: Jensen Huang's enemies take a victory lap.”

The timeline is clear.

On September 25, 2025, Huang’s remarks on the BG2 podcast enraged Washington’s pro-China hawk camp. He said China lagged behind the U.S. in chip technology by “only a few nanoseconds,” dismissed the label “China hawk” as anything less than a “badge of honor,” saying it deserved only to be called a “badge of shame,” and argued that destroying pipelines to the American Dream was “not patriotic at all.”

These words instantly angered certain individuals. Steve Bannon labeled Huang an “agent of Chinese influence” on his own podcast, The War Room, claiming he “should be arrested today,” while Florida Senator Rick Scott retweeted clips of the interview on X.

The hawks remembered.

Semafor quoted Eric Sayers, former congressional defense staffer and now managing director at lobbying firm Beacon Global Strategies: “Let’s put it this way, China hawks are patient, and they have very good memories.”

The reporting revealed a cold fact: Huang is not merely tangled in trouble over an extramarital affair; he stands at the center of an ideological war over chip export controls.

Multiple sources familiar with the hawkish policy agenda told Semafor that Huang’s ouster would make the upcoming legislative battle over export controls “much easier.” Nvidia insiders also believe the uproar has effectively crippled the company’s lobbying power regarding chip exports to China.

As for who leaked the national security documents used to destroy Huang, Semafor’s wording was deliberately subtle: “It remains unclear at this time.”

A man’s private moral flaw collided with a group of “patient and well-remembering” political forces, collided with a strategic debate over decoupling U.S. and Chinese tech, and collided with a timing window that called for “making an example of one to warn others.”

Never coincidence.

The Ceiling Reached by Chinese Test-Takers

In a sense, Jensen Huang represents the absolute peak that Chinese “test-takers” can reach.

He pushed the life methodology most familiar to Chinese people to its extreme: endure, learn, perfect your craft, and exert more effort than anyone else to earn a seat that was never meant for you.

Cleaning toilets at nine, then washing dishes in restaurants later. At thirty, he co-founded Nvidia with two partners at a Denny’s restaurant, armed with $600 in initial capital to start making graphics cards.

When CUDA was launched in 2006, Wall Street initially refused to buy in: cramming general-purpose computing into gaming GPUs increased chip costs by approximately 50%, sending the company’s market cap tumbling to around $1.5 billion at one point.

Nvidia executives later recalled that it took Wall Street nearly a decade to accept that the investment in CUDA was worthwhile.

But Huang did not withdraw. He kept placing bets when no one else understood, refusing to quit as the company teetered on the edge multiple times. It wasn’t until AlexNet ignited the deep learning revolution in 2012, until data center revenue eclipsed gaming to become Nvidia’s largest segment in 2020, and until October 2025 when Nvidia became humanity’s first company to surpass a $5 trillion market cap—even if the combined valuations of rivals AMD, Intel, Broadcom, TSMC, Qualcomm, and Arm could barely catch up—that observers finally recognized that the so-called “contrarian pick” in 2006 was actually the single most crucial strategic wager in two decades of technological history.

Huang’s success was never about chasing trends; it was about continuing to bet when no one understood, ultimately carving a Chinese name into the very center of global technological power.

Therefore, when cracks appeared in his image and some rushed in, the malice involved felt particularly complex.

Among it were anger over private morality, legitimate questions regarding corporate governance, and genuine investor anxiety over stakes. But layered on top was a barely concealed thrill: You finally messed up. You’re finally not invincible anymore. You can finally be brought down.

The more successful a person is, the more intense that thrill becomes.

And when that person is a Chinese American, a Chinese American holding onto strategically vital U.S. tech assets, personal scandals are easily converted into identity trials, while commercial accountability gets swept up in geopolitical witch-hunt fervor.

What they sometimes criticized was no longer “what Jensen Huang did wrong,” but rather “why does Jensen Huang get to stand there in the first place.”

Chips, But No Microphone

Placing Huang’s situation within the power map of Silicon Valley’s tech giants reveals a brutal structural disparity.

Elon Musk owns X (formerly Twitter), one of the world’s most crucial public opinion platforms.

Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post, the benchmark for U.S. political journalism.

The Murdoch family controls Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post.

Mark Zuckerberg holds Facebook and Instagram.

Google’s founders own YouTube, which 35% of Americans rely on as their primary news source.

The Ellison family secured CBS, and still covets CNN and TikTok’s U.S. operations.

What does Jensen Huang have?

He has the world’s most powerful AI chips and the CUDA ecosystem. He commands a $5 trillion market cap and possesses the ability to make every tech company globally queue up for his products.

But he doesn’t have a single microphone.

When the scandal broke, Musk could dictate the narrative pace on his own platform, Bezos could silence The Washington Post or let it speak his preferred voice, and Murdoch’s media empire could turn its front page into a weapon—as they did to Huang.

Huang could only send an internal memo and wait to be defined by others’ headlines.

This is a structural absence of power. No matter how well you solve the problems, score the highest marks globally, or deliver a $5 trillion report card, the rules outside the exam room are not written by the test-takers.

At the poker table of power, chips are merely betting tokens; narrative control is the house.

The Struggle Continues

Many Chinese readily believe in a certain sense of security: as long as I am excellent enough, diligent enough, law-abiding enough, and leave no handle for anyone to grasp, I will be treated equally.

At moments like this, one thinks of a little-known figure: Chinese American Vincent Chin.

In 1982, Chin was beaten to death in Detroit by two white auto workers. As the U.S. auto industry declined and anti-Japanese sentiment surged, the attackers mistook a Chinese man for Japanese, venting anger born of industrial competition onto an Asian face. Neither murderer served a single day in prison. Chin had nothing to do with Japan’s auto industry and harmed no one. He simply grew a face that was easy to blame in such a moment.

Therefore, what we are arguing for today was never about “Jensen Huang is always right.”

Whatever he did wrong should rest on his shoulders. But unproven claims cannot be filled in with references to his bloodline; admitted mistakes cannot serve as a license for racial humiliation; a single person’s accountability must never be expanded into an ancestral sin for an entire ethnicity.

For Chinese accustomed to taking tests, it is crucial to understand that the real world contains more than just exam papers—it holds poker tables as well; beyond standard answers lie power, interests, factions, and narratives.

At nine years old, Jensen Huang faced bullying and walked across the suspension bridge alone.

Over fifty years later, despite possessing wealth, prestige, and an almost irreplaceable company, he has still not fully escaped the condition of having to “be more perfect than everyone else to deserve trust.”

Abandon illusions. The struggle persists.