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Reviewed by:
  • Speak It Louder: Asian Americans Making Music
  • Allison Adah Johnson (bio)
Speak It Louder: Asian Americans Making Music. By Deborah Wong. New York: Routledge, 2004. Bibliography, index.

There's a particularly delicious moment in comedian Margaret Cho's stand-up routine when she waxes nostalgic for one of her best-remembered and favorite television programs from the seventies, the decade of her childhood. Kung Fu starred a young (and decidedly non-Asian) David Carradine as a Shaolin monk who escapes to the American Wild West after committing a desperate and violent act in his native China. Cho remembers that, even as a child, she recognized the incongruencies of casting this Caucasian actor as a Chinese character. She comments that, instead of the series being named Kung Fu, it should have been called Hey! That Guy's Not Chinese! [End Page 92]

Deborah Wong's important collection of essays Speak It Louder: Asian Americans Making Music is similarly filled with moments of marvelous recognition of incongruencies while also engaging in trenchant and critical analyses of various music-making practices of Asian Americans and the realms (physical, cultural, metaphorical) they excurse through in order to pursue their art. Wong's work is both "ethnographic and postmodern, . . . an attempt to show how certain Asian Americans imbricate agency and rewriting through their engagement with music" (7). And, like Cho's humor, Wong's analyses are particularly meaningful and crucial for those of us who identify as Asian American and for those whose interest in music making and analysis have left us wanting for more substantive investigation, feeling disinherited from critical race theories that often define only in black and white. The book's title quotes a line from Asian American rap group the Mountain Brothers:

Dumb nonsense I hate The truth some contemplate Ain't tryin' to wait I possess the power To speak it louder.

(4)

Wong sees and hears transgression on many levels—local, global, transglobal—and here excavates soundworlds with fervor, insight, and elegance while juggling bailiwicks as ethnomusicologist, cultural critic, performer, audience member. The collection of essays is organized into three sections; the first, "Southeast Asian Immigrants Sounding Off," considers the activities and impetuses of some first-generation musicians from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Straddling the spaces of recent homeland and (sometimes hostile) adoptive land, these diasporic artists sound and resound along and across the borderland of displacee and pioneer. The author traces the musical and cultural pilgrimages of musicians like Khamvong Insixiengmai, a premier Laotian-born lam singer, while burrowing into and out of his creative process and devices with a consciousness of conduit metaphors, verb morphology, and metalanguage as well as a deft textual and musical analysis of his songs: "Khamvong's songs have no hero in the mold of Achilles, Arthur, or Roland. There is only an 'I' who is and isn't Khamvong himself. . . . Good and evil are so obvious as to be left unexplored" (32).

Wong skillfully explores the historical memory and remembering of Angel Island immigrants through the work of poet Genny Lim and composer Jon Jang (37–50) who use texts from poems and interviews of the detainees and mixtures of Western and Asian musical instruments to evoke haunting, multilayered music (included on the accompanying cd). The author is equally adept at popular genres, penetrating the Vietnamese American karaoke culture in southern California with an attentive and lively dissection of the practice, paying particular attention to gendered differences. For one, men tend to socialize at karaoke bars and restaurants, while women often gather in groups at one another's homes, pooling their music collections in a kind of daytime aesthetic exchange (78). Wong also attends to the narratives embedded in karaoke videos (79–85), again with an eye (and ear) toward the cultural remembering of émigrés, the transforming as well as the anchored elements that inform the performance practice in both clear and subtle ways.

Acknowledging tropes of displacement and embracement, Wong never yields to facile metaphors or sentimental truisms. Indeed, where Wong especially shines is in her posing of seemingly incongruous points (e.g., linking karaoke to puppet theater through Sharon Mazer's notions of those things verging on...

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