Nick Cho started out as dad to two daughters. As Your Korean Dad on Tik Tok he’s has added 1.7 million followers to the family.
He offers kind and compassionate advice about heartbreak or spending money sensibly in 60-second bites.
Afternoons talked to the Tik Tok sensation about his accidental fame and his message for the world.
Cho says he never set out to become a social media influencer and foremost wanted to portray a nice kind dad for people.
Nick Cho - Your Korean Dad Photo: Nick Cho/ Your Korean Dad
“I really underestimated the kind of impact it would have on individuals. I get like 100 messages per day from different viewers from the United States and from around the world.”
He says many of the messages are of simple thanks, hellos, and requests, but around a third of them are expressions of pain, grief or trauma.
“There’s just so much loss. Whether someone never had a dad in their life, or that they did and passed away. Someone messaged me saying their dad had passed away that day and they turned to my content for some sort of comfort.
“That’s the kind of thing where it feels like it’s a lot bigger than me, but ultimately that I tapped into something that’s really human and really important.”
Your Korean Dad is partly a persona he says, but it’s best described by his daughters who say it is him, but it’s a two-dimensional Cho.
“They’re very thankful they get to have the whole three-dimensional me, and some am I.”
Cho’s bread and butter is a coffee business he’s been running for a few years now. It was a year ago that one of his daughters said he should get on Tik Tok. He started making Your Korean Dad content in April 2020.
“It took a few months to gain a lot of steam but within a few months I hit 100,000 followers, which I thought was astronomical, and then in November I hit 1 million, which was mind-blowing. Then, just last week, I hit 2 million followers and I don’t even know what to say anymore.”
Cho isn’t just any dad, as his moniker shows, and he says that adding Korean is a part of being active in celebrating our differences.
“The Korean part is about normalising the idea that people have different cultures that they come from. There’s the culture of a place, collective culture of where you live, as well as the place that you come from.
“Especially here in America, I think that’s a unique sort of challenge. It’s not just for Korean people, it’s for all kinds of people to help normalise that idea of having multiple cultures that are a part of you is completely normal and it doesn’t make you less of an American.”
Social media has its fair share of trolls and abusers, but Cho doesn’t let that deter him.
“I do recognise that social media has gotten a bad rep, and I do think that it’s because so much of it happened so quickly that it’s really hard for our culture to keep up with all the technology.
“That said, I’m one of those people that believes all people are good, or that people are trying to be good and that when there are negative effects of any kind, it’s really the result of unintended consequences.”
