Claiming Diaspora is an important contribution to the growing body of work examining the musical activities of Asian Americans.Footnote 2 As one might expect from an ethnomusicological study, the book focuses on a specific cultural group within a single geographical space: Chinese Americans in New York City. Despite the broad title, the book is grounded almost entirely in New York City. However, it boldly and innovatively challenges the limitations and problems of ethnographic-based work. Chinese Americans are shown to be part of a diverse community, composed of individuals in a multitude of linguistic, social, national, and ethnic groups, which are further intersected by class and gender. This cultural diversity is reflected by a wide range of genres of music that includes several different types of Chinese opera, traditional instrumental music, folk song, Western art music, contemporary concert music by Chinese composers, Chinese pop, and Asian American jazz. This breadth of genres is exceptional in ethnomusicological studies, which Zheng points out are too often reduced to discussions of “X people from X place playing X type of music” (18). Zheng goes to great length to make each of those X's plural.
This approach, and the theoretical discussion that supports it, closely aligns this work with Deborah Wong's Speak It Louder, a landmark study in Asian American identity and music making.Footnote 3 Both books document and celebrate musics that often seem invisible to outsiders and move effortlessly from ethnography to musicological description and into cultural critique. Both writers take a multidisciplinary approach that includes ethnomusicology, ethnic studies, anthropology, and cultural criticism. Unlike Wong, Zheng contextualizes her ethnographic work with a detailed historical examination of Chinese American music that begins in the 1850s. The rich historical data, which include some of the very first Chinese music documented in the United States, help explain the nuances and differences found in her ethnographic research from the 1980s to 1990s. This information also further distinguishes her work in that it balances ethnographic and historical research and provides a stable ground for her sophisticated interpretation and cultural critique.
The book employs a unique organization that is neither chronological nor based around the genres covered. Zheng notes that each chapter “brings into focus particular elements of the heterogeneous and multifaceted Chinese American diasporic prism” (24). The varying focus of each chapter allows the reader to piece together an image of a diverse and interrelated whole. The vantage points include historical overview, a description of the different genres covered, the different spaces and places of performances, the role of mass media, and seven ethnographic portraits of musicians. The final chapter summarizes the book and helps to draw connections among all the different views presented.
Zheng makes a theoretically sophisticated argument that diaspora is not only a term for the geographical dispersal of people, but also “a new analytical category with which we take part in current discourses in cultural politics, and a new empowering consciousness for many people struggling in their everyday lives to live with, claim, and belong to multiple cultural identities” (28). A series of interrelated problems are examined in detail, starting with an overview of how the concepts of the global and local are conjoined. Rather than thinking of a single dominant global system centered in the West, she suggests a more varied set of “multilayered, and polylateral transnational connections” (39), in which the global is configured locally, either through dominance, as in the case of colonialism, or subversively, as individuals find their identities through varied connections to other places. Zheng emphasizes the transnational aspects of music through noting the travel of musicians and music that is aided by a diasporic cosmopolitanism. The concept of travel is thoroughly surveyed and critiqued. On the one hand, many postmodern thinkers celebrate a kind of transcendence and hybridity, and on the other, migration studies tend to stress the pain and loss associated with forced travel. Zheng insists that diaspora necessarily includes aspects of both (47).
This dialectical understanding informs her critique of Asian American studies, which she contends began as a reaction to racism and persecution. Although Zheng acknowledges the importance of this movement, she notes that Asian American scholars tend to focus on the United States as the site of a new identity, which is reminiscent of a kind of assimilationist attitude, even if slightly revised from the so-called melting pot. Asian American studies, she asserts, often portray traditional music as a reflection of the ancient unchanging past, whereas new music created in the United States becomes the exemplar of Asian American music. Zheng effectively argues that by focusing on the connections, both real and imagined, between the old and new homes, both new and traditional forms of music play an important part in the figuring of transnational identities.
Zheng's revised notion of diaspora is the unifying feature throughout the rest of the book. Chinese music may have first been simply transplanted to the United States, but Zheng reveals a number of interesting ways in which musical experiences have both remained connected to China and fostered new understandings in the United States. Sheung Chi Ng, a folk singer, is a particularly inspiring character in the book. He sings muyu songs, a little-known regional genre from Taishan in southern China that includes a remarkable number of songs about the experience of immigration to the United States during the nineteenth century. After immigrating to New York in 1979, Ng continued to compose new songs that he performed and sold on homemade cassettes in New York's Chinatown. He would earn a prestigious National Heritage Fellowship in 1992 after being “discovered” by Robert Lee, the director of Asian American Arts Centre. Thus this very obscure regional genre earned national recognition within the United States. A group called New Music of China, which performs on traditional Chinese instruments, regularly commissions new compositions from composers of any ethnicity. Many of the commissions have been from the new music composers from China who were living in New York during the 1990s. These composers, including Chen Yi, who is interviewed in detail, as well as Tan Dun and others, draw explicitly on Chinese aesthetics in their own compositions, which are heard around the world. Similarly, the Asian American jazz of Fred Ho and Jason Kao Hwang is a new unique hybrid genre of experimental jazz influenced by Chinese traditions.
The practice of Western art and popular music is in contrast to those genres that are either traditional or traditionally inspired. Zheng reminds us that Western music has figured prominently in China for more than century and that many of the well-known composers of Western-style music in China studied in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s. Many newer immigrants brought the tradition of performing Western music with them. Choirs and youth orchestras are quite common and are important musical institutions in their lives in the United States. In an interesting twist, one of the musicians Zheng interviews, Stanley Chiu, reveals that he was primarily a fan of Western popular music when he lived in China. It was only after immigrating in 1937 that he became interested in traditional Chinese music, eventually becoming the director of the Chinese Musical and Theatrical Association, a traditional music organization in New York's Chinatown.
Of all the genres discussed, popular music receives the least attention. It is addressed somewhat tangentially through the discussion of mass-mediated music. Pop music created in China and Taiwan is sold and broadcast throughout Chinatown, making it the most listened to type of Chinese music among Chinese Americans. However, Zheng suggests that it is the least performed professionally. Zheng's interview with Angel Lee, who was a successful pop singer in China, vividly portrays the effects of this problem. After immigrating to New York, Lee had to support herself with odd jobs and the occasional gig as a karaoke singer, eventually giving up music for a career in real estate. Zheng notes that Lee made a successful return to concert performances in 1999. Other genres such as rock, which is not mentioned at all, or hip-hop, mentioned only in passing, might reveal further vectors of diversity between immigrants and American-born Chinese, an issue that is not explored in detail in this book.
The book also includes a list of Chinese American musical groups active in the New York area, Sheung Chi Ng's repertoire, the complete Chinese texts of songs discussed, and a Chinese-English glossary. The Chinese characters of the texts and titles are helpful for Chinese readers, but the book does not provide the Chinese characters for musician's names, which makes it challenging to find recordings by artists released in China. Although the book does not have a CD, it includes a short discography and filmography.
The excellent historical information and rich and moving ethnographic interviews will certainly please anyone interested in the struggles, triumphs, and sorrows of Chinese American musicians, but the critical advancement of the concept of diaspora strikes me as a crowning achievement and one that I can only hope becomes highly influential in our thinking about the United States as a multicultural, multiethnic site.
