Asian Americans can rap, too.

Asian Americans can rap, too.

BY HELEN FANG

Staff Blogger
Monday, February 25, 2013

I wandered into LC, jacket thrown on, beanie to cover up my just-rolled-out-of-bed hair, late as usual on a lazy Saturday morning. My friend was running the Asian American High School Leadership Conference at Yale, but I had missed the deadline to volunteer. I had emailed her on a whim a few weeks earlier, asking if I could still help out even though the deadline has passed. She responded immediately, saying I just needed to let her know what topic I wanted to present to the high school students, and it would need to be about an hour long.

I had not actually thought through what I wanted to talk about, just that it sounded like a cool way to connect with an Asian-American community that I had never really felt a part of, not at home, and not at Yale. But now, having to come up with a specific topic, I drew a blank. Did I have something meaningful to tell them about college life as an Asian-American, about what happened after the applications, about where I fit in now? What did I even want to present on? What could I even present on? Was I even a part of this community? I had gone to maybe one AACC event ever, freshman year, and I couldn’t answer. And so I never replied to her email.

My friend contacted me again the day of the conference telling me that I should still drop by to see Jason Chu, an Asian-American hip-hop artist, do a Q&A session in the afternoon.

And so I found myself in LC fifteen minutes late, watching all the heads turn momentarily in my direction and then snap back towards the guy perched casually on the edge of a table. A boy sitting next to the door asked if I wanted to put my name in for a lottery group dinner, and I shrugged my shoulders and scrawled down my name.

Jason majored in philosophy while he was a student at Yale, and had spent the past two years in Beijing, sharing his music with the people there. He talked about his experiences there, and about rap in general, how African-Americans use rap to tell their narratives and capture their culture, and how by nature, he had to change that rap style to connect with his non-traditional audience: Asian-Americans. To reach us, he needed to be less referential with his lyrics, more direct so his story would resonate within the community.

He talked about the practicalities of being a rapper, of how we should do what we loved because as Yale graduates, we had opportunities to pursue our dreams in ways other people might not be able to, ways to reach out and impact so many. He talked about going into the ministry or teaching since he wouldn’t be a performer forever, and about how down the road we still have so many different opportunities available to us. He asked us to think about what we would do if money were not an issue and again emphasized that everything he was doing was because of his love for music and the Asian-American community. Rap creates community.

I won the lottery for the group dinner, but my knowledge of rap consisted of the songs my friends sometimes blasted on long car rides and I had never heard of him before his Q&A. Thankfully, quick Google search it turned up a few of his YouTube videos. The one that caught my eye was City of the North, a rap about his time in Beijing (watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watchv=CkZ4dxhiPUs&feature=player_embedded). Having just come off a summer there, it was strange seeing so much of my experience encapsulated in one of his music videos. At dinner, over Korean-style seaweed and Peking duck, we talked about Asian-American representation in the media, and how he wanted to change that and the only way to do so was by creating this coherent Asian-American community. For me, coming from a high school where in my graduating class of 900 there were only ten Asians, coming from a family where we spoke exclusively English at home, but also one where I went to Chinese school every Sunday and my entire extended family still lived in China, my place in this “community” was something I had struggled with my entire life. But more on this in my next post!