Chinese American Says She Voted for Trump to 'Stay Loved' and 'Close to Whiteness': 'I Immediately Hated My Choice'

A Chinese American woman who voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election has revealed that she 'immediately hated' her choice, but did not yet believe it was wrong.

Julia Wu, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, described crying as she drove away from her polling place and later sobbing after Trump won the election. Despite her emotional reaction, she said she initially struggled to accept that she had made the wrong decision.

'I immediately hated my choice, but I did not yet believe it to be wrong,' Wu wrote in a personal essay originally published by HuffPost in June 2025 and republished as part of its 'Best Of' series in 2026.

Wu said her vote was shaped by years of struggling to belong and by the influence of the white evangelical Christian environment in which she had grown up.

Looking back, she identified two impulses that she believes ultimately drove her decision: the desire to 'stay loved' and the desire to 'stay close to whiteness', which she said had both been 'repackaged as a desire to please God'.

Wu stressed that she did not believe voting for Trump itself would bring her closer to either goal. Instead, she believed complying with the expectations of the community around her might preserve her place within it.

'I wanted to stay trusted and to be seen as good, and I believed them when they told me how to do it,' she wrote.

A Childhood Shaped by Wanting to Fit In

Wu grew up in a predominantly white, church-centred community in West Virginia.

Her parents grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution before moving to the United States. Wu said she did not fully understand their experiences when she was young and only learned as a teenager that her mother had been in Beijing during the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.

From childhood, Wu was conscious of being different. She recalled other children questioning her appearance, while experiences at her Baptist preschool reinforced her awareness of her Chinese identity.

Wu said her only Asian American friend from high school later told her that her prevailing memory of Wu was hearing her repeatedly say that she hated being Chinese and wished she were white.

At the time, Wu said she lacked the framework to understand those feelings through concepts such as systemic racism, white supremacy or the model minority myth. Instead, she tried to navigate her sense of difference through assimilation.

'I'd spent so many years trying to convince white people and myself that I was one of them, and I'd almost done it,' she wrote.

How Church Shaped Her Political Thinking

Wu said her church became a central source of belonging and authority as she grew up.

She described an environment in which evangelical Christianity, patriotism and Republican politics became intertwined in her understanding of what it meant to be a good Christian. Nationally, white evangelical Christians overwhelmingly supported Trump in 2016, with exit polling finding that eight in 10 voted for him.

Wu recalled seeing an American flag on the church stage, children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and worship services incorporating patriotic songs.

Ahead of the 2016 election, Wu joined an 'Adopt A College Student' ministry and was paired with a pastor's family. She said the pastor's wife frequently discussed politics with her, including issues such as gun control, racism and Hillary Clinton.

'She presented ideologies as an assumed commonality, sparing me the opportunity to react wrongly,' Wu wrote.

By November, Wu said she had heard enough criticism of Clinton to conclude that the Democratic candidate was not an option. She said she did not have comparable conversations about Trump before casting her vote.

Wu Says Her 'White-Adjacent' Bubble Burst After Election

Following Trump's victory, Wu said the sense of 'white-adjacent' safety she believed she had built disappeared. She described hearing racist comments from people she loved and confronting the reality that her attempts to assimilate could not prevent others from seeing her as Chinese.

'I'd spent my life allying with whiteness, and I couldn't believe now how it had betrayed me,' she wrote.

The experience led Wu to reconsider her understanding of race, politics, religion and her own identity. Looking back, she described her 2016 vote as being tied not only to politics but also to her desire for belonging and acceptance.

Wu still lives in Huntington, West Virginia. She wrote that everyone she loves either voted for Trump or loves someone who did. She also made clear that she does not look back on her vote with gratitude.

'I am not grateful to have made the mistake of voting for Donald Trump in 2016,' Wu wrote, adding that she was nevertheless grateful to have reached 'the other side of a crisis point'.