Soundtracks of Asian America: Navigating Race through Musical Performance by Grace Wang (review)

Scholars of Asian American studies, as well as oral historians, often document marginalized voices in order to illustrate struggles against and resistance to mainstream society. However, in Soundtracks of Asian America, Grace Wang, following trends in more recently emerging literature, focuses on the voices of middle- and upper-middle-class Asian Americans who appear to have achieved insider status as "whites." Wang's work helps to highlight the racial barriers obscured by the color blindness and meritocracy embedded in postracial US society, and she does so by using music as an analytical lens.

Racially neutral expressions about feelings, talents, skills, and the belief that music has universal appeal, all mask the fact that music helps us demarcate race, cultural ownership, and belonging. Locating narrators who study and perform classical music, who present their music on YouTube, and who are in Mandopop (pop music in China), Wang investigates how these Asian Americans navigate the racial paradigms they encounter. She argues, ultimately, that Asian Americans' ambiguous ideas about race show us that race still hinders Asian Americans' integration into broader US culture.

The first half of Wang's book examines Asian Americans in classical music, traditionally a domain of white elites, where Asian successes are highly visible. Chapter 1 shows how Asian American mothers who send their children to the Juilliard precollege program explain this financial and temporal investment in their children. Coming from East Asian countries, where classical music is a marker of cultural prestige within the global order, these mothers believe classical music to be transnational cultural capital, especially in the US, where classical music is also held to be a demonstration of global dominance. These mothers speak about themselves as being diligent and self-sacrificial compared to American mothers, who they believe are lazy and self-centered. They appear to accept Asianness, a stereotype flourishing in mainstream America, to assimilate into US society. This, Wang argues, is how these mothers cope with the racism they experience in the US: they obtain cultural capital by investing in their children's classical music careers while simultaneously reframing classical music as their own Asian practice. In doing so, they are articulating their struggle with the racial paradigms closely tied to the performance of classical music in the US.

But this is not how their children—who are the ones actually practicing—think about classical music. For them, classical music is about the music itself—that is, classical music upholds the ideals of both universal appeal and meritocracy and has little to do with transgressing artificial racial divides. "When you're in the music," one narrator states, "it's all about the music" (79). The numerous successes another Asian musician experienced, for example, convinced him that race no longer mattered in the profession itself. But he, and other young Asian American musicians, also acknowledged that listeners do tend to project racialized ideas when appreciating the music of an Asian American performer. At the same time, these performers authenticate classical music by associating it with the European white race. They prefer being described as sounding like German players. But non-Asian musicians are rarely described as sounding like Asian musicians. Wang argues that despite Asian Americans' increasing success and participation in the field, the racial paradigm persists in classical music.

The second half of the book focuses on musicians in alternative popular music media. In chapter 3, young Asian American musicians who build their community on YouTube discuss and underscore their belief that music is universal and that people are not treated differently because of their race. From Wang's perspective, these musicians "rework the familiar sounds of the US pop landscape into their own image," rather than essentializing Asianness (117). She interprets these beliefs as the musicians' way of strengthening panethnic ties, less around their criticism against racism in the US and more around the common goals of normalizing the Asian American presence simply as an American presence...