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Reviewed by:
  • Speak It Louder: Asian Americans Making Music
  • Eric Hung (bio)
Speak It Louder: Asian Americans Making Music. Deborah Wong. New York: Routledge, 2004. 388 pp., photos, figures, music, appendices, bibliography, index. ISBN 0-415-97039-3.

Through a series of articles on taiko and Asian American popular and “avantgarde” music, Deborah Wong has established herself as the leading scholar of the music of Asian Americans over the past decade. In Speak It Louder: Asian Americans Making Music, she collects updated versions of eight previously published essays and adds six and a half new chapters. The result is a valuable collection that contributes to our understanding of the roles that musical performance plays in constructing different Asian American identities. It also offers insights into the diverse ways audiences “reconstruct” the meanings of these performances.

Asian American music has become a hot scholarly topic in recent years. Despite this, the vast majority of studies published to date, even book-length [End Page 145] ones, have been quite narrowly focused; they examine a single ethnicity, and most often, a single age group, city, genre, and/or activity within that ethnicity.1 Given this context, one of the major strengths of Speak It Louder is its breadth. Although Wong makes no claim to be comprehensive, readers do get a sense of Asian Americans’ involvement with a wide range of musical activities. Specifically, the book is divided into three large sections: the first centers around the music of first-generation immigrants from Southeast Asia, the second considers the politics of presenting Asian American music at festivals and concert halls, and the third examines second-, third-, and fourth-generation immigrants’ engagement with jazz, hip-hop, and a number of other genres.

The opening chapter of the first section examines Asian Americans’ reflections on their pasts through three parallel stories: the author’s own entry into Asian American studies, the Laotian American lam singer Khamvong Insixiengmai’s nostalgia toward his homeland, and Chinese American playwright Genny Lin and composer Jon Jang’s evocations of early 20th century Chinese immigrants’ experiences on Angel Island in their recent politically conscious works. In this moving chapter, Wong convincingly argues that, given the traumatic circumstances underlying most Southeast Asians’ migration to the United States, scholars need to recognize the unique nature of the experiences of Americans of Southeast Asian descent. She writes:

The Southeast Asian American has a nicely challenging role with Asian American studies, forcing a reconsideration of class and diaspora that has proven useful (if sometimes painful) for the field; Chinese American and Japanese American experiences can no longer be treated as emblematic of “the” Asian American experience

(51).

In the next chapter, Wong tells the fascinating story of a Cambodian-American theater troupe’s participation in the 1993 Philadelphia Mummers Parade. Here, the reader appreciates the author’s considerable skills at teasing out the very different motivations of the many actors involved and the varied meanings that this event had for its audiences. She discusses, for example, the Philadelphia Folklore Project’s desire to use the arts to build multicultural understanding; the theater director’s interest in finding the biggest and most visible venue for his project; the media’s wish to use this event as a “harmless, depoliticized symbol of multiculturalism”; and Wong’s seeming disappointment that this “bold penetration” of Cambodian Americans into a parade that celebrated white working-class identity did not have more lasting resonances (58, 64). I only wish that she had done a closer reading of the troupe’s performance in front of the judging stand.

The final two chapters of the opening section centers on the musical activities of Vietnamese Americans. In one, Wong examines karaoke and analyzes two [End Page 146] contrasting videos for a sentimental pop song entitled “Bai Tango Cho Em” (A Tango for You), and convincingly argues that this song can alternately evoke an idyllic vision of pre-Communist Vietnam or project a blissful image of an immigrant’s California dream. She also draws insightful contrasts between “the American emphasis on using karaoke to feel like a ‘star,’” and the Vietnamese American men who sang almost daily at restaurants in the Los Angeles area who...

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