As a young Chinese American kid growing up in suburban California in the 1980’s through the 1990’s, one of the earliest ways I felt the orientalist gaze was through song. There was the rhyming song with accompanying hand gestures: “Chinese (pull the outside corners of your eyes down), Japanese (pull the outside corners of your eyes upwards), dirty knees (point down to your knees, maybe this was a reference to the proliferation of early 20th century laborers), look at these (lift your shirt up to show your nipples)!” I repeated this once at home to my Chinese American parents after Kindergarten one day. I was made to understand that this was not a positive song to repeat.
As I grew up, there were other seemingly lowkey, innocuous markers of difference casually tossed around. The standard things kids do like immitating the sounds of Chinese language, yelling “ewwwww you eat that?” The send the sublte message that the Chinese things about you that can be hidden, should. After all, even Bugs Bunny wasn’t on my side. When I went to graduate school, I came to learn about the graphic novel “American Born Chinese” by Gene Luen Yang who captured a lot of these feelings in a way that’s so easy to understand. Captured it in characters like cousin Chin-Kee, depicted above, a specter that looms over Asian American identities.
What has been dubbed as the “Oriental Riff” serves is a ubiquitous tune that serves as a dog whistle for those jokes, for that ridicule, in about four seconds. Maybe, or maybe not followed by a gong. The Riff, the cartoons, the songs, the sometimes subtle bullying, all contribute toward Edward Said’s concept of “Orientalism”. One of the key devices of indoctrinating the Western idea of self and normalcy, against the orientalist backdrop of the other - on one spectrum wise, mystical and the other primal, evil and perverse.
Until now, I think the totality of the orientalist gaze had really created an over correction, where my Chinese identity mostly lived at home with my family, and maybe around the Lunar New Year. Finding something to appreciate in Sun Ra’s “China Gate” or Pharoah Sanders’ “Japan” and more recently Onra’s Chinoiseries without hearing something between the Oriental Riff and “Ching chong ching chong ching chong” was tough, no matter the intention or connection to the music. Yet I also never had a problem celebrating Wu-Tang’s “Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)”.
In my recent explorations of Avant Garde/Free Jazz and Improvised Music in my record collecting, I had gotten to learn about the music of saxophonist Francis Wong, a Chinese American saxophonist and friend of my long time musician friend and mentor PC Muñoz (who both share the stage with David Boyce as Red Fast Double Luck with Saxophonist David Boyce). Francis’ music, especially his albums Ming and Great Wall I think really helped give me confidence I too could shed the spectre of the Oriental Riff and really create music that is authentically Chinese American.
In my album ALL HAIL THE MONKEY KING, I drew upon one of the figures of Chinese mythology that has really resonated with me over the years, that of Sun Wukong, the Monkey King. Born in the year of the Monkey, 1980, the figure of the monkey has always appealed to me. To be young, to be free, to swing from trees as a child. Literally. More recently I found myself seeking to really understand who I am, new Adult Autistic Dx, impending divorce, escaping a toxic work environment and really trying to figure out what’s next in my life. I really had to confront myself and so much of that is tied into family patterns and history, but also the ongoing history of global migration under capitalism, and the desire to reclaim what is mine.
The monkey king is bold, he knew he was more than what the world had prescribed him to be. An audacious monkey who dared to dream, he left his community to see what he could be, he was powerful, clever and bold. He dared to defy the heavens and demand a seat at the table. When the Jade Emperor sought to placate him as a heavenly “stable boy” he continued to demand his place. In literature he is the trickster, who dares to push boundaries often through mischief, a google search summarized it as: an archetype that uses cunning, deception, and wit to challenge norms, subvert authority, and disrupt the established order, often serving as both a hero and a fool. Unlike many other tricksters however, he is not a catalyst for another’s growth, though he may point out the flaws in the order of any given society, the growth of the course of the Journey to the West story arc, is his own. The monkey king allows me to be audacious, to be bold, to lean into my own discomfort that maybe is actually the discomfort of others. ALL HAIL THE MONKEY KING is my journey and my growth.