Tim here, and I'm coming up to a very Chinese time in my life.

I'm sure many of you are too. By that, I mean Lunar New Year is coming up, and I'm preparing to celebrate the Chinese variant with my family. Chinamaxxing has been all over social media lately, which is interesting, because it makes the things I got made fun of growing up suddenly cool, and I have complicated feelings about that.

I was made in China, back before China got cool, and when I was growing up, "Made in China" meant an inferior version. Nowadays, China makes everything from the most gorgeous artisanal knives to futuristic cities and cars, but also still those off-brand knock-offs. See, funny thing is that back in the 70s, the same thing happened with Japan, where Japanese products were considered cheap and trash... but now, when you want something to seem high quality and artisanal, you look to talk about how it was inspired or made with Japanese knowledge.

...Though honestly with all the chronic pain and weird body issues I have, I kinda feel like I got the 90s version of "Made in China,” which tracks, considering I was born back then, in China.

Still, having come to the USA at 3 years old, a lot of Chinese traditions and heritage are foreign to me. I still struggle to communicate with my cousin, who’s the same age as I am, despite her having the same sort of interests in anime, and despite me having a decent grasp of conversational Chinese. She should be a mirror of sorts, easy to talk to and relate to, and instead there's somehow this glass wall between us where we can see each other but can't quite reach through.

But one look at me, it’s pretty clear I’m not white, despite how many times people have accused me of being white.

It’s because I don’t have any kind of accent, and I was born with what Chinese people will say is a “white nose,” and so no matter where I go, people don’t think I look like I’m native there.

(no, seriously, look at these comments--)

I think for anyone who's read my writing and all my verbosity, clearly my English and grasp of the language is "pretty good."

Being stuck between two different cultures was an experience that created a “Third Culture” not bound by the origin of heritage. I had a lot of close friend who were Vietnamese American, Filipino America, Korean, Thai, Japanese-- It didn’t really matter.

A Japanese American could probably tell you quite a bit about pho, just as a Vietnamese American can tell you about ramen, and a Chinese American like myself could give you a run down on Thai curries, because that’s the kind of third culture mixing pot that was born from our diaspora, from our inability to fit in perfectly in any specific space. Not fully Asian, not fully American.

And so today, during the Lunar New Year our beloved Naked Noods is getting a rebrand.

Naked Noods is becoming Vite Noodles.

I know, I know. A lot of you are going to be upset because it's a fun name, there’s a lot of practical reasons for this change as well. Naked Noods gets filtered a lot, for... well, kinda obvious reasons. We get a lot of trouble trying to get any emails through with the words "Naked Noods" in them, since some filters, especially AI filters nowadays, decide that we’re something a little... spicier. And because of that, we get auto-sorted into spam and quarantined a lot more than we should be.

When we thought about what the new Vite Noodles should be and what it should be about, we realized something. You see high-protein pasta everywhere, you see high-protein noodles on store shelves. Spaghettis, fettuccines, penne. You know what's interesting? You don't see Asian noodles.

High protein asian noodles are really hard to make, and lower quality extrusion for asian noodles just don’t get the right texture and bounce. If you want high protein, high fiber noodles with the right texture for asian inspired food... there’s just no substitute for Vite Noodles.

And that's what we have been and have always been, haven't we? Asian American noodles, made in the USA. What better time to rebrand and to stand tall as Asian Americans than Lunar New Year?

And as for the new branding design and colors-- well, lemme me hit you with the ramen-tisms.

Modern ramen was first established in 1910 in Asakusa, Tokyo, in a restaurant called Rai Rai Ken, which is "Lai Lai Ken," in Chinese... Because see, this restaurant was actually a Chinese restaurant! The noodles were sold as Chinese noodles, and ramen is still known as Chinese noodles in Japan today in many places. The word "Ra-men" itself is a Japanese pronunciation of "la mian," or pulled noodle, in Chinese.

Here's the thing, though-- ramen noodles aren't actually pulled noodles, because even the non-high protein versions have use a low-hydration dough that’s tough, way too tough and crumbly to be able to pull by hand, and have to rely on the power that can only be generated by machines.

....I mean, I guess if you’re strong enough you could put a squat bar across your shoulders and step on the dough with like 200lbs to form it but like...

To speedrun this a bit so this doesn’t get TOO long for what’s already... pretty long, what we get is this noodle that started in China, travels to Japan and matures there to become its own thing and its own culture, then is re-invented again by an ethnically Chinese man who lived in Japan named Momofuku Ando who then creates instant ramen, gets exported all across the world, and then lands in America, where a Chinese American kid encounters it again, and thinks it’s the greatest thing ever.

And then this young Chinese boy, who had been living in America and came back to China to visit family, walks into a Chinese grocery store and saw rows upon rows of instant ramen, more varieties than he'd ever seen in his life, bright packaging stacked floor to ceiling in colors he'd never seen on American grocery shelves. And suddenly, that’s all he wanted, and his family would ask if he wouldn't he want this nice crab instead, or these other delicacies...

But he’d look at those packages of instant ramen and go, "No, I want that."

And when that kid grew up and left the Michelin Star restaurants, he remembered these times and decided to reinterpret ramen again, into something high-protein and nutritionally complete, made in the USA.

It's a beautiful thing, I think, when different cultures come together to create new things, with each hand that touches it adding something, and each place it lands, something new gets added while carrying the history of everything it was before.

When we decided to redesign our brand, we thought about what it actually means to exist in that in-between space, and all the history that had come before it. What kind of shape, what kind of design should we go with? The answer lay, ironically, within the name of Vite itself. The V, the triangle-- The three pointed structure that can formed in so many ways, to express the third choice instead of existing within a binary. Our own point, our own existence, defined the way that we want to.

For the colors, we had the choice of our regular greens and oranges and yellows... but that didn’t feel quite right. So, we went back to the drawing board, thinking about what we wanted the colors to represent. How do you make colors represent that third culture, asian american existence?

Looking at Chinese design, everything from Chinese New Years and classic colors of luck and prosperity was red, used in the Forbidden Palace and Imperial Courts. But what of America? That one was more challenging-- but we thought about the colors, of the flag and the red, white, and blue... See, my parents had landed in the USA in New York, the east coast and the Atlantic ocean, but we’re now on the West Coast, with the Pacific ocean close to us instead. Then, why not blue, for America, to represent the famous words “from sea to shining sea”? Now with those colors, we blend them together, the experiences and in betweens-- the myriad combinations of purples and indigos and violets in all the different ways, gradients and mixes and differences of being Asian American, and add the touches and highlights of green of Vite. Sometimes more Asian, sometimes more American, and always somewhere in between.

We got this message recently:

"You have shipped Yuzu and Seiso 3.1 alongside KFP 3x Vite Ramen. Both products appear to be some weird waifu variants of your 3.1 ramen formula. What happened to your company? You were a grassroots startup that delivered an excellent product and are now catering to some weird niche internet fetish over regular consumers. Have some integrity, please."

deep sigh.

You're right.

We're going back to our roots.

...Anyway we designed a gijinka for Vite Noodles!

For those unfamiliar, a gijinka is the practice of turning a non-human concept into a human character, and we wanted a new representation of who we are. She wears a lab coat mixed with hanfu, showing the blend of science and tradition that goes into every brick of noodle we make. When she closes that lab coat, you only see black and the uncertainty of exactly how Asian, how American she is. You can only see the triangles and purples cast on her coat. And when it's open, you see her boldness, the reds and blues and purples, a lean, strong muscularity that defies traditional beauty standards. If you look closely at the gold threading on the coat lining, woven between the purple geometric patterns, you'll find noodles. The product, the story, the identity, threaded into the fabric of who she is.

A fun little fact about Lunar New Year that you might not know if you didn't grow up with it-- Red is in EVERYTHING. I mean everything. Red envelopes with money inside, red lanterns hanging from every doorway, red decorations plastered all over. Red is protection and luck, and you basically can't have Lunar New Year without it.

But this year is the Year of the Fire Horse. In Chinese mythology, The Horse already has fire energy in the zodiac, and when you stack the Fire element on top of that, you're double stacking heat and fire, which... You don't throw gasoline on a wild bonfire, right? So unlike other years, this year, 2026, you bring in cooler colors, the greens and blues and purples to balance all that heat, but you don't just stop wearing and using red because it's still lucky and you can't just ditch that. Instead, red becomes more subtle and muted, as an accent color instead of a primary one.

Funnily enough, we designed Vite’s colors around the idea of Asian American identity, red for China and blue for America and purple for the in-between. We had no idea that the blue halter and the green hanfu lab coat would end up being the exact cooling colors that the Fire Horse year calls for, or that all the red on her, the Chinese knot closures and the sash, would land exactly where tradition says red should go this year, in accents instead of everywhere. We designed for who we are, and then... Hey, maybe I got some of that Chinese blood telling me what to do after all, huh?

She's designed to be neurodivergent, ADHD and autistic, because aren't noodles that safe food that everyone loves, especially when you need something reliable and everything else is too much? She taught herself to be the loudest, funniest person in the room because subtle kept getting misread, and she's not sure you'd still like her if she stopped. She's been told to smile more, so she learned exactly how to smile more.

And like me, and many others, in a very Chinese part of her life.

You can read her full character description in the next section.

We still have a lot of Naked Noods packaging to go through, so there's going to be a bit of a transition period. After we're through it, we'll be swapping to the new packaging, and this, like our experience as Asian Americans, will be changing over time. I want to highlight Asian American artists and designs, invite different variants and different packaging, and tell the stories of others. Every part of the packaging design has been created with intentionality, and moving forward, we'll be creating more recipes and sharing more of who we are.

And so moving forwards, I'm going to be as loud as I want to be. I'm going to be too much. I'm going to be all of this that I am, my ADHD, my autism, my Chinamaxxing, my love for the United States of America, where I have memorized the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble of the Constitution and feel my heart stir when I hear the poem set at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, where my parents first entered the United States, while still respecting all the heritage and traditions and family that I grew up with.

Happy Lunar New Year.

Happy Chinese New Year.

Welcome to the Year of the Fire Horse.