Ep. 3: Julian Saporiti

Chanhee: Hello everyone. This is Chanhee, and you're listening to Cha-Tea Circle. Last April 2024, I had a chance to go to a No-No Boy performance at Tufts University, organized by our mutual friend, the historian Diego Luis. As someone who has followed the No-No Boy project for years, particularly as a graduate student hoping to expand how I do history-telling, I had such an immersive and intimate experience listening to Julian and his partner Amelia. No-No Boy highlights the messiness and multiplicities of Asian American history through music and storytelling. In this episode, Julian and I spoke about his ideas behind the No-No Boy project, his relationship to Buddhism and activism, and music as an effective medium for storytelling.

[Music "Little Monk" by No-No Boy]

Chanhee: Hi, Julian. Thank you so much for joining our podcast today. Our audience just listened to part of “Little Monk,” a song in your new album, Empire Electric. For those who are just discovering you and your music, can you talk about the background of your No-No Boy project and how your project has evolved in terms of themes, stories, and music style? 

Julian: Sure. I guess I should start by saying that The No-No Boy project, which is first of all named after a book, sort of a teacher's trick to use a band name to get people to read. The project started as a marriage of my two career paths. So for the last ten years, plus, I guess at this point, I've been an academic, I've been in graduate programs, and have been a professor here and there, studying Asian American history, studying musical cultures, transpacific cultural exchange, that kind of stuff, and finding these really interesting histories.

So that's like, sort of, career number two. Career number one was just a regular musician. I grew up in Nashville, Tennessee. My dad was in the music industry down there. When I was a kid, I went to Berklee College of Music in Boston and was in an indie rock band that was very lucky and got a record deal and toured all over North America and Europe for a long time. So basically, I had this background. This is already kind of what I thought was finished and retired career as a musician, which I had sort of put aside to go to grad school. But then the two things merged in a really beautiful way. I was researching all of these fascinating Asian American histories. Some of the better-known songs of the project are about other Asian American and Asian musicians dealing with war and empire and making music throughout. So I thought I should use my songwriting skills and my music production skills to maybe be a bit more creative as an academic, not just write a regular dissertation, because having a whole background as a different kind of writer, I already knew I had a skill set as a musician that would far surpass what I could do as an academic prose writer. So I could do a better scholarship. And I could also reach a lot more people. I mean, that's probably the reason why we're talking. If I had just written a regular dissertation, I'd probably be halfway to publishing my first book right now. And you would have never heard any of the work that I've done, but because I was able to turn it into music, I've been so much more prolific and so much more, I guess, productive as a scholar.

So that's the No-No Boy project. It's a marriage of two skill sets: academic research and artistic expression. In my case, songwriting, music production, concerts, that kind of stuff. And it's changed a lot because I started writing these songs mid-grad school while I was doing my PhD at Brown. I first came across a lot of these stories about Asian American history when I was doing a master's degree at University of Wyoming. And then to get my PhD, I went to Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where I did a PhD between Ethnomusicology and American Studies. And I was like caught up in this moment, where I was researching Japanese American incarceration camps or Vietnam War refugees or what was happening at the American border today as an echo of those previous, histories of empire and incarceration. 

And so it started out as a much more, I think, political project. When you go to a place like Brown, it's very politicized. It's very narrow-minded to like the liberal side. It's not a very diverse place, not like Wyoming was, where there were a lot of Republicans or libertarians around, like interjecting themselves into the cultural conversation on campus. Brown is sort of like my way or the highway. Especially when I was there, the Trump election had just happened. So people are really, myself included, had our hackles up and we're feeling. If we're ever going to feel very activisty, that was the time. 

And over the course of the project, things changed and spirituality has a big part to do with that. If you listen to the first records, they're folk songs–they're not necessarily political songs, but they are kind of servicing this sort of old 1940s-, 1950s-, and 1960s- folk music–American tradition of the left using folk songs to address topics that were happening like war, economic impoverishment, whatever. They were singing about at the time. And I was sort of doing the same thing, but shining a light on Asian American histories. At least that's what I think a lot of other people like professors or critics have told me I was doing, which is cool. But, with the more recent album Empire Electric, it was the first album I got to do beyond the boundaries of being a graduate student or an academic. I sort of just walked away from academia, guitar in hand with all these histories I'd studied because I wanted to share them with a more public audience. And also, you'd know how the job market is right now, so it's not even that good of a bet even with an Ivy League PhD that you're going to get any kind of job. So it’s kind of saying something about academia when being a folk singer is a better job prospect than being a professor in America. 

But that aside, this latest album, which is the third, in the trilogy I guessed of the No-No Boy project, it's a lot more expansive sonically, and it's more joyful, more joyous. It's more, I think, beautiful. There are also a lot of dark moments because, again, I'm singing about Asian American history, the history of immigrants, refugees, empire, and war–the subject matter can be quite dark. But I feel like it's more balanced. And that, of course, comes from my spiritual path over the last decade, which is, I think subdued my capital A activist side, which I was always wearing like an ill-fitted suit when I was at Brown. I was a middle-of-the-country person; I'm from Tennessee; I'm an extremely liberal progressive person, but I'm not from one of these echo chambers where you can just criticize the flyover states and just say I hate these people. The way that people in Wyoming say, “I hate the liberals”--that kind of stuff. I just don't come from those populations and I have respect for, I guess, everyone to a certain extent. So, Brown was always really ill-fitting as far as that kind of culture of activism and calling people out all the time. And I guess the alleviation to that, what did fit well, if capital A activism, capital A academia, the way it is now, all professionalized and in quite narrow-minded, I think to the left, at least in the humanities, Buddhism really kind of had filled that void.

[8:30] I had started getting into Buddhism when I was in Wyoming. I found all these Thich Nhat Hanh books in the used bookstore above a cafe called Knight Heron Books in Laramie, Wyoming, and I would take them on these mountain climbs that I would do around the state all the time because they're these little books–Thich Nhat Hanh has all these little books. For his very peaceful, quiet, but very thoughtful Vietnamese Buddhism, that he does. And I never really studied it the way I do my scholarship. It was always just more of a thrift store Buddhism kind of thing. Just take some good ideas here and there where you find it–never been a completist. I've read his versions of a lot of the sutras, but, you know, I'm not a chapter-and-verse kind of person. But that's.. that helped me a lot. And then when my wife, Amelia and I, we met at Brown, and she also had a similarly kind of conflicted time like not a natural activist. A very pleasant person and got caught up like myself–becoming less pleasant, protesting all the time, and this kind of virtue signaling type ways that we do these days.

We went straight to one of Thich Nhat Hanh's monasteries that he started in the U. S.: Blue Cliff Monastery in Upstate New York. And that's really where that song that you played, “Little Monk,” and the whole, I would say, vibe and centerpiece of this album comes from. It's sort of a walking away, a letting go, which is pretty important to Buddhist people. But for me, it was walking away from the PhD I had just done, you know, and being okay with that. I find it very hard to be the type of liberal American activist or conservative activist that you see in America these days or an academic right now. And I think that's a large part because of my spirituality. It just doesn't jive well for me. 

And so something like making art to deal with the scholarship that I'm studying–I think that's sort of where I've landed and so again, now I'm just a folk singer. I'm lucky. I get gigs to pay the bills, and I do get to do some teaching because universities will bring me out to hang out with colleagues for a week, you know, and do some teaching to their classes and do a concert and share my work and do some workshops on songwriting or how you turn rigid scholarship into art. But that's sort of the evolution, and I'm so glad to have this conversation with you, like I said, when we first met a few weeks ago, because I find it difficult almost to, even in Asian American studies where there are these incredibly rich spiritual and religious traditions that have not only define that continent, but when you talk about Asian America, stuff like yoga and Buddhism and mindfulness is such a huge industry for everyone in over here. And yet when we teach it, I never really had a lot of sections on Asian American religion or Buddhism or the mixing of spirituality. It was always a kind of food and trauma and war. And I think it's such a wonderful thing to broach from my specific fields, you know, so it's lovely to have this conversation with you. 

Chanhee: Oh, yeah, same. And as I hear about your relationship to Buddhism and activism, and history telling, I just keep thinking about your song “Little Monk,” because I found the tension in the lyrics. It is so interesting–the tension between the little monk who lets things be and the children's outcry and larger and louder acts of protest. So, I don't know; it seems to me that being a Buddhist means being mindful of the injustice in the world, which is kind of like a different direction of being a protestor. But I'm thinking about many contemporary Buddhist activists, such as Lama Rod Owens and Angel Kyoto Williams, or historically someone like Thick Quang Doc, whose act of self-immolation was a protest against the South Vietnamese government's persecution of Buddhists. So I'm curious to hear more about how Buddhism shapes and interacts with your work in your way of activism and history telling, and of course, music.

Julian: Yeah, I mean, it's funny because the self-immolation photo is so iconic, and being a South Vietnamese person, it's particularly resonant, I think, on a cultural and national level. But it's funny, that photo, that iconography in particular, is something I've changed my views on a lot. I used to be very inspired by that photo. It's like right up there with the tank man in Tiananmen Square, like those kinds of old protest photos from Asia of the 20th century. My favorite band when I was a teenager was Rage Against the Machine, this rap rock band from Los Angeles–they were very activisty. They had a whole reading list on their website, including Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States, which totally radicalized me. I ended up being like Ralph Nader campaign coordinator in college–like a true third party, like I said, very progressive, liberal to the core. And that was very much because of "Rage Against the Machine," and on their first album cover, they used that self-immolation photo. That's like the iconography on one of my favorite albums of all time. So I always thought the way probably a lot of people who only knew that one image, like it was very like badass or very masculine cause the music behind, it was very like rocking and it's completely out of context, But I sort of had this relationship where I was like, “yeah, revolution,” you know, like the way that Che Guevara t-shirts when you're a kid, or at least when I was a kid, I was like wearing them all the time, not really knowing what a bastard and a hero that guy was at the same time. Like most people are very complicated, but truly like a murderer and a hero. 

And I feel similarly now to that image of self-immolation. I don't find it necessarily something to behold with wonder or inspiration; I find it very sad. I think just cause you're a monk and just cause you're Buddhist doesn't mean that you're like everything you do is wonderful. Again, I don't have any kind of sect of particular Buddhism. I'm not as nearly religious as the way I am a scholar, reading everything, taking notes, that kind of stuff. It's really, you know, I have quite a library at this point, but I like the Thich Nhat Hanh stuff, who has interesting feelings, and he was very much an activist himself in his own way. But it's a personal journey. The reason I like Buddhism, compared to how I grew up as a Catholic or in the buckle of the Bible belt with all these Southern Baptists, Pentecostals, and evangelical kids, I like it because you can sort of choose your own adventure. And so I have the utmost respect for human decisions to self-immolate or be a protester and yell and scream like that. But that's not what I take from Buddhism. If anything, it made me quieter and more contemplative, and I think if everyone, especially in this moment, I think that's maybe the most radical form of protest. Everyone's loud. Everyone's self-immolating on Facebook and Twitter and all that kind of stuff. We're just a country of self-immolators, and we all think we're righteous doing so–both the right and left. And I'm just tired of it. 

For me, hanging out with monks at Blue Cliff, where my wife and I spent that week, or going through my daily meditation, reading Thich Nhat Hanh and other people, just looking at mountaintops or trees and counting my footsteps and being mindful of my breath. Just for me, something like a small version of that radical gesture to burn oneself. Any kind of burning myself is just not that valid these days. I used to go protest everything. I joke around that like on Brown's campus, there was a protest every day about everything but economic class because all those kids are super rich and they didn't want to protest that. But I very rarely will raise my voice to do anything but sing or have a conversation, hopefully like a loving conversation. I'm definitely more skewed toward the loving-kindness aspect of Buddhism. And that's a lot of my meditations, and also just again, I think to be an activist is to raise one's voice in a very like, “raise yourself” kind of way. What I've gotten from Buddhism is to obliterate the self and realize you're a bigger part of something, and to be kind to even your enemies–that's just one person's point of view. And again, I'm not part of a sangha; I don't go hang out with people in Portland; I do it kind of on a personal level or with my wife or maybe with friends, but I'm much more of a go-hang-out under the tree, and just sit in, and try to calm down because again, I think, that's like true radicalism today. When everyone else is lighting themselves on fire, I think it's a very necessary thing to maybe just go hang out with your mother and plant stuff in her garden on a Saturday and drink lemonade, you know, so that's kind of where I am and that's what that song “Little Monk” is about. 

The reason I love songwriting as an academic is because I find these, whether it's ethnographies or histories–and “Little Monk” is very much an ethnography, auto-ethnography, ethnography of that place, Blue Cliff, and the monks that I was hanging out with. It's just scenes from that little culture. And the literal story behind it, if you're interested, is Amelia, my wife and I went to Blue Cliff, and it was a youth retreat when I was still young enough to be a youth. So it was like 35 and under and I was like probably 34. So it was all these youths and monks, and all the youths were camping out in the field, and it was great.

You pay what you can to help support the monks. You camp out in their field. And then every morning you wake up at five ungodly early, and then you go to the meditation hall. And you meditate in silence and try to stay awake. And then you do some kind of physical activity. You could do yoga. We did Qi Gong, moving that Qi around through some physical movements. And then we did breakfast and all of this was in silence until they rang the bell at like nine o'clock or something. So you start the day with mindfulness, mindfulness of your body, nourishing yourself with a vegetarian breakfast and tea. And then they ring the bell, and then you do the dishes, and you can start talking again. I found that so instructional. They're basically telling me by the order of the day: listen first. Listen before, be quick to listen, slow to speak, which is the regimen. That's four hours of listening to yourself, to the monks, to yourself eating, breathing, moving, that kind of stuff.

And one day, this is what the song deals with. There was an instance during a Q&A–we did a question-answer with the monks. All the monks kind of sat up front, and we were all sitting there on our little cushions on the floor–this beautiful wooden meditation hall, the size of a basketball gym. And we have time, a couple of hours to just ask the monks whatever we need help with, that wasn't addressed in our small little kindergarten Dharma circles. And it was great. Because these people are super smart because, much like scholars, they just get to think all the time. They just eat and think, and they're quiet and they have some good advice and some good perspectives. And so the line in “Little Monk,” um, the second verse of “Little Monk” is, “Do you remember at the monastery when the outraged child cried, and little monk just sweetly smiled back?” This was a much more dramatic moment than those lyrics would have you believe.

Cause one, it wasn't a child. That's sort of a condescending term within the song. This was like a full-grown adult, but acting very childish. This is someone in their early 20s, typical kind of like college kid on fire, self-immolating kind of thing. They just got up during the Q&A, and this kid yells, starts yelling at these monks because they're so frustrated by the world. They had so much pain. I really saw myself when I was 20 years old, and I was protesting all the time–“Occupy Wall Street” kind of stuff. That's what was happening in America. And I saw this kid just start yelling and crying, literally crying, and they were very concerned about climate change, about all the rhetoric that we've been hearing over and over, especially Gen Z, about how these boomers are leaving us with this broken world, and it'll be on fire and that kind of stuff, and that's what they were saying. And they were crying, and I really felt for them, as a teacher, as someone who was their age not very long ago, as a Buddhist, as a human. But I also thought it profoundly inappropriate of all the places to yell and all the people to yell at, they were yelling at these monks who don't do anything. Like, they don't go anywhere. And I was just like, “What answer? You go talk to scientists or something, or go study, like, I don't know, this is not the avenue.” But it was. It was exactly the avenue to go down because this monk–and it wasn't a little monk. little monk is a particular monk, who's like four feet tall, who looks like a cartoon monk, who are the children of the monastery called little monk–that's how he got his name, and he was in my particular little Dharma circle. So he's like the avatar for all the monks for me. 

But this monk just felt this outraged child's yelling about “the end of the world is here” and they just went on for this five-minute rant about this. And the monk just sat there and smiled this half, little Buddhist half-smile. And that was instructional within itself to be able to feel, but not reflect the outrage, to meet it with love and kindness, just in one smile, in one's openness to hearing the violence of these words that this child was spewing at this monk. Because we knew where it came from. We knew what Thich Nhat Hanh would say where the seeds of those anger came from and how they've been watered in this child's lifetime, especially if they're an educated left-leaning person, how they've been watered by the news and the media and their cohort and that kind of stuff.

But then the monk who answered the question said, “Of course, this is very worrying for humans that the world might end or might become very uncomfortable due to man-made climate change. There's always multiple truths to any situation.” Because the child said our world is ending, so “you're right. Our world might end. Of course, it will. We're going to go extinct at some point, but that's one truth. It's our world, the world of human beings, your world, my world. But it's not the world. It's not all of the energy in the solar system. It's not the planet earth, even when the sun goes out. That's our sun. The infinity of space and godliness or whatever you believe in. That will continue.”

So that was really profound because it takes some of the pressure off that you have to solve all the world's problems all the time. And you have to care about everyone's suffering all the time. And if anything, I didn't see that as an out that the monk was giving. If you just look at this bigger truth, that there's a bigger truth than yourself, it made me more interested in how I can help our world, I guess, because when you accept that our world will end at some point, I think you can do a number of things and the thing that I choose to do is to try to make it better. 

So that one little verse, “Do you remember at the monastery when the outraged child cried, and little monk just sweetly smiled back? Oh, how and when do I get so Zen?” That verse comes from that entire kind of ethnographic passage of this 22-year-old college kid yelling at these monks about climate change and the monk just saying, “No, you're right. You're right. And it's okay.” Because if you really care about the world, the world will be fine without us. In fact, it might be better without us. So he gave us, multiple truths and that was very helpful. 

Chanhee: I think I got to learn more about the nuance of the conversation in the lyrics. And at the same time, I got to learn why you decide to sing justice, sing Asian-American history instead of yelling. So I want to ask you about music as a medium in relation to the song “Imperial Twist” from your first album, 1975. So when I first listened to this song, which is one of my favorites, um, I liked it so much, because it was so catchy and rhythmic. 

Julian: Thank you! 

Chanhee: Thank you for making that song. And my partner and I were almost dancing in the car. It was so uplifting, and I loved it so much. But as we paid more attention to the lyrics, there was something like strong criticism of imperialism. And later, when you played the song during your concert at Tufts University, which I was very lucky to attend, you and your wife Amelia played the images of the Vietnam War on the screen behind you, including bombings. 

So, in this particular song, you create a very interesting juxtaposition between style and entertainment and grappling of the difficult history of truth. So by putting the two side by side, you can make the audience actually feel very unsettled. Something like you're dancing to the music, it sounds amazing. But at some point, you realize that, “Wait, what am I dancing to?” So I'm curious to hear more about your approach to the song in relation to this tension between entertainment and difficult truth-telling. 

Julian: Yeah, well, I don't know how many, you know, like I said, the monk told me there were multiple truths. So I'm not sure truth-telling is the goal. Maybe what you were feeling was multiple truths being told at the same time, right? Because that's exactly what that song is about. That song was given to me–the story by Vietnamese elders who played music, who played rock and roll during the war who lived in Saigon and the Americans came over. And they loved rock and roll music, and at that time, it was like Beatles, Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, and the Doors, all these great American and British rock and roll bands from the sixties and seventies. That's what the Americans went during their off time when they're on leave would want to go to the clubs in Saigon in here.

And I guess I should say, they sort of created a lot of bands because the American military funded teenagers, like some of my mom's friends, gave them instruments and records and all this kind of stuff to play rock and roll for the GIs on their bases.

So it was this cultural imperialism, as well as this occupation of Southern Vietnam, and a lot of people were very grateful for it. A lot of the Vietnamese folks in my community, South Vietnamese folks who played in these bands, they had multiple truths. The song, “Imperial Twist,” the recording starts with a piece of oral history I recorded–just a conversation with my mom's old high school friend, Robera, who played bass in one of these bands. And he says, paraphrasing here, “I was pro-communist, but I was also very pro-American because I really loved rock and roll.” So, I want to unsettle you. I mean, any song about the Vietnamese diaspora, we are unsettled. So, if I'm going to pay homage to those people, to my people, there should be at least, you shouldn't feel settled because none of us are, in some way, you know. That's not to say we haven't made lives, but any immigrant, any refugee isn't ever totally settled. That's the nature of moving. So unsettled is good, that's the goal. That's getting closer to a truth or to say multiple truths of any history. 

So they were playing music in the clubs, downtown in Saigon, they were playing on these army bases, playing this rock and roll, which was the music of the occupier. But they loved it. And they sort of, a lot of the good ones would localize that music. They put their own Vietnamese languages–an incredible tonal language on top of this already incredible, very like culturally mixed 60s, 70s, psychedelic rock that was happening. So it's one of my favorite types of music, the old recordings of those bands. And that's very unsettled within itself. If you want to do a lineage of all the sounds that go into that export of rock and roll, and then the Vietnamese of that rock and roll, that's already very unsettled music that I love because of the unsettling, because of the melange, the mix.

And so, we're telling just a story, just some little snippets of the Vietnamese diaspora through a few rock and roll musicians, people who were playing in a club and they were playing Jimi Hendrix music, and they loved it, and then a bomb exploded planted by the Viet Cong, and it killed one of the drummer's friends and stopped the concert. That's the pure joy of the beginning of that song that all musicians know, and the audience is excited to hear the song “Purple Haze” by Jimi Hendrix played live by this great Vietnamese rock band, and then a bomb goes off. It is literally an immediate juxtaposition of the most joyous feeling a music lover or musician can feel. The beginning of an awesome song with ultimate death and despair, which is what those GIs and those Vietnamese kids experienced living through that war. So it should be two things at once. 

And as you mentioned, when we perform live, a lot of the work in the presentation of the concert is done through visuals. I went through all these archival visuals of different Asian Americans, different Asian historical footage and still pictures. And what we do during that video in particular (there's like a lyric video online that you can see the visuals for this song) is, it's pictures of those bands, it's movies of those bands just rocking out and having a great time. Just like, it looked like me when I was a kid, just like in seventies clothing. But that's juxtaposed and sort of double exposed over archival video from the Americans dropping napalm bombs because these things were happening at the exact same time. Sometimes as dramatically as at a concert, the war would happen, which is such a violation of, for me as a musician–my true sacred space, but also just in general, while all these people were playing music, while my mom was a teenage girl in Saigon worrying about what dress she would wear, there would be bombs going off on the way home from school. And in the countryside, whole villages would be obliterated. These things happened at the exact same time that rock and roll was happening. 

And so, sometimes you can dance to it, and that's great. And you should dance to it joyously, and you're not supposed to feel bad, it's not like a trick, it's a song. I got a message the other day from someone who I don't think cares at all about Asian American history that said “Imperial Twist” has been my number one song on Spotify for the last two years.” It's like, wow, that's amazing as a musician. It's like, thank you. And we have another song called “Two Candles in the Dark,” which a couple came to New York to our gig at Joe's Pub at the public theater on this last tour. And they said that was our wedding song and that song is about people falling in love in a Japanese internment camp. But that's kind of the point. That's sort of the proof of concept why I didn't write a dissertation because music can travel, right? And whether or not someone knows every detail of the history that I study, eventually, like you said, you might be dancing in the car. And then it's like, “Oh, what does he mean a bomb went off? Is that metaphorical?” No, no, no. It's quite literal, but it's also metaphorical. That's what a Jimi Hendrix song is. It's a sonic explosion, but I think, confusion, multiple layers of culture and meaning–that's what history is to me. That's what being Vietnamese American or Asian American is. I don't think there's any truth to it. I think you try to be as factual as possible. So in the case of that song, I went through any archives of these bands that I was listening to, that my mom grew up with, and did interviews and oral histories, and tried to get down some facts. 

But, you're talking about histories that haven't stopped as well. That song also references all the times when I was on tour, sort of a continuation of these Vietnamese musicians in my first tour is down to the Texas border where I would get pulled over regularly by border patrol, and they would ask me, “What's your mom's maiden name?” That's a big question that Homeland Security asks you to identify yourself, because it's like a tricky question that an impersonator wouldn't know. 

And I didn't, I couldn't remember. I couldn't remember my mom's Vietnamese maiden name because I was so divorced from that heritage, right? And this was in the same state where the band that I referenced in the song lives now. The band that was playing Jimi Hendrix when the bomb went off. They live in Texas now. There are these Vietnamese people in Texas. And there I was getting pulled over, and the whole reason I was detained for a couple of hours because I couldn't remember my own Vietnamese heritage. So these histories linger. And for me, it's all a mess. And I love reading all the books of my colleagues who clarify history, and they lay out a narrative. You know, I'm a big, boring history reader. Like I'm reading a book on the Mayflower right now that I just love, like real boring American history stuff. 

But for me, as an artist, that's what art can do that academic work traditionally can't do. You can sit inside the mess of history, whether it's through those projections that are showing almost two opposing thoughts at once, but that were happening at the same time during the war. Or through the poetry of one's lyrics, and then when it involves my own community, my own sort of auto-ethnographic experience layered onto the history of these people who came before me. So I think it's totally fine to dance to that song. It's a groovy tune. it's by far our most popular song. And I like it a lot. And even as a performer, some nights I'm just like caught up in the groove, and I'm like, “Oh yeah, this is great. This is a fun song!” And then other nights, a lyric, like the real personal ones, that lyric in particular that I'm referencing about my mom's maiden name, “I didn't know my mother's maiden name that time in Texas when we were detained. I've been back to old Saigon, but how much of you is lost when they change your name?” Right? So it's like the layering. Like Saigon is no longer the city my mom grew up in; it's Ho Chi Minh City. And my mom's last name is no longer my mom's last name.

And so how much do you lose? We're working at multiple levels here. My mom now has an Italian last name. I have an Italian last name, you know, I don't mind that. I think it's a cool last name. I also don't mind Ho Chi Minh City, but I'm not your typical South Vietnamese person. Like Roberta, I'm also pretty pro-communist, but I really love rock and roll, so I'm pretty pro-American too. But yeah, that song, I'm so glad, I want you to dance. That's why I scaffold all of those rhythms in there. [38:20] That's part of the pedagogy. If your body literally wants to move to a history lesson, I think you're going to remember that history a lot better. And then if that history isn't clean and it makes you reckon with it, then, we're doing a much-needed service because the only thing you have to do with history is try to reckon with it. To actually learn history is to feel conflicted because I don't know, like, I don't have a side. I just see the past, and I see how it echoes in my life. And it's not for me, I'm not even trying to make sense with it, but I am trying to reckon with it, which to me just means sitting with it and then maybe doing a little bit better with the history that I make.

Chanhee: I guess this messiness of history, the complexity of history, is always a great reminder to think about how to tell a history. And as you mentioned, this embodied knowledge through music. I don't know; this is so great–which textbook never be able to give you. So, I guess, this is a very amazing way to teach history and learn history while providing a space to feel a history, whatever that feeling is–whether that's joy or feeling unsettled. 

And I'm thinking about your concert, your live concert. As you mentioned, you show those archival sources, something like videos, photos, even historical figures’ voice, which was really rich. And I thought about this as you providing your audience with different avenues to reach the stories. Like through music, you share your own reflections and interpretations of specific history. Through these rich primary sources as part of your performance, you also offer a space for your audience to bring their own experience, and their own history by reflecting on sources and by imagining the historical scenes, while listening to your music. This is, this is what I experienced during your concert.

Julian: That's great. I love that. I think that would be a great blurb to describe when I have to send a description to universities when I'm performing, that's a great blurb. You should send me that because that's a really smart way to put it, but I think you're exactly right. That was the intention. It was to give my perspective on multiple truths, if we go back to the monk’s words, my interpretation of history, cause that's all it is–it's just one guy read a bunch of stuff, read more than he needed to in grad school, and then turned it into some songs. That's all it is.

This isn't a peer-reviewed book for a purpose because it's just my best guesses and my historical imagination and how I–my perspective on this history. And, the recordings of historical voices, whether it's my mother's voice or some of her friends or people have been through these different histories. And then the marriage of that music and voices and storytelling to the archival visual images behind me, that's food for the audience, like you said, because that's open to your interpretation. Like I'm singing my interpretation of history through the songs. And I might be trying to teach a little bit as a teacher, a professor, trying to teach through the songs the way you would when you lecture, but even when you lecture, that's still your interpretation. But the visuals and the voices. I think those are really interesting to reckon with. And I think if you're paying attention to those, it's almost like, wanting to license the audience or deputize the audience to be their own historian, right? It's a charge to the audience to say, “No, here's the material. The secondary source in front of you is the songs.” I really like how you put that. The primary sources are there though. That's what the visuals are. And when you're reckoning, what do they bring up? That's what I'm really interested in because I don't really give a shit about people learning my specific history and research. I asked those research questions because I was interested. What is it like for a bunch of Japanese Americans to form a jazz band in an internment camp? That's a crazy thing to do. I really want to know more about these people. What's it like for all these Saigon teenagers to play Jimi Hendrix songs while the world's on fire around them? These are the research questions that were interesting to me, and they became interesting songs, I think, to some people. That's great. 

But really, for the audience, as a teacher, I'm not really teaching Asian American history or transpacific history as much as I'm trying to teach a methodology. And it's a very simple one. Just go talk to your grandmother. That's it. Go talk to your grandma. Or, if you're a grandmother, tell your kids and your grandkids your history, leave a tape, right? Because everyone has, we're all, again, we're all humans. There are multiple truths. Like, you and I might be Asian American to some degree. You know? First gen, second gen, whatever you want to call it. Blah blah blah. You know, diasporic communities, yada, yada, yada. That's cool. But we're also human beings. And human beings have this ability to tell stories and share histories and mythologies, and we've created these communities and ideas of concepts of family. And I think that's really neat. And so the only instruction that I want people to take away is just go ask your uncle. What his life was like as a mechanic in Ohio, or go ask your grandpa, what it was like to fight as a white guy in the Vietnam war, or if your family came across the Southern border, maybe one of my songs about my mom coming over here, invites you to talk to your mom about those stories.

And that's what's happened a lot. I get emails from all sorts of people, just regular concert goers or people who hear the music on Spotify or undergrads or grad students. And they're like, “Oh, this has been super helpful.” That's really the only takeaway, and that's what I think, I love the idea that you're unsettled during the concert. Not in a horror movie kind of way, although some of the histories are pretty horrific, but you have to shake things loose in order for new information to come in, right? Whether that's the embodiment of knowledge through music and art and movement, or whether that's like the metaphor of shaking things loose in your brain. That's what any professor wants their undergrad to do–to shake up their brain so they can put more information in there. And see if some new information makes sense to them so they can go through the world. So the idea of shaking, unsettling, while we're showing some very complicated and almost like contradictory primary sources at the same time, or I'm singing one thing, and the music sounds like another thing, putting joy and horror and trauma and love all together, because that's what it's like from what I can understand. 

Chanhee: I think you already touched on this, but as you mentioned, each person has their own truth. Everyone has some different truths. And I guess everyone has some different definitions of Asian-American as well. So I want to ask you about how you define Asian American, especially thinking about your building of kinship and emotional connections with historical figures in your music. 

And part of these connections, I assume. came out of this feeling of belonging in the same trajectory of Asian-Americans, whatever that means. Um, but a question many Asian Americans ask now is how much connections and similarities we really share with these historical figures. Particularly, after the 1965 Immigration Act, which allowed a specific class of immigrants, who had some levels of privilege to come to the State.

So, do you feel these gaps when you immerse yourself in the Asian American past? If so, how do you navigate your distance and how do you bring them close to you? Or perhaps you just leave it there. 

Julian: So I think ultimately we're going to get to that. I just leave it there. Like you said, but let's talk about the process of, leaving it, leaving the term Asian American behind, because when I started this project, again, I was a grad student. I moved to Wyoming. I had been a guy in a band. I grew up in Nashville. I tried to distance myself from my Asian American heritage, specifically my Vietnamese heritage, as much as possible. Because for me, the reason I related to being Asian American is because I was just called Chinese or Japanese on the playground. It's really weird being Vietnamese, especially growing up in the 80s and 90s, because the war in Vietnam was so definitive for this country. And yet, they knew nothing about the people who they were actually fighting with or against over in Vietnam, who they were occupying.

And so, I grew up with this definition through all these Hollywood movies of Vietnam being this crisis of white masculinity. And we were completely othered, there were no speaking roles, we were the enemy, if anything, and so there was that level. But then on the playground, I'm half Vietnamese; I look very not white, but I don't look Vietnamese cause I'm a much bigger person than physically bigger than your average Vietnamese guy. You know, I'm like six feet tall, 200-something pounds. I'm not five feet tall, 120 pounds, like a lot of my Viet brothers over there. And, even as a kid, it was very reductive. Just people would like slant their eyes at you. This happened all the time when I was a kid, people just like say racist stuff, like fake Chinese, like Ching Chong, Ching Chong, just in public and then also like even my friends on the playground. It was just always being called Japanese or Chinese. So in that way, I felt very Asian American because I was reduced to being of these two vague Eastern orientalized cultures Chinese or Japanese that these kids knew about maybe through Kung Fu movies or Bruce Lee or racist cartoons or whatever. 

So I distanced myself as much as I could from those playground experiences. And really, the worst experiences that truly were, like second-hand traumatizing, were my mom being berated by random people, just like driving down the street, like groups of white boys, just sticking their heads out the windows at stoplights, and just yelling like these horrible things at her. And so I just wanted to not be affiliated with that, which was tough because, like my wife is half white too in Taiwanese and Chinese, but she can pass as maybe like Hispanic or sometimes as white. I just don't have that possibility. Later in life, people think I'm Filipino or half Korean sometimes actually, which I don't see at all because my skincare regimen is not great. But it was really when I went to Wyoming through Asian American history that I kind of felt some sense of belonging. But it wasn't because I related to Chinese minors who got massacred in the State, or people in a Japanese internment camp, because obviously, like Vietnamese people, much like Korean people, much like Chinese people, have a big problem historically with Japanese people in the 20th century, an ultimate evil that a lot of people remember if they lived through that war, like my family does. So I didn't really have a lot in common. But it was because I found other musicians. It's because I found this picture of a swing band in a Japanese internment camp in heart mountain, Wyoming, that led me to write the song “ The Best God Damn Band in Wyoming.” Like I found a kinship because we kind of look similar. We have dark hair. We have, you know, small eyes. And we're musicians in this random state of Wyoming. Those people became like family to me. Literally, one of the singers became like a grandmother to me, but it was because of a musical connection and maybe some vague Asian American stuff.

But when I went to Brown, it was the first time I actually met other Asian Americans. And all of them, for the most part, there's some Vietnamese kids. I remember the Vietnamese student association took me out for dinner and asked me to perform at their little celebration at the end of the year. And that was a huge honor for me because I had never met more than one Vietnamese person at a time growing up in Nashville, and here was like 30 Vietnamese people. I was like, I finally found people. I would ask any Vietnamese person to go get pho. Like if I was in a class with like an undergrad or grad student, I was like, do you want to go hang out? You know? Cause I was so excited to sort of reframe my Asian American, Vietnamese American experience as positive, cause it was so negative growing up. And so I was friends with a lot of these people; I worked with some grad students. But I was trying to buy into the Asian American thing, because when you do Asian American studies, which was a big part of my fields as a PhD student, you realize after a while that this isn't necessarily like a truth, like the idea of Asian Americans, this was started in the seventies like by activists on the West Coast who were mostly like Japanese, Chinese, and some Filipinos, who, yes, had families that had been through some hardships, like first waves of Chinese immigration or Japanese internment camps, but by the time they were starting this, they were all like college-educated people. These were very different from Vietnamese people who had come over in the 70s and 80s, and had recently lived through wars and stuff like this. And you realize that they have a very narrow idea of what Asian American means. And so, I started to distance myself from that because I'm not East Asian. And in fact, when you look at what you're gesturing to, I think, a lot of the quotas being for more highly educated Asians coming in–if you look at Japanese, Chinese Americans and Indian Americans, they make more than white people on the dollar, like they are the upper class, but yet there's like this Asian American activism that I don't really jive with at this point. When I teach now, I try to really expand my syllabus to include Pacific Islanders and Filipino stories and obviously South Asian, Southeast Asian, and Near East people. But when you do that, I think, what you're gesturing to is that it almost becomes too much to hold, like what is an Asian American? 

It's because even now, when I picture an Asian American in my head, it looks like a Chinese person, like if I close my eyes, you know, like a Han Chinese person, it doesn't look like someone from Sri Lanka. And that's a huge problem. And even all the representation that these people have been fighting for for the last few years, it's still a certain kind of representation. It's East Asian folks. It's not like what Ali Wong calls like jungle agents, like my people. So, yeah, I think as a teacher, it's still a field, and so I'll still talk to it, but I think to disaggregate the data to understand. Looking at it from a class and economic level is really important, and if all these liberal ethnic studies people like myself want to raise marginalized voices, we should probably teach less Japanese and Chinese history and start teaching more of these other Asian Americans like Marshall Island refugees or people who are from living in generations of like hyper ghettos from Cambodian diasporas and stuff like that. People actually need help. Everyone's different, but there are huge swaths of the “Asian American community” who do. 

So I guess from the teacher level or the vague political level, I still think Asian American is an interesting term that just needs to be diversified and represented better and more accurately to the population of the United States. But, as for myself, you nailed it on the head, I leave it. I'm not an Asian American anymore, maybe Vietnamese American at this point, but really I'm like a half-Vietnamese, half-Italian guy who grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, in the nineties and I play music. That's my identifiers. And I think I'm okay letting go of the term Asian American, because I went through that whole process of studying it for like over a decade of my life and seeing how I really feel about it, understanding and really being grateful for those East Asian activists in the seventies who came up through Berkeley and San Francisco State and who made this a field in their own image, like my advisor, Bob Lee is one of those people. But I also have my qualms that I don't like closing my eyes and thinking of an Asian American and seeing a Chinese face and that's it, right? And not seeing a Sri Lankan face or a Nepalese face or whatever. And also, whatever field you teach is defined by your teaching, at least to your class. And so, I don't know, that's also where Buddhism comes in. It's like, I have my little garden to tend. If I have some students, I will tend to that garden in my own way. And we might go over some of the foundational historic literature, but I also might change the foundation a little bit too. Our mutual friend, Diego–he wrote this incredible book that very much complicates the origins of Asian Americans and makes it a much more hemispheric Filipino-based history project that goes back 200 years before the Chinese miners that we usually start with. I might start there, it's okay to change the foundations as we get new information. So I guess on the teacher level, I'm happy to teach Asian American studies course if I ever teach again. I won't have a problem with the nomenclature, but on a personal level, as a Buddhist, how do you belong? You can't belong to a race–I find that very difficult, right? If you're not supposed to have like a self and you're supposed to be part of this larger, I don't know, pool of energy or Star Wars force thing or whatever we're supposed to believe in or think. I find race, nationalism, and the nation-state that kind of stuff very difficult to wrap my head around and intellectualize.

So, again, multiple truths, but you were dead on. I've kind of left that behind. 

Chanhee: Well, thank you so much. This has been really rich and inspiring conversation. And personally it was really liberating, especially thinking about the term Asian American in relation to my own identification process. But at the same time, it was fun to talk about how we can teach, and how we can expand and change the field. So, thank you so much, for your time and sharing your amazing music and wisdom. 

Julian: Thanks. Yeah. I don't know how much wisdom, but, um, good luck to your editor trying to find some good coherent statements in here, but it's absolutely a pleasure to meet you to talk to you. To very recent grad students to current grad students, good luck–have as much fun as possible while you're still funded and doing this thing.