As much as the Covid pandemic took away, for some it gave and gave. In entirely unexpected ways.
One such recipient of a previously unimagined life path was Chad Jones. Now I fully recognise that the internet is a strange place with content rabbit holes your personal algorithm may never, ever lead you down. But when the collective audience of said Chad Jones’s rabbit hole is the size of the official population estimate of South Africa, then I feel that we should pay attention.
What, you might ask, happened to propel Chad into this stratospheric level of digital fame? I will tell you. It was the dance.
Chad explains over lunch at Akti, a new Mediterranean-inflected restaurant in The Zone, Rosebank. I may have mentioned that I’m of Greek extraction — so all I need to tell you is that I approve. It reminds me of some lovely establishments in Athens, where style and substance unite in delicious renditions of Greek classics.
Then all my followers just went on there and started defending me and tuning them like, ‘Hey, he’s been doing it for two years. What’s wrong with you?’
Chad is a fan. He recently returned from his first trip to Europe, and I’m happy to report it was to Greece, where he consumed a lot of Giro, and is, therefore, perfectly positioned to concur with my conclusions.
Chad grew up and, until this year, lived in Gqeberha under the influence of his tiger parents. He has absolutely no idea what I’m talking about when I ask if he was raised by tigers. I ask the relevant questions: was he a high-performing youth? By which I mean did he do all the extramurals, play all the instruments, pursue engineering or medicine at university? He ticks all the boxes. “My parents did not expect my sister and me to win at everything but they did expect us to do our best.”
To that end, Chad became a computer engineer, national karate champion representing South Africa, and master of about 20 instruments. I mean really. And then during lockdown he decided to do his best at TikTok.
He got his parents to participate in a couple of dance challenges. He told them not to worry, nobody would see them and they would all just be having some fun in those troubled times. How wrong he was. Those videos went viral and before he knew it he was changing career path to become a content creator with a stupendous following, various brand campaigns (he is shooting the Coca-Cola Oreo cookie campaign right now), roles in films including an Afrikaans film where he had to cry on demand, a reality dance show on SABC1 where he mentored a dance crew, and Tropika Island of Treasure, where he unfortunately got eliminated in the first round.
“I’m actually very competitive.” I can’t imagine. He animatedly describes the challenges, including swimming far out into the ocean to retrieve a 7kg box which he had to carry himself because his partner was not lying when he said he was not really a swimmer, and the joys of archery — Maasai style — which unfortunately led to their elimination.
Where did the love for dance come from? It was not, it transpires, one of his many extramural activities. “I always loved dancing. Both sides of my family are very musical. On my mother’s side, my grandfather played the piano and violin, and on my dad’s side, he played guitar. My parents grew up ballroom dancing together. My grandmother, on the mom’s side, was very big into line dancing. My sister is also very musical.
“So I’d say it’s always been there. A lot of people thought when they first saw me, ‘OK, this guy just learnt how to dance on TikTok’, especially because it’s mostly African and South African dance. But I grew up learning kwaito and gqom and amapiano, all those genres. I speak more Xhosa than Mandarin. I grew up with it at school. Most of my friends were African, and the parties I went to, that is the music we listened to and the dances we did.”
Chad describes how he had to protect his parents from some very negative commentary during Covid.
“Half was negative. Half was positive. I had to monitor the negativity, otherwise my parents wouldn’t do it, because, you know, it was Covid and we are Chinese. So they would be like, ‘y’all go back to your country and take your virus with you’. I was like, are you kidding me? Being born and raised in South Africa, and your own people saying it to you. It was very disheartening. If my parents had seen that they’d have just stopped. Because they’re very old school.”
But as his community grew, so did support around the sheer delight in seeing him dance our dances, and possibly what it means for our collective national identity to share the exuberance and joy in our mutual culture. “I was pushed into a circle to dance and someone filmed it and I was trending on Twitter or something, because someone posted that video saying ‘Chinese national dancing to South African music’. Then all my followers just went on there and started defending me and tuning them like, ‘Hey, he’s been doing it for two years. What’s wrong with you?’ So I think we have built a really nice community.” For which he is truly grateful,
I ask him if he could have imagined this about-turn in his life. “I get to work with awesome, different new people every day — it’s amazing because I used to be that Asian nerd behind the computer, so it got me out of my shell as well. I mean, I wouldn’t say I was introverted, but I never showed myself online before.”
I wonder what he has learnt on this wonderful quixotic journey. “Don’t be scared to be yourself or put yourself out there. Social media is kind of running the world, think of any business and if you want to do well you have to have a social media presence, so don’t be scared to put yourself out there,” says Chad.
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