The first time I heard Jenn Tran‘s name was months before she appeared on Joey Graziadei’s season of The Bachelor. Spoiler site Reality Steve shared a list of Joey’s cast members, and I immediately clocked Tran as the surname of cousins, storefronts, city council members, and hundreds of students I went to high school with in the predominantly Vietnamese California community I grew up in. Given The Bachelor franchise’s track record with Asian contestants—a majority of whom don’t make it past week two without so much as a couple minutes of screen time—I didn’t think much of Jenn other than recognizing her last name.
And then she had her first one-on-one date with Joey. And then she made it to the final six. And then she had a hot seat segment during the “Women Tell All.” And then she was announced as the Season 21 Bachelorette.
Part of me thought it was surreal that Jenn was the new Bachelorette. After 52 Bachelors and Bachelorettes (including two seasons with two Bachelorettes), The Bachelor franchise finally—finally!—had its first Asian lead. And she was Vietnamese. But part of me also felt like something was off.
While the news that Jenn would be the first Asian Bachelorette was exciting, her casting was also marred by controversy. Many fans expected Maria Georgas or Daisy Kent—two white fan favorites from Joey’s Bachelor season—to be the Bachelorette instead. The expectation was so high that, during The Bachelor Season 28 finale, the producers made sure to explain why Maria and Daisy weren’t the Bachelorettes over Jenn.
Daisy said that she wasn’t ready to date again after Joey’s season ended, while Maria—who was mic’d up in the audience—gave her blessing for Jenn to be the franchise’s next lead. Whether or not it’s true that Maria and Daisy were offered the role of the Bachelorette before Jenn, both moments served as a way for The Bachelor franchise to get ahead of criticism for choosing Jenn. Why weren’t Maria and Daisy the Bachelorette? They simply didn’t want to be.
It’s little surprise Bachelor Nation wanted Maria and Daisy as the Bachelorette. Jenn had a significant lack of screen time compared to other finalists on Joey’s season. Daisy opened up about her journey with her cochlear implant. Maria was at the center of the house’s drama. But viewers didn’t really get to know Jenn—her most memorable moment was coining the phrase “shot o’clock.”
That had a trickle-down effect on Jenn’s Bachelorette season: Many of her contestants, either during or after her season, expressed interest in Maria. Sam McKinney, one of Jenn’s frontrunners, confessed he went on the show because Maria or Daisy (two white women who look nothing alike) were more his “type,” and he thought one of them would be the Bachelorette. “I thought, ‘No, if there’s the opportunity to find my wife here, that’s exactly what I’m going to do,’” Sam M. said, explaining why he agreed to remain on The Bachelorette when he found out the lead was Jenn. “And then I got out of the limo. I’m like, OK, ‘This girl is not my type.’ There was this whole idea of the unknown. I thought the Bachelorette was going to be Daisy or Maria.”
For anyone of color who’s dated someone outside their race, “my type” is a loaded term that’s all too familiar. When Jenn’s Bachelorette cast was announced and included almost no Asian men, some theorized her contestants were originally cast for Maria. It’s not uncommon for contestants to apply for The Bachelor or The Bachelorette expecting the lead to be someone else. Many contestants from Arie Luyendyk Jr.‘s season of The Bachelor have admitted they expected Peter Krause, the fan favorite from the previous season of The Bachelorette, to be their Bachelor. The difference is that Arie and Peter are both white men.
With the first Asian Bachelorette, there are certain cultures, customs, and familial differences that contestants not only need to be open to—but also willing to integrate themselves in—if they truly want to marry Jenn and spend their rest of their lives with her. Those differences were highlighted in the premiere, when Jenn’s mom gave her words of wisdom in Vietnamese—a first for the franchise—and again in the finale, when Jenn’s mom spoke in a combination of Vietnamese and English while questioning her final two.
Sam M. wasn’t the only contestant who might’ve had a different Bachelorette in mind. Other contestants, including Jeremy Simon, Austin Ott, and Tomas Azzano, were spotted following or hanging out with Maria after Jenn’s Bachelorette season. And then there was Devin Strader, Jenn’s winner. Jenn and Devin got engaged at her final rose ceremony—only for Devin to break up with her over a 15-minute phone call a month before the finale aired. The bigger bombshell? Devin followed Maria a day after he dumped Jenn.
During her first Bachelorette interview in Joey’s Bachelor finale, host Jesse Palmer made sure to let the audience know that Jenn was the first Asian Bachelorette, if she wasn’t going to mention it herself. “By the way, you’re also the first Asian American Bachelorette in franchise history. How does that feel?” Jesse said in the last minute of the interview, as a pat on the back to the franchise for rectifying a problem they created in the first place.
ABC wanted Jenn to be the first Asian Bachelorette, but didn’t care enough to think about what that meant to her, what she was looking for in a husband, and vice versa. There’s a difference between representation and tokenism, and ABC missed the mark: Jenn ultimately picked someone who wasn’t there for her, spending a year of her life looking for love only to leave single.
Over the last seven years, The Bachelor franchise has featured seven leads or color—a step in the right direction. But producers can’t expect to copy-and-paste the same cast and expect the same results. There are nuances and intricacies that come with dating someone of a different race—something they severely overlooked with Jenn’s cast. So far, the only suitor we know was cast for Jenn is Thomas Nguyen, a Vietnamese contestant who bonded with her over their shared backgrounds on night one.
Season 13 Bachelorette Rachel Lindsay, who severed ties with the franchise in 2020 over a racially ignorant incident with former Bachelor host Chris Harrison, also accused the franchise of purposefully casting contestants who had no experience with dating Black women for her season.
“There was a point where I broke down on camera, and they used my tears for something else, but I was getting upset at the selection of men of color,” she said in an episode of Ziwe in 2021. “I also learned as I was going through my season that several of the Black men on my season didn’t date Black women.”
Jenn has also called out the lack of Asian men in her cast. “I can’t really speak to the casting process and the decisions that were made, but it is unfortunate that there weren’t a lot of Asian men this season,” she told Glamour. “Asian men haven’t always seen themselves in this position, and I am hoping that me being here and Thomas N. being there, that the both of us can inspire other Asian men to realize that they can do this too if they want. They can be in this position as well.”
ABC is trying to do right by Jenn. A day after her Bachelorette finale, which saw her in tears reliving her breakup with Devin, Jenn was announced as a last-minute contestant on the new season of Dancing With the Stars. The franchise also seems to be learning from its mistakes. The next Bachelor, Grant Ellis, who is the second Black Bachelor in the franchise’s history, was announced weeks before his cast was finalized to give enough time for contestants who are actually interested in him to apply.
But those things don’t undo the way Jenn was treated on The Bachelorette. The Bachelor franchise has existed for more than two decades. With only a handful of couples still together today, breakups are destined to happen. But Jenn didn’t get a fair shot to begin with.
After almost 50 seasons of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, the franchise is bound to have another Asian lead. Let’s hope that they do better with them than their first.
