Aiden's A-Pop Blog

Taking the lenses that this class has given me and using them to examine the world around me has lead me to adopt some new working philosophies. I have come to believe that no one is the product of any one culture and that since every culture seems to draw from other cultures I think it’s safe to say that we all possess large amounts of cultural hybridity; though some more than others. Some might debate this hypothesis with me but since culture is so messy and hard to define, almost to the point of being subjective, I doubt that a debate could produce anything more conclusive.

Culture could be as broad as an entire nation’s norms or as minuscule as the way a husband and wife interact with each other from day to day.  If this is true then I, as the son of my mother and father and recipient of the cultural legacies of both their families, am multi-cultural from childhood. If I am a member of a little-league soccer team and after Monday night practice I go to play Dungeons and Dragons with my friends then I am being shaped by the two group’s different and sometimes conflicting, perspectives and norms.

In my own life music has been my primary vehicle for accessing other cultures. I grew up playing metal and punk rock but everything changed for me when a group of black and Latino musicians took me under their wing and taught me a southern style of playing traditional gospel music. They turned me on to a lot of new music and helped me learn how to “break” the rules of my conventional style in order to give way to something that flowed and made people want to dance. Today my way of interpreting chords and music has their DNA that they passed down to me infused in every note. I never would have become the musician I am today without this cultural crosscurrent that I was privileged to take part in.

Culture, how humans choose to interact with the world, the style and character that each of us brings to the table, is one of the best parts of being alive. I’m grateful for the further awareness of other cultures that taking this class has brought me and I intend to continue being a responsible and astute observer of culture for the rest of my life.

I started this quarter assuming that I would write about music as my “home” in our final essay; it seemed so logical considering the huge role that it’s played in my life and the way it can flavor any of life’s myriad seasons and circumstances, helping me to catalog my experiences. I switched to writing about father figures because it felt like something I could dive into deeper in my rhetoric rather than having to rely solely on writing about something (music) that had to be listened to in order to be understood. Since then I’ve been realizing that even though my father is a huge part of what home is to me, home is not so simply described.

Home is something that for me changes with the passing years and what feels comfortable, safe, and familiar in this season might not in the next; I can only imagine what someone who’s been displaced from their geographical home goes through in that respect. The texts that we’ve been analyzing over the course of this quarter almost all deal with characters that have been displaced from their countries and homes and who struggle with defining themselves because their origins are complicated and hard to sum up in any way that is neat and tidy. Home is a hard topic to write about for this very reason, because it is so fluid and nostalgia leaves such a different taste in each of our mouths.

All this being said I think that I made the right decision sticking with family for my topic because even if we aren’t all connected with our fathers almost all of us have a family whether biological or out of close ties that are beyond blood. Home can be our connections to people as well as a physical place, I think that most of us would say that we feel more at home with our closest friends than with some of our own blood relatives. Many of the characters in our texts also struggle with this aspect of home as well, being unable to relate to the people in the new country that they’ve arrived in because they share no common history and having no close friends or family in their new environment.  Reading their stories just makes me more grateful for the deep roots that I have and the relationships that give me balance no matter how removed I become from my starting place.

The most powerful discovery that I made last week regarding my final project was that my “home” and it’s relationship to Asian-American culture wasn’t something that I had to go out and find, it was something that already existed that I just had to take the time to observe. There was no need for me to go and synthesize random bits of APIA culture in order to try and make some coherent whole; my life has already been affected by these cross-currents and I just had to approach the project from a new perspective in order to see them.

For example: my father and I often bond over martial arts movies (him being a student of the martial arts himself). I usually don’t even think of these movies and shows as a part of a foreign culture, and perhaps that is the essence of cross-currents: they have become my own culture as well. When I took a step back I realized that I was surrounded by Asian and Asian-American influence from the shows and movies I watched, the music I listened to, and the books I read.

The Hayao Miyazaki films from Studio Ghibli like “Spirited Away,” “Howl’s Moving Castle,” and “Ponyo” are a huge part of my family and all of us still watch them today. My brother and I have very little in common and often have a hard time connecting because of it but Studio Ghibli films were something that we could always agree upon and it brought us closer together without us ever even considering that we were taking part in a cross-current. One of my current best friends and I (who is also not Asian-American) bonded over the anime show Naruto when we were fourteen. We began trading the books back and forth and years later we are still best friends.

I already find myself becoming more aware of my cultural surroundings in my daily life because of the texts that I am being exposed to this quarter, my hope is that this new perspective will enable me to connect more easily with people from other, not-so-different, cultures and to build stronger friendships because of it.

“Absent Fathers, Lost Sons: The Search for Masculine Identity” is a book I’m using as a source to bolster my final essay. A big part of my paper is about how fathers help to give us our identity and set the tone for our lives by guiding us in our early experiences. The author Guy Corneau asserts that the last few generations may have had a hard time connecting with their fathers because the fathers were so busy surviving for most of their lives that they never developed much emotional intelligence or the ability to be emotionally vulnerable. The newer generations growing up with more safety and security now rise in Abraham Maslow’s famed “Hierarchy of Needs” to needing love, belonging, self-esteem; things the last generation was arguably not paying as much attention to.

Many people that I know have a hard time connecting with their fathers, usually for similar reasons. As of right now I’m not sure how quantifiable this theory is, but I’m hoping that this book can provide me with some answers. The book presents an interesting theory and I haven’t done enough digging in the book to quite get at Corneau’s full thesis, but I found it to be startlingly close to the points I’m trying to touch in my own writing so I think diving deeper will be worth my time.

Dark Blue Suit is not “about” sex. It is much more a memoir of sorts, telling detailed stories from the life of “Buddy” a 2nd generation Filipino-American growing up in the heart of urban Seattle. Buddy lives in a community made up of mostly poor racial minorities, who have a hard time finding jobs often because of their skin color. Opportunity among his friends and relatives for upward mobility is scarce and families are often broken and scattered across the west coast. Buddy himself grows up knowing, even at the age of five, that he has other siblings that he may not be aware of due to his father’s almost openly promiscuous behavior. This seems to be the case for almost all of Buddy’s older male role models; most haven’t formerly “settled down” with a mate but even those that have carry on affairs on a regular basis, and are aware that they have far more biological children than the ones that actually live under their roofs.

Many of Buddy’s contemporaries in the book are told that they have no future other than the military or manual labor by teachers and counselors in the high schools they attend. Often times this bleak counsel is internalized and so the youth of Buddy’s community seek means of escape which often come in the form of fighting, drinking, drugs, and sex. Throughout the book women are discussed in regards to how many of them a man has been capable of sleeping with and how capable they are of using their sex as a means of survival. One of Buddy’s half sisters, Sonia, for example survives on the streets as a hooker and a stripper having been run out of the house by Buddy’s parents decades prior.

The young men obviously look up to their older role models, Buddy’s dad in particular is noted as having a lot of influence among the members of the community, and so in turn the young men begin to follow the pattern set before them by the previous generation. The men hunt women, sleep with as many as possible, and inevitably end up having many children and a string of broken relationships that one could argue damage their sexuality and ability to maintain healthy relationships. In Buddy’s own life we see his inability to hold a steady long-term relationship, he’s had at least two divorces by the end of the book with hints that he’s had several other relationships that ended poorly as well.

It’s unclear what Buddy’s romantic goals are, it almost seems as if he’s just going with the flow, but I’d hazard a guess that because his father modeled a pattern of womanizing to him Buddy has normalized his dad’s promiscuous behavior and it has now crippled him. I wonder if Buddy’s dad had been faithful to his mother how much of the pain in these short stories could have been avoided, I think that it goes to show how big of a role our parents play in our lives and the price of poor leadership.

Forgotten Country paints an incredibly realistic picture of a family dealing with trauma. The most fascinating part of this book to me was the dynamic between the protagonist, Jeehyun, and her father. Jeehyun and her father share an interesting relationship; Jeehyun feels a filial obligation to please her father and earn his love while the father loves her unconditionally but because of his personality and cultural background, sometimes doesn’t show his affection.

So much of the family conflict in this book, which made up the brunt of the plot, I thought could have been avoided if the family simply communicated better. The aunt feels resentment toward the father for not living up to her expectations and towards the mother for not pushing the father to achieve more,  the sisters resent each other because of their own perceptions of what the other has that the other doesn’t, Jeehyun assumes that she isn’t loved by her parents because of their insistence on her being responsible for her sister and their seeming lack of sympathy and so on.

The author also draws our attention to some of the cultural reasons for way the members of the family, especially the elders, act this way towards each other. When the family returns to their homeland of Korea the sisters meet other relatives who act in similar ways: not discussing hard emotional issues even if they are painfully obvious or acting out displays of false or exaggerated concern or passion because that’s what they were taught was expected of someone of their place in a family. After the father dies for example the aunt wails and cries and “makes a scene”, the author makes a note to the reader that the aunt feels that that is what she is expected to do as the sister of the deceased person and a woman. It’s this sort of disingenuous behavior that almost every member of the family exhibits at some point in the book that seems to lead to their lack of vulnerability and, therefore, their inability to express their true feelings to each other.

At the end of the story, Jeehyun realizes that her father’s goal was really just to have the family together and to be happy as a unit, living in their homeland, in the last months of his life. Her father also displays affection for her that she didn’t think existed up until that point. When her father loses the ability to speak, there is a scene where he kisses her face tenderly, Jeehyun notes that she doesn’t think that he’s kissed her since she was seven years old.

It is a heartbreaking thing to think that Jeehyun only realized her father’s true love for her in the last year of his life, having always doubted before because of his detached and formal tendencies. Fathers that struggle with being emotionally intimate is something that I believe many people today face, this story just goes to show that a little can go a long way for a soul starving for affection and affirmation. That being said remember to tell someone that you love them today!

For my final project I touch on how music from popular anime shows influenced the music that I play and listen to. To me there is no better example of a cultural crosscurrent in anime music than “Battlecry” written by Japanese artist “Nujabes” for the 2004 anime “Samurai Champloo” (from director of “Cowboy Bebop” Shinichiro Watanabe). This Japanese language show, set in a fictional feudal japan, nakedly and without apology combines American hiphop music, break-dancing, and samurai to make one of the coolest and most unique shows I’ve ever seen.

I used to listen to anime “openings”(basically theme songs that play at the beginning of anime episodes) on repeat when I was younger, and Battlercry was one of my favorites. The track has a classic hip-hop backtrack and features Japanese-American artist Shing02 rapping in English. This song was one of the first things I thought of when I chose my topic for the paper; a perfect blend of cultures to create something altogether “other” and more special for it!

Hong Kong-made film “Ip Man” is loosely based on the life of Yip Man, Bruce Lee’s legendary martial arts teacher. Although most of the events of the movie are completely fictional, we see Ip Man fulfilling a father role that would fit the ideal archetype in Western culture; heroic, brave, slightly mysterious.

To me this is an example of Asian pop culture paralleling American pop culture in regards to the father figure in media. Ip is humble, strong, quiet, and at first he tries to avoid conflict until his family is threatened, which in turn causes him to unleash a sort of righteous vengeance on the vilified Japanese Army. In American movies the vengeful father is sometimes portrayed as “macho” and tough like John McClane in “Die Hard” but in other movies like “Taken,” directed by Pierre Morel, the father seems more reserved and humble and is just trying to do what’s best for his family.

My own father fits the ladder type, he’s gentle and kind at heart but would defend his family selflessly and ferociously if he had to. This is a way that I grew up relating to this popular Chinese film and others like it, even though I was reading subtitles; I could see my own father in Ip’s decisions and demeanor in a way that transcended race and cultural boundaries.  For me that ability to relate cross-culturally becomes of similar characters and themes is what brings the people of the world closer together.

Home for me will always be the music I listen to.  I’ve been obsessed with music since I was an infant and have been blessed to play with many different bands, worship leaders, and producers over the years. All genres of music to me represent a different side of my personality and a different season of my life. Hip-hop and pop were the first genres that I was exposed to as a kid and the genres I return to when I need new inspiration.

Yoon Mi Rae is an Asian-American artist that I discovered while doing research for this course. Yoon was born in Texas to Korean-American parents but moved back to Korea before entering high school. She is now a popular rapper/singer in Korea.

As soon as I heard Yoon’s music I was reminded of one of my favorite American artists: Lauryn Hill. Both Hill and Rae’s art employ singing and rap, classic R&B piano tracks and drum machines. It’s strange to me that two artists can sound so similar but one is familiar to me and the other seems foreign just based on what language the lyrics are written in.