On his 49th birthday in October the American rapper Snoop Dogg showed his 55 million Instagram fans a video of his face pasted onto that of a vlogger named So Y Tiet, who was counting up to 49 in a sing-song voice. Snoop Dogg tagged Tiet as "Soy dogg" and "my cousin in Vietnam."
Tiet does not speak English and has never left Vietnam. Yet his quirky crooning has bounced all over the internet, from a rap by the American performer Wiz Khalifa to a TikTok post by the Manchester City Football Club. So how did a millennial Vietnamese cattle herder shoot to global online fame?
