This playlist is the first part of MAARC’s Citizenship Initiative – a series of programming and educational materials commemorating the Bhagat Singh Thind decision.
“Between Citizenships,” curated by MAARC researcher Faye Ma, aims to explore the fraught theme of Asian/Asian American citizenship with songs that negotiate between individual sense of belonging and identification with the nation state. From anticolonial sentiment to memory of war and intergenerational trauma, from imagination of the “home country” to contemplating one’s identity while being far away from home, from refugee experiences to being Asian in the American South, these songs highlight the Asian/Asian American identities and experiences between citizenships, official and unofficial.
BETWEEN CITIZENSHIPS
Songs by Keywords
Here are some of the common themes presented in the songs featured in the playlist, which is organized loosely in the order of the keywords listed below.
- Legacy of Colonialism and War
- State’s power to define citizenship
- Personal sense of belonging/multiple belongings
Born Akiko Urasaki in December 1986, Awich grew up on the island of Okinawa, Japan–in the shadow of US military bases and with her family recounting anecdotes and trauma from World War II. Aside from the contradicting realities of the American Dream and the tragedy of war, Awich’s identity was further complicated by her Okinawan indigenous heritage and Okinawa’s wretched history with Japan. Luckily, instead of seeing these labels and cultural influences as constraints, Awich has always had the ability to break free of these constructs and see herself as a story of its own.
Having developed a strong curiosity about America and learned English by rapping along to Tupac songs, Awich relocated to Atlanta to attend college at the age of 19. After 18 years of exposure to American culture through her proximity to the U.S. military base, Awich felt at the time that Tokyo was more foreign to her than Atlanta. In the Southern capital of American hip hop, Awich got married and gave birth to her daughter while completing her degree and immersing herself in the robust and diverse musical scene. After enduring the tragedy of her husband being brutally shot and killed, Awich returned to Okinawa with her daughter and threw herself back to hip hop.
In her music, Awich delves deeply into the history of her land and people, as well as her own grief and hope. Learn more about Awich and her new EP through this interview with Japan Times. In UMUI, Awich expresses her pride in the Okinawan culture and protests against the presence of the American military bases. See lyrics here.
Leslie Damaso: Ang Aking Bayan
Leslie Damaso is a classically trained Filipino-American singer. Her latest album, May Laya, is a collection of kundiman art songs of the Philippines.
Kundiman (which in Tagalog means “if it were not so”), was written in the late 1800’s through the mid 1900’s as a reaction to the Spanish occupation of 333 years. It was later used as propaganda during the American and Japanese occupations and during the time of the People Power Revolution when Ferdinand Marcos was president.
In the past couple of years, Leslie has felt an intense longing to explore her roots and to define what home means to her. “Though I am an American citizen, how is it that I’m also Filipino? How do I make sense of the baggage of instability, the effects of war, corruption, colonization, politics, and religion from the country where I was born? Like many immigrants, it was and it is so much easier to assimilate. For people like me who are part of the diaspora, the question of identity or home is challenging to define. Along the way you find little pieces like these songs, you encounter people and places that comfort and inspire and you create this unique collage which makes a home that you never imagined you could have.”
Here, we feature the song Ang Aking Bayan, which translates to “The Place I Call Home.” See lyrics and translation by Leslie Damaso here.
Leslie Damaso: Bayan Ko
Damaso has also recently released a music video, “Bayan Ko.” This song, along with “Ang Aking Bayan,” has a bit of an anti-colonialist sentiment. According to her, the “Bayan Ko” video is just the start of how she wants to move through that sentiment by exploring her own story as well as looking beyond the borders of ethnicity and finding that commonality with others such as the desire for freedom.
Thao & The Get Down Stay Down: Temple
Thao & the Get Down Stay Down is an American, San Francisco-based alternative folk rock music group with the Vietnamese American singer-songwriter Thao Nguyen as its front person. Originally from Virginia, Nguyen’s music is influenced by country, Appalachian folk, and hip hop.
In Temple, the title song of Nguyen’s 2020 album, she sings from her mother’s narrative perspective, a refugee of the Vietnam War who fled her home country and didn’t return till more than thirty years later. “My initial intention in doing that was to offer her story as a refugee of war an opportunity to be a more complex, more nuanced rendering of what it is to be someone who loses their country to war and what has to happen afterwards.” said Nguyen in an interview with OPB. “My mom never directly addressed the war because obviously it’s such a source of sorrow and trauma and grief. But she would throughout my childhood and into my adulthood kind of pepper tellings with these really striking images of her life before the war in what she was doing at the fall of Saigon. And so I wanted a song that collected these images and presented them in conjunction with more general images that we have of the notion of this war.” See lyrics here.
No-No Boy: Instructions to All Persons
No-No Boy is an immersive multimedia work created by Nashville born songwriter and Asian American history researcher Julian Saporiti that blends original folk songs, storytelling, and projected archival images to illuminate hidden American histories. Check out their website for resources on the history of Japanese Internment Camps during WWII, making historical archive and field recording into engaging musical and visual content, their recent projects, and more.
“The title of this song is a direct quotation of an infamous poster plastered up and down the west coast in the spring of ’42. It instructed all Japanese Americans to report to assembly centers so they could eventually be moved to concentration camps across the US. One of the main ideas behind this work is to break down big, unprocess-able numbers like these 120,000 incarcerated Japanese- Americans hastily sent to these camps, to unfocus the large narratives and black and white arguments around which we have constructed history and community legacies, and instead, refocus on individuals, as a way in for the listener and student. The three verses of this song are taken directly from three conversations I had with Sachi Kuwatani, Tats Nagase, and Roy and Miriam Hatamiya, while kicking around San Francisco in early 2016, all of whom were children or teenagers in the camps.” – Julian Saporiti
No-No Boy: Lam Thi Dep
“[Lam Thi Dep] was written after reading Yen Le Espiritu’s Body Counts and Viet Nguyen’s The Sympathizer. These works suggest how reductive and insufficient the term “refugee” can be.
Lam Thi Dep was a female Viet Cong soldier immortalized in a striking photograph, poised folk warrior, holding an American machine gun. In this song, she is jumbled up alongside a fictional south Vietnamese general and a musical theater loving child of boat people. We see these individual’s USA bound post-war fates working in bakeries, drinking cheap beer, doing nails, saving money to visit Broadway, voting Republican. This informed but imagined micro-diaspora points to the diverse lives of “refugees” which Espiritu and Nguyen highlight through their writing.
The last verse gets a bit jargon-y and is one of the more prickly passages. Read Espiritu chapter 1 and then, if you ever visit Providence, try to catch a bit of the “oppression olympics” of which the students at Brown university hold daily contests.
The first verse is all I’ve been able to write of a beautiful diary entry my aunt gave me, written in French, as she watched the North Vietnamese descend upon Saigon in 1975, her world, like millions of others’, finally collapsing.” – Julian Saporiti
Check out the full lyrics book with annotation here.
St. Lenox: Korea
St. Lenox is an indie pop outfit helmed by Andrew Choi, a Juilliard-trained violinist turned philosophy PhD turned New York corporate lawyer.
Ten Hymns From My American Gothic is a record that Choi wrote as a gift to his dad who immigrated to the United States in the 1970s. It focuses on the narratives of and between first and second-generation immigrants, and is framed as an immigrant’s journey back to the “home country” that, according to Choi in a lecture he gave at the University of Kentucky, “is a lie” – “nothing about the desire to return guarantees that things will resolve themselves in a way that will make him happy as a kind of causal necessity.” Read more from that lecture here for Choi’s commentary on the second half of the album.
The song ”Korea” is about the special angst of children of immigrants who develop a magnetic but also imperfect conception of their country of origin based on the only thing that may have – the pictures and words passed down from their parents. See lyrics here.
Harsha: Poramorsho
Harsha Sen is a biology researcher from Kolkata, India living in Boston who raps in Bengali, Hindi, and English. For Harsha, who “probably wrote his first verse in the back of the school bus on a little scrap of paper when he was like 12,” rapping is about exploring himself and telling the truth.
According to Harsha, Poramorsho (“Advice”) is a letter to himself – “it’s about growing up, about how far I am from home, and about all the threads that tie me to where I am from and where I am now. The video was a fun way to make something cool with my friends, and I really love that it gave me a chance to incorporate the perspectives, voices, and faces of others into the visual treatment of a pretty introspective song.” Learn more about Harsha through this interview with the Swarthmore Voices and find his SoundCloud here.
Sarah Bernadette: Where Are You Really From?
Sarah Bernadette (full name Sarah Bernadette Matsushima) is a half Japanese, half white singer/songwriter currently in Boston, MA. Her song “Where Are You Really From?”, off her new EP In/process, describes experiences of othering that are relatable for many people of color, mixed race people, or even just “ambiguous-looking” people. According to Sarah, the question “Where are you REALLY from?” is usually a follow-up for when “Where are you from?” doesn’t get the answer the asker wanted. “Where are you really from?” asks, essentially, “Why aren’t you white?” and is a way of “gauging whiteness.” As a mixed-race Asian woman, Sarah states that she often receives this kind of question in a fetishizing manner, along with being told that she’s “exotic.” In “Where are you really from?” Sarah hopes to shed light on these frustrating daily experiences of racism, and to help those facing these kinds of interactions to feel seen and heard.
Ariel Bui: Moon Over Kentucky
Ariel Bui is a Nashville-based artist, activist, and educator. The song “Moon Over Kentucky” is a true story based on her life and stylistically based on the fact that she is an American from the American South, even if she is Vietnamese as well as American, born in Louisiana and based out of Nashville, Tennessee. See below for the lyrics, and learn more about Ariel’s work here.
Oh, the moon over Kentucky
It brings me to my knees
Like the one I almost married
To be Canadian
Oh, the moon over Kentucky
Is like a setting sun
For your wife I will never be
And a husband I have none
Chorus:
Where the grass is blue
I am too
While the moon over Kentucky
Has a yellow belly hue
Oh the moon o’er Lou’siana
It found me awful low
In its glow nothing consoled me
But a distant radio
In a moon over the bayou
I fell in love with you
Broken-hearted Cajun sweetheart
Come a’court me in Nashville
Chorus:
Oh, the full moon over Nashville
Is why I write this song
Music City’s got me workin’
To pay off my student loans
From the highway I can see you
Oh my ‘most forgotten moon
Music City’s got me cravin’
Oh that ol’ Kentucky moon
Chorus 2x