Ghost Echoes Pt. 1 : No-No Boy x Japanese Breakfast
Julian Saporiti
May is Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, and to honor that, EarthQuaker Devices artist, blogger and scholar Julian Saporiti is writing a four-part series called Ghost Echoes that revolves around the rich and deep subject of ethnomusicology. Saporiti, who is half-Vietnamese, is debuting new music from his songwriting and multimedia project, No-No Boy, and an interview with Julian and a live home session (featuring EQD’s Afterneath, Rainbow Machine and Time Shadows) inspired by the project is available on KEXP’s YouTube page. The latest No-No Boy album, 1975 [Smithsonian Folkways], is named for the year that Saigon fell. It finds Saporiti and his calm, soothing tenor musically delving into his own family history on songs about the Asian diaspora mixing his eclectic folk-based but genre-hopping sound with recordings of people telling their own stories. Saporiti and Smithsonian Folkways have also produced a documentary on the recording of 1975 (which also features the Ghost Echo and Space Spiral.) Dig it right HERE.
“The overall theme of Ghost Echoes highlights how for those of us from marginalized communities, we have to do more work to find connection and kinship to the past,” says Saporiti. “We have to dig a little deeper.”
Hapa Book Club: In Praise of Hanboks and Stratocasters
A conversation: No-No Boy x Japanese Breakfast + an Asian American Playlist / Reader
Michelle Zauner will never know how much seeing her play electric guitar dressed in a traditional Korean hanbok sitting on top of an 18-wheeler meant to me.
If you’re not familiar with Zauner, she is a writer. A very good one. She recently released a memoir called Crying in H Mart which examines her mixed and scratched identity through food, family, grief and loss. The New York Times recently published an article on the cultural significance of H Mart, worth a read. If you clicked on this article to learn more about the “Asian American experience,” food, family, grief and loss are good places to start.
Zauner also makes lovely indie dream pop records as Japanese Breakfast. Back in December 2016, I had the pleasure of interviewing her for my dissertation. While I wouldn’t expect her to remember this conversation now that she’s “Jimmy Fallon Big!,” it certainly had a big impact on me and my band No-No Boy.
For about a decade, I’ve been researching a rich but largely ignored history of Asian American popular musicians, looking at Filipino cruise ship bands, Chinese nightclub acts, SE Asian psych rock groups, and Japanese American Internment swing bands. It’s an attempt to try and recover a history and a lineage erased.
Growing up as a slanty-eyed rock obsessed kid, I never heard myself or my experiences in my record collection. Sure, some of my idols like Eddie Van Halen (Indonesian), Karen O. (Korean), or James Iha (Japanese) happened to have Asian lineage, but American culture was still a couple decades away from promoting “diversity and inclusion” as a good marketing strategy. From my point of view, it was almost like those Asian American artists were cool despite being Asian. That was a really fucked up way to see the world, but as a half-white, half-Vietnamese kid growing up in Tennessee, subject to bullying and steady low-grade racial trauma, I just wanted to keep my head down and ignore anything Asian.
The year I started high school, 1999, the indie rock archetype was Stephen Malkmus. If you’re not familiar, imagine the whitest man you’ve ever seen, then go listen to Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain and thank me later. Even after I became a “professional” musician in the mid 2000s, I could never shake the feeling that I didn’t belong. That by virtue of my face and brown skin, I wasn’t authentic to the scene.
Cut to November 2016. I was walking home from the bus stop and saw a poster reading “Japanese Breakfast” outside the Columbus Theater in Providence where I was living at the time. I was intrigued by the name alone. This was either going to be some appropriative, colonial, fetishizing indie rock of which there is a longstanding tradition (think Weezer’s Pinkerton, my favorite high school album and still in my top 20 or Beirut, maybe my favorite indie band) or perhaps, times had changed and here was a young musician proud to own their Asian-ness, inserting their identity as strength within their art.
When you’re looking to understand a history, a culture, or yourself, it’s productive to start with the complications. Japanese Breakfast, like any Asian American musician or person, is a wonderfully complicated artist. As a teacher and fan, I share excerpts from our 2016 conversations for two reasons: first, it catches a generous and ascending talent digging deep and offering some important and well articulated perspectives important to Asian American discourse, and second, you should buy Michelle’s book.
Columbus Theater, Low Anthem Studio, December 17th, 2016
Michelle Zauner: I was in another touring band called Little Big League for three to four years and I never had any Asian American kids come up to me and thank me for doing what I do or reach out to me online. I think part of that was the genre of music I was a part of was super white. We got really weirdly looped into this emo scene which is a very white community.
I really welcome Asian American kids who come up to me after shows and thank me for representing them in some way…in the same breath, it is kind of a double edged sword because I don’t know how much of my music is influenced by my Asian-ness. I think that it was part of my identity that I rejected for a really long time and after my mother passed away, it became a really integral part of my identity and I felt like I was reaching out to it so much more than I ever had. Do I incorporate traditional Asian American instruments into my music? Absolutely not. Do I have any Korean language or specific references to my Asian American identity? I don’t think so - little things here or there, but it’s definitely not at the forefront.
Julian Saporiti: There’s not a larger Asian American political drive behind the music?
MZ: No, I don’t think so…I started getting asked that question a lot in interviews and it’s sort of like being a woman in music; at a certain point, you just get really exhausted that people are even asking you this question. It’s OK to ask me about how does gender influence your music if I felt like men were getting asked that question too, cause I think that I write largely about personal relationships and a lot of the time that has to do with people’s identity and sometimes that has to do with gender and the way that we interact with the world. I think that men do that too and it’s surprising that they aren’t asked the same kind of questions. So, in the same breath, it’s like, I appreciate you have an interest in my heritage and you’re asking me these questions, but I know if I was white, you’d never ask me about my English or Irish heritage and how that influences my music. It’s an easy question to just say, “No.”
JS: I’m interested in this racial “rejection” or masking, because I went through a very similar thing growing up. I’m from Nashville. Dad’s white. Mom’s from Saigon. I knew no Asian kids except for Lily whose mom ran the Asian grocery store my mom shopped at. Whiteness, my Asian-ness; these weren’t things I was able to comprehend. I didn’t go to a liberal arts school. Ethnic studies was not a thing for me. It’s really only been the last five, six years for me to take apart a lot of this stuff. So I’m curious, because you said the word “rejection.” That’s a word I highly identify with, especially with being a halfsie growing up in a more rural southern place.
MZ: Totally. I grew up in Eugene, OR and the population is 98% white. I think one thing I really desired was this feeling of being a neutral body. There’s a couple things. One was, I think that when you’re young, anything that feels different about you is a scab and it’s such a huge source of shame because you want so badly to fit in with everyone and that desire is at its peak in adolescence. I never just felt neutral. If someone was attracted to me, I had to have this suspicion that it was because I was Asian and do they have yellow fever and if they weren’t [attracted to me] is it because I’m Asian. You know what I mean?
JS: (chuckling) Yeah, I know. And the attraction thing is fascinating because I’ve only ever dated white women.
MZ: Yeah. I’ve only dated white men, as well. There’s this neurosis that exists in you when you feel different from everyone. Especially to be half Asian or to be half any race, there’s this constant feeling of not belonging anywhere. If I go to Korea, everyone knows that I’m not full Korean. If I’m here, everyone just thinks I am an Asian person. So, it’s hard to feel like you belong anywhere and I think I was just so angry at that and I hate that I never had any Asian friends and if anything, I felt that maybe I did certain things to go out of my way to reject that part of my identity and to have people associate me with someone who is not Asian. You know what I mean?
I think one thing that’s really interesting - I don’t think too deeply about this - I think that I started being really interested in getting tattoos because instead of just being that Asian girl at the party, it’s like I had this control over what I looked like and my body, to be like, “Oh, she’s the person with the tattoos.” I had the opportunity to be that person instead of just the Asian girl, whatever. And I think there are a lot of Asian people that have become interested in this because it’s something that’s not usually associated with Asian bodies in a way. I mean historically with Japanese tattooing and all that, but…
JS: Yeah, you’re not in the Yakuza.
MZ: Yeah, yeah, yeah! Or this docile or goody-goody personality/stereotype, I think I really rejected and maybe am a louder, more domineering person because of it.
Whenever I have to write an “Asian American Studies” syllabus, the video for “Everybody Wants To Love You” always makes it. Dressed in her mother’s hanbok, we observe an artist rescuing tradition while disrupting stereotype after stereotype. It elevates both Asian American and popular music discourses by helping to break long standing Asian female tropes of the former and elevating the possibilities of who should belong to the latter.
To define “Asian American” is an impossible task. It’s too reductive and broad of a category and privileges the experiences and viewpoints of mostly wealthier folks of East Asian descent.“Asian Pacific Islanders” span a home region which definitionally includes Iran, Mongolia, Sri Lanka and Hawaii. This demographic is comprised of distinct waves of geographically, spiritually, and economically diverse immigrants and refugees who were often enemies across the Pacific sometimes with no cultural commonalities. Isolated from the college educated west coast Asian Americans (mostly Japanese and Chinese) who made up the term itself in the 70s, I’ve never felt particularly “Asian American.” But in Michelle, I saw myself. The more rural, white-raised kid trying to scrub off or cover up her yellow. This was my life, too. And so, speaking with her, much like my research dredging up all of those Asian ghost bands from the archives, felt like some kind of abstract artistic kinship.
JS: Can I ask you about the video where you’re dressed up in Korean garb, drinking, riding a motorcycle, and ripping a solo on that big rig?
MZ: When I do these interviews with people and they ask me about my heritage, that’s part of how I feel tokenized or whatever, so I kind of wanted to juxtapose that with this video. It was like a commentary for a couple of reasons. I think that one, my band name is very sensitive, because it’s misleading. Which I thought was funny when I came up with it. It’s kind of irritating to have to explain and I’m very, very vocal about being half-Korean, but I do understand that there are people who can interpret it in a different way and be offended. I’ve had a half-Japanese girl be very upset and kind of come at me about it.
JS: I think given the respective histories [between Korea and Japan]…
MZ: Exactly! I know! Exactly! I think that, obviously, cultural appropriation is a really hot topic and I think that it is problematic when it’s a person in a position of power that is doing the cultural appropriation. Historically, I don’t feel like that’s what I am a part of, because my grandmother was a child during the Japanese occupation and was forced to forget her language and given a Japanese name and there’s a really painful history there.
JS: That’s fucked up.
MZ: Yeah, and even as a child, the Koreans hate the Japanese, still.
JS: Yeah, my mom hates the Japanese. I think everyone…
MZ: Everyone in Asia hates the Japanese! (laughs)
JS: They all hate each other. It’s just so funny when you come to America and there’s this pan-Asian identity, right, we’re ‘Asian American.’ Especially if white people see us they think we’re probably brother and sister.
MZ: Mhmm, mhmm, mhmm.
JS: Even though we’re from very many miles apart, or our mothers are. I find that interesting. But yeah, the band name, the video…
MZ: I made the video after this girl reached out to me, very upset. I exchanged a few emails with her. It was really hurtful and scary because I am really sensitive to that and I really value that culture of calling people out and being PC because I think that it really opened up a space for me to be able to do what I do in a way that I never have been able to do before. Because I do think it’s really important to people now that we listen to a variety of marginalized voices and in a way, maybe that helped carve a space for an artist like me. Because when I was growing up, I didn’t feel like I ever saw that. So I feel like I made that because I never tried to mislead anyone and I always tried to be very vocal about my heritage. If anything, it’s more embarrassing for me as a Korean woman because it worried me that [the band name] upsets Korean people. That I’m being insensitive to our history.
You know how it is. You grow up your whole life getting asked, “What are you?” It feels very private and it feels like a source of power to not reveal it and I think that I liked “Japanese Breakfast” because that was kind of playful and that kind of winked that I had some kind of east Asian identity without revealing like, this is my race.
JS: You mention attraction, the body, the docile interpretation of Asian female bodies, and the video counters that in a lot of ways. Is that intentional?
MZ: Absolutely, yeah. And it’s also just part of who I am. I have this heritage and it’s what I look like and sometimes I feel like it’s inflated but those are things I would do on a Saturday night as a young adult. I go to the bar. I’m riding on the back of my friend's motorcycle. That’s my local bar that I go to all the time. So I thought there was humor in that juxtaposition. And that dress is meaningful for me because my mom wore that to my wedding. So, yeah, I felt like it was a really meaningful video and it was definitely meant to represent something that isn’t seen.
JS: And I guess that’s the larger thing, the scene, right? Because I noticed that in watching your videos, who I assume are friends of yours who populate that. It’s a very white space and until recently, that’s been my world too. I do a lot of work in the Asian American community, but as a songwriter, only in the last two years has my body become an Asian body in my songs. Which is really weird. When I was putting out records, the protagonist was always like me, but a whiter me.
MZ: I totally feel the same way. With creative writing, absolutely. When I was in college and writing, I felt like I could never have a narrative with someone like me because then the whole character would have to have this back story about how their Asian American identity influenced their life and if I don’t explain that there would have to be this note in the margin [from a professor], “Tell us more about this identity,” or whatever. Whereas you could just… not mention race at all and you would assume it’s a white person. I felt like I really wanted to write from these white male voices, and looking back, obviously, it’s because those were the books I was reading. They’re from white male perspectives because they were written by white men. So, it makes sense that I would think that’s what professional writing or great fiction is, having a character like that. If I could [write like a white man] as an Asian American woman, then I must have accomplished something really great because I’m able to transform myself into this person. I don’t have to write about myself, you know? And now, it’s really great. I wrote this record out of necessity to just express myself and what I was going through.
JS: You see yourself in there? You’re in there?
MZ: Yeah, I think so. Now that I’ve finished my second record [Soft Sounds From Another Planet], I can shift gears. I’ve been reached out to by a few literary agents so I’m gonna expand that essay into a memoir and the working title is Crying in H-Mart. Because I feel like H-Mart is this mecca for Asian Americans where, a lot of the time, they’re placed out of the way, or those neighborhoods are on the outskirts of an urban city. I feel like every time I go to an H-Mart, I have to travel half an hour to get to this place where I feel like all of a sudden, I’m in another country. And it’s such an emotional space for me because I started cooking after my mom passed away and it’s so hard for me sometimes. As a young kid I’m sure there was some Asian market, or the Chinese place, or whatever, that you would go to as a kid.
JS: That was huge for me. I remember climbing on the rice bags.
MZ: Yeah, totally! So, for me, I remember it was Sunrise Asian Market. My mom took me there. So, it’s a very nostalgic place that I feel like any Asian American kid, or many, grew up going to. It’s very much a pilgrimage to the place. Then I’m inevitably going to remember this rice, because this is the brand that mom got. I wish I could call my mom to remember what kind of sesame oil we got. I don’t know if you’ve had patbingsu before, you know every Asian culture has a shaved ice thing. Seeing the red bean you put on the shaved ice, in the aisle on sale in the summer. I was just like, “Fuck, I have to make this.” I bought everything in order to recreate this really important memory from my childhood. I bought a shaved ice machine that day, because I was like, I have to do it! So it’s such a special place and it’s also really hard to see young Asian girls with their mothers or three generations of grandma, mom and child shopping for whatever dinner they’re going to make or eating in the food court together. It’s so beautiful to me. So I think that’s such a special place and probably the start of what I’m going to write.
Shortly after interviewing Zauner, I went home to Nashville over Christmas break. I was sitting in the dining room transcribing interviews. My mom was cooking Vietnamese food in the kitchen - lemongrass and fish sauce. The smells of home. Headphones on, I was playing back these oral histories of people who had escaped wars and lived through internment camps, and sandwiched in there was my conversation with Zauner. As I revisited our conversation, I found it comforting. One of my kind, I thought. Two half Asian kids who grew up in indie rock each with overlapping collections of identity issues. It’s an interesting document of hiding, rejection, and recovery. I started plucking at my guitar. I kept the dialogue playing and wrote it into a song. Then, I did this with the next interview, and the next. Over a chả giò lunch, I asked my mom more about our family. Six songs came from that conversation.
It’s May 2021, and some of these songs have started popping up on the same radio playlists as the new Japanese Breakfast single, which is funny since this is really just an overblown school project.
Thanks to Michelle, for the chat and the reflection.
In anticipation of publishing our 2016 conversation, I got back in touch with Michelle just to check in and see if her views had changed on anything in the intervening years. Not really. She’s pretty much still the same talkative, honest, complicated and inspiring person I met back in 2016, still a little uncomfortable at being shoehorned into the “Asian American Artist” role and despite having just written a New York Times Bestseller, surprisingly insecure about the future of her writing. All to say, she is refreshingly human, and again, you should buy her book.
Zoom Call, Brooklyn/Portland, May 21st, 2021
JS: In terms of how you view yourself as an “Asian American,” you were a little prickly about it when we last spoke. I am too, because you get that question a lot, especially from white journalists, right? Do you sit better with that term now since you’ve done so much work and excavation with your writing or is it still reductive bullshit?
MZ: I think I still probably get prickly about it, mostly because it’s so broad. I was more prickly about it before because I didn’t feel like I was representing anything. Especially with music, I was never talking about an Asian American experience, I was talking about my experience and I was hesitant to answer questions like that, but now that I’ve written this book which touches on mixed race identity and Korean culture, I kind of have it coming more. It’s my own fault. Part of the reason I get prickly about it is there’s always this feeling that my accomplishments aren’t based on merit, they’re all rooted in identity politics and filling a diversity slot.
JS: Do you feel just as “in-between” and “mixed” as ever?
MZ: I’ve actually had a lot of conversations with people who have mixed race kids or mixed race people who have this really wholesome idea that I’m not “half and half”, I’m full Korean and full American. That doesn’t resonate with me at all. I feel that my identity is really rooted in being half in / half out of both places and I feel like this cultural vagabond of sorts. This feeling of never belonging anywhere has really driven me to be a creative person and that’s what I try to get at in my book. I’ve never felt more of a sense of belonging than I do in the space that I’ve made for myself.
JS: You mentioned when we last spoke that if you could write like Raymond Carver, if you could write like a white man and write white characters, you would show mastery of the form. How do you feel about that now?
MZ: I think that’s what’s super freeing about music, that you don’t have time to say, “This is a character, they look like this.” It’s just someone feeling some way and you don’t necessarily know what they look like, who they are or where they came from.
I’ve been asked recently if I was going to do more writing and if I’d considered fiction. There’s this pressure that if I wrote fiction and my characters weren’t Asian, would people think that I’m whitewashing my characters, or I’m missing this opportunity to create more representation? I almost can’t write fiction because there’s too much pressure to represent something.
JS: Do you want to write fiction?
MZ: I have some desire to write fiction but there’s almost too much of a burden. Am I only allowed to write Asian American characters?
JS: No, you’re not.
MZ: (laughs) It’s not like I have to, but there is an expectation. You know all the interviews you’re going to be doing will be “Why aren’t all the characters Asian American?”
JS: People don’t realize if you’re on the radio or in magazines, you can still be an insecure person. You mean a lot to so many people. It’s so funny, you can talk to the source of [other people’s] inspiration and find we’re still so rife with insecurity and expectations hoisted upon us by strangers that shape our art. I’m interested to see what you do [next] and I hope you do take some of the world-beating rock star that other people view you as and write whatever the fuck you want to write. You don’t have to listen to me, but be fearless in whatever you write next. Be fearless, because you’ve meant a lot to me, you’ve meant a lot to my students and I appreciate you.
MZ: That’s so sweet to hear. Enjoy your weekend, Julian. Bye!
Reader, if you’ve hung in this long and you’re thinking, hey, “These Asian people sound interesting and my liberal musical diversity scorecard is actually a little light,” well friend, get ready to shout “BINGO!” Here are some good essays and songs to sit with and consider.
“Your Best American Girl” - Mitski
“Temple” - Thao & The Get Down Stay Down
“From The Back Of A Cab” - Rostam
“Wild, Wild East” - LuLing Osofsky
“Fight To Make It Up” - Takénobu
“Lord Knows Best” - Dirty Beaches
“Wild, Wild East” - Sunny Jain
“Cowboys and East Indians” - Nina McConingley
“Diving Woman” - Japanese Breakfast
Julian Saporiti a.k.a No-No Boy photo by Diego Luis. Michelle Zauner a.k.a Japanese Breakfast photo by Peter Ash Lee.
Julian Saporiti is a Vietnamese American songwriter and scholar born in Nashville, Tennessee. His work "No-No Boy" has transformed his doctoral research on Asian American history into concerts, albums and films which have reached a broad and diverse public audience. His latest album "1975" released through Smithsonian Folkways has been hailed by NPR as "an act of revisionist subversion" and American Songwriter called it "insanely listenable and gorgeous." By using art to dive into highly divisive issues such as race, refugees and immigration, Saporiti aims to allow audience members to sit complication as music and visuals open doorways into difficult histories. Saporiti currently lives in Portland, Oregon. He holds degrees from Berklee College of Music, University of Wyoming and Brown University.
