When I changed into middle school, I determined the track of the Taiwanese pop name Jay Chou. My Mandarin wasn’t accurate enough to understand his lyrics; however, thinking that his odes to unrequited love have been more relatable than those of an American pop star, I’d ask my mother to translate — at least until our conversations became unbearable lectures on etymology, proper pronunciation, and somehow, always, my man or woman. But an unprecedented exhilaration still hung in her voice as she sang songs using her technology’s pop stars — Tsai Chin of direction and Fei Yu-ching. Later, I learned that my mother became a choir star, representing Fengyuan in journeying competitions.
That tingling consciousness that so much remains untold between my parents and me approximately ourselves and my history lingered amongst my memories as I made my way via The Moon Represents My Heart: Music, Memory and Belonging at the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA), which highlights Chinese immigrant relationships with and contributions to tune throughout genres. Filled with images, ephemera, and listening stations covering tracks from the 1850s to the present, elements of the exhibition felt interestingly acquainted — as though I knew this culture. Still, I wasn’t sure who instructed me about it. Seeing a 2003 profile of rapper MC Jin in Elle Girl’s “Our New Crush” column made me consider trying — and failing — to convince my white friends that Jay Chou turned as cool as Justin Timberlake. Hearing Broadway actor and people singer Stephen Cheng waver and croon in Taiwanese over a Sixties Rocksteady beat on “Always Together (A Chinese Love Song)” jogged my memory of information my grandparents have been pronouncing over the smartphone growing up having to respond in part in English.
A horizontal banner revealed with explanatory texts spans the length of the gallery. However, your eyes and ears must wander through The Moon Represent My Heart earlier than following the textual content. Curators Hua Hsu, Herb Tam, and Andrew Rebatta have established the show so visitors can first disperse, after which they reconnect as they relate unexpected strands of records in sections like “Source Materials: Opera, Chinatown Sounds, and Hip-Hop” and “Movements: Beijing Rock, Asian American Folk, and Songs of Revolution.” The exhibition left me feeling daunted but additionally proud and hopeful. As I questioned approximately the lifestyle my parents misplaced or repressed in coming to the United States, I observed many Chinese Americans — from singers to classical musicians to experimental sound artists — who picked up that culture and re-formed it into something new.
A photo of four younger men, wearing sharp fits, with jet-black hair slicked into pompadours, made me stop and stare. The Cathays banded together in 1963 in New York’s Chinatown after paying attention to The Temptations and The Four Seasons. “But open your angel’s palms/ To this stranger in paradise”; their mellifluous voices almost mask the displacement and alienation the lyrics allude to. The track closes with, “And inform him that he need be/ A stranger no greater.” As I looked at The Cathays, I remembered my dad’s closet full of plastic-blanketed suits at domestic and imagined how dapper he could have been before he opened his print store in San Diego and opted for ratty T-shirts.
“My moms and dads exhorted me to overlook approximately going, […] ‘An ounce of gold is won in trade for 1000 states of happiness,’” reads part of “The Story of Gold Mountain,” a 19th-century Toisan people music pleading a father now not to sign up for the California Gold Rush. It’s accumulated in an ebook and short documentary on Uncle Ng (1910-2002), a famous local Chinatown person who was acknowledged for singing on the streets and in Columbus Park. My dad, who labored 12-hour days that left him too worn out to talk, got here to the USA nearly 140 years after the miners, but what the display does great: connect these echoes of immigrants, bonded across time and language within the pursuit of golden perfection.
