Lifestyle
Moo Deng is a worldwide phenomenon. How long can this global love affair last?
CHONBURI PROVINCE, Thailand — Like most babies, Moo Deng spends a lot of her time sleeping.
But for a few hours a day, the 4-month-old pygmy hippo springs to life, gumming on leaves, zooming around the compound and tossing her head in a silent, open-mouthed roar.
These moments, captured by her zookeeper at the Khao Kheow Open Zoo, a two-hour drive south of Bangkok, and shared on social media, have turned her into a global phenomenon — an “It Girl” beloved for her sporadic fits of energy and proclivity for snapping toothlessly at hoses and knees.
Named for a Thai dish that means “bouncy pork,” Moo Deng has become the muse for cakes, clothing, tattoos and fireworks. Make-up tutorials demonstrate how to get her baby-pink cheeks and dewy skin. Partygoers this year dressed up as the pygmy hippo for Halloween. So did comedian Bowen Yang on “Saturday Night Live.”
Her remote home — struggling post-pandemic — has been transformed into a must-see attraction for international visitors and locals alike.
When Dong Kim, a 29-year-old travel blogger, visited in October, the excited hordes reminded him less of a zoo than a South American soccer game or a Black Friday door-buster sale.
Atthapon Nundee, the 31-year-old zookeeper who makes viral videos of Moo Deng, sprays the pygymy hippo and her mother with water.
(Lauren DeCicca / Getty Images)
“I’ve gone to the Great Wall, I’ve been to the Colosseum, I’ve been to Christ the Redeemer in Rio. But [this] was by far the longest line I have ever waited in,” he said. “It literally felt like people would die for this hippo.”
But Moo Deng’s sudden celebrity was not merely a result of cute animal worship or the fact that the pygmy hippo, native to West Africa, is an endangered species. While she was gestating in her mother’s womb, a 31-year-old zookeeper was hatching a plan to make her a star — tapping into a worldwide culture well-versed in capitalizing on internet virality — and save the financially strapped zoo while he was at it.
Today Moo Deng is the most famous animal on the planet — for now.
Nearly 175 years before Moo Deng took the internet by storm, another exotic hippo helped save the world’s first modern zoo.
The London Zoo began in 1828 as a members-only community, but opened to the public in 1847 in an effort to earn enough money to stay afloat. Visitors grew bored until Obaysch, named after an island in the Nile where he was captured, arrived three years later. The first hippo seen in Europe since the Roman Empire, Obaysch doubled annual attendance, drawing up to 10,000 visitors every day.
Baby hippo Moo Deng plays with a zookeeper in the Khao Kheow Open Zoo in September.
(Sakchai Lalit / Associated Press)
“They had to figure out a way to keep the public interested,” said Robert Young, professor of wildlife conservation at the University of Salford in England. “The thing they came up with … celebrity animals.”
Fans quickly grew attached to their favorites. When the zoo sold Jumbo the Elephant to P.T. Barnum in 1882, people protested in the streets. A black bear named Winnipeg became the inspiration for Winnie the Pooh. Guy, a western lowland gorilla, received hundreds of birthday cards every year.
In the 20th century, animals in the news (Sea Biscuit) and movies and TV shows (Lassie, Punxsutawney Phil) captured the hearts of millions. Recently, social media has hastened the celebrity of animals such as Grumpy Cat and JiffPom the Pomeranian.
In 2017, Fiona the hippo went viral as the internet watched her fight to survive infancy. She became the biggest attraction at the Cincinnati Zoo, inspiring her own ice cream flavor and children’s book.
Leasing giant pandas from China has become another strategy to draw visitors. But foot traffic subsides after two years, Young said, while zoos spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on bamboo that the pandas sometimes refuse. Pygmy hippos can be housed and supported at a much lower cost.
Huanyuan Zhang, a college lecturer at the University of Oxford who studies West African forest ecology, was surprised to see a sudden uptick this year in references to his research. He was even more perplexed to discover the cause was a pygmy hippo born more than 6,000 miles from its native land.
“It just feels like, out of many friends, one of your normal friends suddenly becomes a celebrity,” said Zhang, who hopes that the world’s love for Moo Deng will raise awareness of deforestation and endangered species. There are fewer than 2,500 pygmy hippos alive today compared with 12,000 in 1982.
Male panda Yun Chuan was introduced to the public at the San Diego Zoo on Aug. 8. He and Xin Bao, a female panda, are the first giant pandas to enter the United States in 21 years.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Young said zoos often rely on ambassador animals to bring attention to lesser-known species. But social media, he noted, will always favor the Moo Dengs of the world.
“The big issue,” he said, “is how do you get people interested in the uglies? Getting people to want to save a gorilla is quite easy. You try and get people to want to save the aye-aye, possibly the ugliest primate on the planet, it’s a very different situation.”
Four years after the pandemic choked off travel, the Khao Kheow Open Zoo had yet to recover from the financial devastation. With only a couple of thousand visitors per day, the budget to maintain the 2,000-acre zoo was stretched to its limits. Anticipating the birth of Moo Deng, zookeeper Atthapon Nundee sensed an opportunity.
Nundee had studied to become an electrician, but his first job out of college was driving a 10-wheeler truck around the country. After three years, he started looking for something closer to home. The zoo, a five-minute commute, had an opening.
Fans cheer as they see Moo Deng run around her enclosure at the Khao Kheow Open Zoo in November.
(Lauren DeCicca / Getty Images)
Over the next eight years, Nundee cared for baby hippos including two of Moo Deng’s siblings: Moo Wan and Moo Tun, also named after Thai pork dishes. Though Moo Deng is known for her spunky attitude, Nundee said her siblings were just as playful. So with one more on the way, Nundee was ready.
“I know when they become funny, how to set up the camera, which angle to take to see when it’s cute,” he said. “Any animal can become famous like Moo Deng. It’s just about how friendly you are with the animal.”
Moo Deng’s celebrity did not start at the moment of birth. To his dismay, Nundee discovered her crawling around the morning of July 10, placenta still attached. Their star had been born, and no one was there to document it.
But in August, the zoo posted a poll online asking the public to help choose her name. Nundee’s close-ups of her splashing in the water and snapping at the air started circulating on social media. Admirers called her sweet, or feisty, or filled with silent rage. Japanese residents working at the local industrial park shared their fan art, boosting Moo Deng’s popularity in Asia before her stardom spread west.
By September, the meme-ification of Moo Deng caught the attention of Molly Swindall, an influencer who posts about baby animals and attending Taylor Swift concerts. The 29-year-old was so enchanted that, in early October, she flew more than 18 hours to Thailand, stood at Moo Deng’s enclosure for four hours, and then returned to New York the next day.
“She’s absolutely iconic,” Swindall said. “Whether it’s a leaf being stuck to her face for a couple hours, or her moon-walking or biting knees, or running around with rage, she just makes you laugh.”
Moo Deng was so popular the zoo had to impose time limits for viewing.
(Sakchai Lalit / Associated Press)
By the time she returned for a second visit, the zoo had implemented a five-minute limit for spectators, after some were caught tossing water and shells to try and rouse Moo Deng. Swindall still went through the queue three times, waiting about 30 to 40 minutes each round.
The baby hippo’s economic impact has spread far beyond the confines of the sprawling zoo in the Chonburi province.
Miles before the entrance, posters advertise Moo Deng ice cream. The restaurants in the area fill up at lunch time, and on weekends, makeshift stalls sell snacks along the road. The influx of tourists has boosted local incomes by 50% or more, nearby workers said. The month that Moo Deng was born, the zoo had fewer than 85,000 visitors. In October, total attendance rose to 300,000.
Decha Sontanawan, 59, spent about $1,000 to turn an old truck into a merchandise stall for Moo Deng pillows, keychains and T-shirts to sell outside the zoo. He recouped his investment within four days.
Decha Sontanawan sells Moo Deng pillows outside the Khao Kheow Open Zoo.
(Lauren DeCicca / Getty Images)
Now Sontanawan, his wife, his daughter and his son-in-law, who all work at the zoo, take turns manning the Moo Deng truck on their days off. “Everything is better. Everything’s recovered, everything’s booming,” he said.
Skyrocketing demand has transformed Moo Deng into a brand. About 70 companies have paid the zoo for the rights to print Moo Deng on products such as pajamas, pet food and squeezable condensed milk. A supermarket chain launched its own Moo Deng-themed coconut juice after signing a contract that Monday afternoon, and a Thai business newspaper has reported that collaborations are expected to generate as much as $4.3 million by March.
The money now accounts for 30% of revenue, according to Narongwit Chodchoy, the zoo director, with proceeds going to zoo habitats and living conditions, as well as flood victims in Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand.
“We have to try to keep her fame and reputation going,” he said, although, at some point Moo Deng will lose some of her youthful “bounciness,” and thus some of her charm.
That’s why the zoo is already pursuing its next viral hit. A pair of two-toed sloths is on the way, in the hopes that with three — two males and one female— the zoo will produce another small star. If so, the baby also will be managed by Moo Deng’s keeper, who has enjoyed his own rise in fame, if not in pay.
For now, Moo Deng is still going strong. Other baby pygmy hippos born this year in Sydney, Berlin and Edinburgh, have failed to match her allure. The Edinburgh Zoo promoted its newborn pygmy hippo Haggis this month as a rival to Moo Deng’s famed cuteness. It later apologized for pitting the babies against each other.
Skyrocketing demand has transformed Moo Deng into a brand. About 70 companies have paid the zoo for the rights to print Moo Deng on products such as pajamas, pet food and squeezable condensed milk.
(Sakchai Lalit / Associated Press)
When a common hippo was born in Eastern Thailand last month, she was named by an online poll too, and christened Hom Daeng, the Thai word for “Shallot.” Pygmy hippo fans couldn’t help but compare. One Facebook user complained that Hom Daeng was too dry, unlike Moo Deng, who appears perpetually moist in photos.
“This one has no aura at all,” another critic wrote. “It’s like comparing a celebrity to an ordinary person.”
Special correspondent Poypiti Amatatham in Bangkok contributed to this report.
When Marian Sherry Lurio and Jonathan Buffington Nguyen met at a mutual friend’s wedding at Higgins Lake, Mich., in July 2022, both felt an immediate chemistry. As the evening progressed, they sat on the shore of the lake in Adirondack chairs under the stars, where they had their first kiss before joining others for a midnight plunge.
The two learned that the following weekend Ms. Lurio planned to attend a wedding in Philadelphia, where Mr. Nguyen lives, and before they had even exchanged numbers, they already had a first date on the books.
“I have a vivid memory of after we first met,” Mr. Nguyen said, “just feeling like I really better not screw this up.”
Before long, they were commuting between Philadelphia and New York City, where Ms. Lurio lives, spending weekends and the odd remote work days in one another’s apartments in Philadelphia and Manhattan. Within the first six months of dating, Mr. Nguyen joined Ms. Lurio’s family for Thanksgiving in Villanova, Pa., and, the following month, she met his family in Beavercreek, Ohio, at a surprise birthday party for Mr. Nguyen’s mother.
Ms. Lurio, 32, who grew up in Merion Station outside Philadelphia, works in investor relations administration at Flexpoint Ford, a private equity firm. She graduated from Dartmouth College with a bachelor’s degree in history and psychology.
Mr. Nguyen, also 32, was born in Knoxville, Tenn., and raised in Beavercreek, Ohio, from the age of 7. He graduated from Haverford College with a bachelor’s degree in political science and is now a director at Doyle Real Estate Advisors in Philadelphia.
Their long-distance relationship continued for the next few years. There were dates in Manhattan, vacations and beach trips to the Jersey Shore. They attended sporting events and discovered their shared appreciation of the 2003 film, “Love Actually.”
One evening, Mr. Nguyen recalled looking around Ms. Lurio’s small New York studio — strewed with clothes and the takeout meal they had ordered — and feeling “so comfortable and safe.” “I knew that this was something different than just sort of a fling,” he said.
It was an open question when they would move in together. In 2024, Ms. Lurio began the process of moving into Mr. Nguyen’s home in Philadelphia — even bringing her cat, Scott — but her plans changed midway when an opportunity arose to expand her role with her current employer.
Mr. Nguyen was on board with her decision. “It almost feels like stolen valor to call it ‘long distance,’ because it’s so easy from Philadelphia to New York,” Mr. Nguyen said. “The joke is, it’s easier to get to Philly from New York than to get to some parts of Brooklyn from Manhattan, right?”
In January 2025, Mr. Nguyen visited Ms. Lurio in New York with more up his sleeve than spending the weekend. Together they had discussed marriage and bespoke rings, but when Mr. Nguyen left Ms. Lurio and an unfinished cheese plate at the bar of the Chelsea Hotel that Friday evening, she had no idea what was coming next.
“I remember texting Jonathan,” Ms. Lurio said, bewildered: “‘You didn’t go toward the bathroom!’” When a Lobby Bar server came and asked her to come outside, Ms. Lurio still didn’t realize what was happening until she was standing in the hallway, where Mr. Nguyen stood recreating a key moment from the film “Love Actually,” in which one character silently professes his love for another in writing by flashing a series of cue cards. There, in the storied Chelsea Hotel hallway still festooned with Christmas decorations, Mr. Nguyen shared his last card that said, “Will you marry me?”
They wed on April 11 in front of 200 guests at the Pump House, a covered space on the banks of Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River. Mr. Nguyen’s sister, the Rev. Elizabeth Nguyen, who is ordained through the Unitarian Universalist Association, officiated.
Although formal attire was suggested, Ms. Lurio said that the ceremony was “pretty casual.” She and Jonathan got ready together, and their families served as their wedding parties.
“I said I wanted a five-minute wedding,” Ms. Lurio recalled, though the ceremony ended up lasting a little longer than that. During the ceremony, Ms. Nguyen read a homily and jokingly added that guests should not ask the bride and groom about their living arrangements, which will remain separate for the foreseeable future.
While watching Ms. Lurio walk down the aisle, flanked by her parents, Mr. Nguyen said he remembered feeling at once grounded in the moment and also a sense of dazed joy: “Like, is this real? I felt very lucky in that moment — and also just excited for the party to start!”
He always texted when he was outside. No call, no knock. It was just a message and then the soft sound of my door opening. He moved like someone practiced in disappearing.
His name meant “complete” in Arabic, which is what I felt when we were together.
I met him the way you meet most things that matter in Los Angeles — without intending to. In our senior year at a college in eastern L.A. County, we were introduced through mutual friends, then thrown together by the particular gravity of people who recognized something in each other. He was a Muslim medical student, conservative and careful and funny in the dry, precise way of someone who has always had to choose his words. I was loud where he was quiet, messy where he was disciplined. I was out. He was not.
I understood, or thought I did. I thought that I couldn’t get hurt if I was completely conscious throughout the endeavor. Los Angeles has a way of making you feel like the whole world shares your freedoms — until you realize the city is enormous, and not all of it belongs to you in the same way.
For months, our world was confined to my apartment. He would slip in after dark, and we’d stay up late talking about his family in Iran, classical music and the particular pressure of being the son someone sacrificed everything to bring here. He told me things he said he’d never told anyone, and I believed him.
The orange glow from my Nesso lamp lit his face while the indigo sky pressed against the window behind him. In our small little world, we were safe. Outside was another matter.
On our first real date, I took him to the L.A. Phil’s “An Evening of Film & Music: From Mexico to Hollywood” program. I told him they were cheap seats even though they were the first row on the terrace. He was thrilled in the way only someone who doesn’t expect to be delighted actually gets delighted — fully, without guarding it. I put my arm around his shoulders. At some point, I shifted and moved it, and he nudged it back. He was OK with PDA here.
I remember thinking that wealth is a great barrier to harm and then feeling silly for extrapolating my own experience once again. Inside Walt Disney Concert Hall, we were just two people in love with the same music.
Outside was still another matter.
In February, on Valentine’s Day, he took me to a Yemeni restaurant in Anaheim. We hovered over saffron tea surrounded by other young Southern Californians, and we looked like friends. Before we went in, we sat in the parking lot of the strip mall — signs in Arabic advertising bread, coffee, halal meats, the Little Arabia District — hand in hand. I leaned over to kiss him.
“Not here,” he said. His eyes shifted furtively. “Someone might see.”
I understood, or told myself I did, but I was saddened. Later, after the kind of reflection that only arrives in the wreckage, I would understand something harder: I had been unconsciously asking him to choose, over and over, between the people he loved and the person he loved. I had a long pattern of choosing unavailable men, telling myself it was because I could handle the complexity. The truth was more embarrassing. I thought that if someone like him chose me anyway — chose me over the weight of societal expectations — it would mean I was worth choosing. It took me a long time to see how unfair that was to him and to me.
We went to the Norton Simon Museum together in November, on the kind of gray Pasadena day when the 210 Freeway roars in the background like white noise. He studied for the MCAT while I wrote a paper on Persian rugs. In between practice problems, he translated ancient Arabic scripts for me. I thought, “We make a good team.” Afterward, we walked through the galleries and he didn’t let go of my arm.
That was the version of us I kept returning to — when the ending came during Ramadan. It arrived as a spiritual reflection of my own. I texted: “Does this end at graduation — whatever we are doing?”
He thought I meant Ramadan. I did not mean Ramadan.
“I care about you,” he wrote, “but I don’t want you to think this could work out to anything more than just dating. I mean, of course, I’ve fantasized about marrying you. If I could live my life the way I wanted, of course I would continue. I’m just sad it’s not in this lifetime.”
I was in Mexico City when these texts were exchanged. That night I flew to Oaxaca to clear my head and then, after less than 24 hours, flew back to L.A. No amount of vacation would allow me to process what had just happened, so I threw myself back into work.
My therapist told me to use the conjunction “and” instead of “but.” It happened, and I am changed. The harm I caused and the love I felt. The beauty of what we made and the impossibility of where it could go. She gave me a knowing smile when I asked if it would stay with me forever. She didn’t answer, which was the answer.
I think about the freeways now, the way Joan Didion called them our only secular communion. When you’re on the ground in Los Angeles, the world narrows to the few blocks around you. Get on the freeway and you understand the whole body of the city at once: the arteries, the pulse, the scale of the thing.
You understand that you are a single cell in something enormous and moving. It is all out of your control. I am in a lane. The lane shaped how I drive. He was simply in a different lane, and his lane shaped him, and those two facts can coexist without either of us being the villain of the sad story.
He came like a secret in the night, and he left the same way. What we made in between was real and complicated and mine to hold forever, hoping we find each other in the next life.
The author lives in Los Angeles.
L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.
The art industry is increasingly shaped by artists’ and art businesses’ shared realization that they are locked in a fierce struggle for sustained attention — against each other, and against the rest of the overstimulated, always-online world. A major New York art fair aims to win this competition next month by knocking down the increasingly shaky walls between contemporary art and fashion.
When visitors enter the Independent art fair on May 14, they will almost immediately encounter its open-plan centerpiece: an installation of recent couture looks from Comme des Garçons. It will be the first New York solo presentation of works by Rei Kawakubo, the brand’s founder and mastermind, since a lauded 2017 survey exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute.
Art fairs have often been front and center in the industry’s 21st-century quest to capture mindshare. But too many displays have pierced the zeitgeist with six-figure spectacles, like Maurizio Cattelan’s duct-taped banana and Beeple’s robot dogs. Curating Independent around Comme des Garçons comes from the conviction that a different kind of iconoclasm can rise to the top of New York’s spring art scrum.
Elizabeth Dee, the founder and creative director of Independent, said that making Kawakubo’s work the “nerve center” of this year’s edition was a “statement of purpose” for the fair’s evolution. After several years at the compact Spring Studios in TriBeCa, Independent will more than double its square footage by moving to Pier 36 at South Street, on the East River. Dee has narrowed the fair’s exhibitor list, to 76, from 83 dealers in 2025, and reduced booth fees to encourage a focus on single artists making bold propositions.
“Rei’s work has been pivotal to thinking about how my work as a curator, gallerist and art fair can push boundaries, especially during this extraordinary move toward corporatization and monoculture in the art world in the last 20 years,” Dee said.
Kawakubo’s designs have been challenging norms since her brand’s first Paris runway show in 1981, but her work over the last 13 years on what she calls “objects for the body” has blurred borders between high fashion and wearable sculpture.
The Comme des Garçons presentation at Independent will feature 20 looks from autumn-winter 2020 to spring-summer 2025. Forgoing the runway, Kawakubo is installing her non-clothing inside structures made from rebar and colored plastic joinery.
Adrian Joffe, the president of both Comme des Garçons International and the curated retailer Dover Street Market International (and who is also Kawakubo’s husband), said in an interview that Kawakubo’s intention was to create a sculptural installation divorced from chronology and fashion — “a thing made new again.”
Every look at Independent was made in an edition of three or fewer, but only one of each will be for sale on-site. Prices will be about $9,000 to $30,000. Comme des Garçons will retain 100 percent of the sales.
Asked why she was interested in exhibiting at Independent, the famously elusive Kawakubo said via email, “The body of work has never been shown together, and this is the first presentation in New York in almost 10 years.” Joffe added a broader philosophical motivation. “We’ve never done it before; it was new,” he said. Also essential was the fair’s willingness to embrace Kawakubo’s vision for the installation rather than a standard fair booth.
Kawakubo began consistently engaging with fine art decades before such crossovers became commonplace. Since 1989, she has invited a steady stream of contemporary artists to create installations in Comme des Garçons’s Tokyo flagship store. The ’90s brought collaborations with the artist Cindy Sherman and performance pioneer Merce Cunningham, among others.
More cross-disciplinary projects followed, including limited-release direct mailers for Comme des Garçons. Kawakubo designs each from documentation of works provided by an artist or art collective.
The display at Independent reopens the debate about Kawakubo’s proper place on the continuum between artist and designer. But the issue is already settled for celebrated artists who have collaborated with her.
“I totally think of Rei as an artist in the truest sense,” Sherman said by email. “Her work questions what everyone else takes for granted as being flattering to a body, questions what female bodies are expected to look like and who they’re catering to.”
Ai Weiwei, the subject of a 2010 Comme des Garçons direct mailer, agreed that Kawakubo “is, in essence, an artist.” Unlike designers who “pursue a sense of form,” he added, “her design and creation are oriented toward attitude” — specifically, an attitude of “rebellion.”
Also taking this position is “Costume Art,” the spring exhibition at the Costume Institute. Opening May 10, the show pairs individual works from multiple designers — including Comme des Garçons — with artworks from the Met’s holdings to advance the argument made by the dress code for this year’s Met gala: “Fashion is art.”
True to form, Kawakubo sometimes opts for a third way.
“Rei has often said she’s not a designer, she’s not an artist,” Joffe said. “She is a storyteller.”
Now to find out whether an art fair sparks the drama, dialogue and attention its authors want.
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