In Beijing, Eileen Gu is called the Snow Princess. Her fresh face and highlighted tresses grace billboards and glossy ads for Louis Vuitton and Tiffany. Her gold medal performance in the Winter Olympics women’s big air freestyle ski event crashed the Chinese social media site Weibo, when more than 300 million people swooned over the teenager’s historic achievement.
But her 85-year-old Chinese grandmother, waiting and watching from the home they share in San Francisco, doesn’t get all the fuss.
“I’m not used to all this nonsense of making a big deal about success,” Gu’s grandmother, Feng Guozhen, said in an exclusive interview this week with the Bay Area News Group.
Perhaps the attitude of this spry grandmother helps keep the 18-year-old sudden megastar and daredevil grounded as she becomes the unforgettable face of the Beijing winter games, especially in China where she has spent every summer since she was 2. The San Francisco teen returns to the spotlight at 6 p.m. Saturday (California time) in pursuit of her second gold medal in the Freeski Slopestyle event.
“Eileen is very level-headed,” Feng said, speaking in Mandarin on Thursday in an interview translated by a neighbor, “and she would never let fame get to her.”
From the hallways of San Francisco University High School to her own front yard, those who have watched Gu come of age believe she is the right woman for the moment, uniquely capable of balancing her whirlwind success and sidestepping the controversies over her decision to compete for China instead of the United States. While China doesn’t permit dual citizenship, the U.S.-born teen hasn’t made it clear whether she’s renounced her U.S. citizenship or been granted an exception.
As she often puts it, “Since I was little, I always have said when I’m in the U.S., I’m American, when I’m in China, I’m Chinese.”
Her grandmother says Gu talks from the heart. “She’s not thinking about politics, just for the love of it,” Feng said. “She’s not being manipulative, because she’s very pure, just wants people to be happy, to have fun.”
Gu speaks fluent Mandarin, endearing her further to her fans in China, where she is known as “Gu Ailing.” And she often talks about her summers in Beijing taking math classes by day and encouraging her female classmates to join her playing in a boys basketball program at night.
Gu’s accomplishments are impressive by any measure: Not only was she the youngest person to win the gold medal in Olympic freestyle skiing history when she landed a double cork last week, she was the first female rookie to win three medals at the X Games. She was a top runner on the high school cross country team and doubled up on her classes junior year to graduate a year early to prepare for the Olympics. She scored a nearly perfect 1580 out of 1600 on her SATs and will enter Stanford as a freshman in the fall. She has signed sponsorship contracts with more than 20 companies in the United States and China, including Red Bull, Beats by Dre, Victoria’s Secret and Cadillac.
“With all that, you think she would have at least a fairly high opinion of herself, and you just never get that,” said Jim Ketcham, athletics director for San Francisco University High, the private high school where she graduated last year. “She just acts completely humble and completely normal.”
Before Gu traveled to New Zealand during her high school years for a week of ski competitions, she would visit “every one of her teachers personally to apologize about missing class,” he said. Before a trip to Australia for a World Cup, she worked on a schedule with her cross country coach to avoid missing as few races as possible.
Ketcham largely credits Gu’s mother, Yan Gu, and Feng, her grandmother — the two women Gu herself has called “the two most fiercely independent women that I know.”
The family is reluctant to discuss Gu’s American father, but her successful, single mother and grandmother raised her appreciating both American and Chinese cultures in an elegant home overlooking the San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge.
Gu’s mother immigrated to the United States 30 years ago, graduating with degrees in biochemistry and molecular biology at Auburn University before earning an MBA at Stanford and forging a career in finance. Yan Gu spent weekends skiing at Lake Tahoe — a passion she would share with her daughter.
Gu’s grandmother holds a degree in the sciences from a prestigious university in Nanjing, where she played basketball. When she retired as a senior engineer in the Structural Reform Department of China’s Ministry of Transport, she moved to San Francisco to help raise her granddaughter.
Before Eileen was old enough to walk, her grandmother taught her to recite poems from the Tang Dynasty and was a constant cheerleader at her after-school sports, from junior varsity basketball to varsity track. Together in the kitchen, they make dumplings.
“She has a relationship with them that is as strong and positive as you could possibly imagine,” Ketcham said. “And I just have a feeling that a little part, or a big part, of her decision to compete for China was really just a sign of respect for those two people in her life who were born in China and love their country.”
In 2019, Gu announced on Instagram her “incredibly tough” decision to compete for China: “I am proud of my heritage and equally proud of my American upbringings,” she wrote. “The opportunity to inspire millions of young people where my mom was born, during the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help to promote the sport I love.”
Inspiring young people, especially girls, has been a goal since grade school. While attending Katherine Delmar Burke grammar school — an all-girls private school in San Francisco — Gu delivered a speech in seventh grade about women’s empowerment, a tape of which Adidas would use as a voiceover in 2019 for a women’s golf commercial. “I encourage you all to step out of your comfort zone,” Gu’s young, high-pitched voice says, “and to show the boys that girls are just as powerful as they are …”
To the athletic director, Gu is the kind of person who “doesn’t know what she can’t do.”
And if that means that an 18-year-old can influence the future of girls in China, Ketcham said, Gu’s the one to do it.
“I think she sees that if she’s successful representing China in these Olympic Games, there is going to be an incredible increase in opportunities for girls in China to become athletes and experience the joy that she’s felt being an athlete,” Ketcham said, “and I think we’re watching that happen right before our eyes.”
Staff Writer Summer Lin contributed to this report.
