Nitemrkt are good kids. That’s not meant to ruin their street cred. They are also good rappers, and hardworking and deadly serious when it comes to hip hop. But the three members that make up the ascendant rap group – Jason Chu, Leo Xia and Sakiboy (James Huang) – are also good kids in the traditional, old-fashioned sense: they’re sweet, they mean well, they don’t brag the same way many up-and-coming rappers do. “We’re just good kids who want to have fun,” says Chu, who also acts as the Los Angeles rap outfit’s manager and unofficial spokesman. “We’re not trying to pop bottles and do bumps [of cocaine]. I always think about that Drake lyric: ‘While all of my closest friends out partyin’, I’m just here makin’ all the music that they party to’.” Nitemrkt’s recent single, Bag That Bao , has Los Angeles and the greater hip-hop world taking notice, bringing a new level of recognition to the burgeoning Asian-American trap scene (a subgenre of rap) and winning them fans globally and across Los Angeles’ many multi-ethnic neighbourhoods. The group broke through to a wider audience in July, when Jenny Zhang, a writer for the website Eater , shared the video for Bag That Bao , an “irresistibly catchy” Chinese trap song about steamed buns. The video shows the rappers going wild in LA’s Chinatown and Southern California’s predominantly Chinese San Gabriel Valley: filling their designer bags with pork buns, scarfing xiao long bao (soup dumplings) and, when they are finished, wiping the sweat from their foreheads with the papers traditionally found on the bottom of Chinese buns. The post and the video quickly went viral. That song is not just an earworm but it is also a perfect encapsulation of what Nitemrkt stands for. They are less interested in tropes about being stuck between cultures, and more in the reality of a separate, vibrant uniquely Asian-American experience that they are both a product of and helping to enrich. They rap in Mandarin and English, referencing a truly internet-enabled youth culture. The idea for Bag That Bao came from the American slang for making money: “get that bread”. One day, Chu was on the phone with music producer Chops from the seminal Asian hip-hop group Mountain Brothers. Offhandedly, Chu said they needed to “bag that bao”, a phrase Chops hadn’t heard but immediately recognised as a great hook. He even offered to provide the beat. Nitemrkt’s latest single, Shen Yun , follows the same mould – this time using the ubiquitous Falun Gong-sponsored dance spectacular (and frequent meme fodder) Shen Yun as a metaphor for Nitemrkt’s omnipresence in the hip-hop scene. To a propulsive trap beat, Chu raps: “I’m everywhere that you look/ Where your grandmamma cook/ Every billboard what’s good?/ Shen Yun.” A night out with the group feels like a night out with the most popular kids in university. They seem to know everyone, and everyone in the community appear genuinely delighted to see them. They have become a fixture in the Asian-American creative community in Southern California because of their enormous talent and good nature. But their smiles and sometimes goofy videos belie their intensity and seriousness when it comes to their work and development as artists. They work hard at their craft and think deeply about where they came from and what their music can accomplish. After growing up in Delaware, Chu graduated from Yale University with a degree in philosophy – he also studied in Beijing and spent time in South Korea. When he’s not rapping he works as a programme coordinator at the Asian-American Centre at Fuller Seminary. Sakiboy initially seems quiet, but he is quick with a joke and has a mischievous streak. Sakiboy is the group’s rap purist, and also its hip-hop historian. Growing up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Saki says that “hip hop meant everything, it is really what raised me”. Sakiboy has always surrounded himself with music – today, he earns a living shooting movies, mostly music videos including producer credits on some of singer Billie Eilish’s recent videos. “My parents put me on the piano at six years old. I started singing in a choir when I was 10,” he recalls, “but I never made my own music, not until a year and a half ago with Nitemrkt.” He may not have been recording his own songs, but by college he had a reputation for the complex flows and fire ad-libs he routinely demonstrated as part of the NC State Cypher, his university’s freestyle hip-hop group. If Saki and Chu bring the hip-hop knowledge to the table, then Xia brings the China knowledge – including the latest Mandarin slang – as well as more foundational music chops. “Music has always been a part of my life. I was a good Asian kid playing piano and violin,” Xia says. “Originally it was more what my parents chose for me, but eventually I realised that music could be a way for me to express myself and I got into songwriting and performing that way. It was something I did all the way through high school, not even thinking that it could be part of my future professionally.” Chinese hip hop group Higher Brothers are back with a new album and world tour While he was born in the Bay Area in Northern California, he moved with his parents to Beijing when he was six years old, only returning to the United States to attend the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. While Xia has always been a hip-hop fan, he always saw himself first and foremost as a singer-songwriter with a tendency towards R&B. He remains the most melodic member of the group and is dependable for his catchy hooks and bridges. He is also known for his fluent flows in Mandarin, a big step for Xia who had always struggled with his identity and conveying his own experiences through his art. “I really do value my culture and my language. Recently I’ve been writing these full verses in Mandarin and for me there’s this sense of power that comes with that,” Xia says. “It feels like I’m reclaiming my culture, reclaiming my history, reclaiming a connection with my culture that I guess I felt I let go of.” Xia saw first-hand hip hop becoming popular in China, and now he’s starting to see Asian-American hip hop follow the same trajectory in the US. “When we started, there wasn’t as much Asian rap on the scene both in China and the US, so we saw a void that we could fill. Now we’re part of a growing movement where Asian-Americans are being more proud of who they are,” he says. It all just came out of a need to express and tell our stories for ourselves.”