Buying New York property and shedding censored chat apps, these Trump supporters are defying demographic destiny. When Phoebe Xu left China for the U.S. as a 20-year-old in 1982, she was fleeing a suppressed society marked by the aftereffects of the bloody Cultural Revolution. So more then three decades later, when a political-correctness-decrying capitalist rose to the top of the presidential pecking order in her new home, she didn’t see a pariah — like many of her Asian-American peers — but a powerful testament to social conservatism and free speech. Xu soon found she wasn’t alone. Along with hundreds of others, the 57-year-old project manager began posting to a sprawling pro-Trump group on WeChat, China’s most popular social media app. Their energy grew as the candidacy of Donald Trump did. By the time Trump became president, Xu had branched out into a separate, private WeChat group of about a dozen like-minded conservative Californians who talked about daily life and a politics shaped by immigrant success stories and their escape from socialism. “We came to America with $40 to start life. Now many of us have become relatively successful,” she says. Their story is reflective of the way Trump is fostering unlikely backing within groups that don’t broadly support him. As the president has lambasted China amid a multibillion-dollar trade war, Chinese-American opinions have been abysmal — just 24 percent approve of his job performance, the second lowest of any Asian-American demographic, according to AAPI Vote’s Asian American Voter Survey conducted in October. Yet Chinese-American support groups for Trump are congregating in myriad ways: from middle-class families buying up property in New York City at record levels to activist groups trying to pass legislation in Georgia to those, like Xu, taking up digital real estate. | 