Education: Challenges & Perspectives – Workshop 5A: Contributions of the Arts Curriculum to General Education

Michi Itami:

So we don’t lose time here, I’m just a presider, and it’s called “Contribution of the Arts Curriculum to General Education.” Our first panelist is Amy Chin. She’s executive director of the New York Chinese Cultural Center and Chinese Folk Dance Company.

Amy Chin:

Hi, I don’t know how many of you are familiar with my organization and what our work is so I’ll just do a brief introduction. The Chinese Cultural Center has been in New York City for 30 years, we’re celebrating our 30th anniversary year beginning this year. We are a community school of the arts, it started out as a very small community group that was interested in sharing the arts with the community. This is in the 1970’s, and there was not a real identity as being Asian-American at that time, it was just building.

Our center started with five people who were very interested in dance, very interested in Chinese culture, and they started rehearsing for a China National Celebration day. This is, you know, right after Nixon, and all this stuff. It was very grassroots, it started with students, it started with some teachers in the community, and artists. Today we run a school in Chinatown that has over 300 students; they range in age from two to over 70. We teach a range of movement from folk dance to classical dance to tai chi to Peking opera, acrobatics, to Chinese painting, calligraphy, painting, paper cutting, and related art.

An outgrowth of the center is our Chinese Folk Dance Company which is comprised of professional artists who have immigrated to this country. Today the Chinese Folk Dance company tours throughout the country; we do over 500 performances and lecture demonstration programs throughout the country each year. If any of you are going to the Heritage Festival this Sunday, we’ll be performing at 2:00. I was tickled to find out because we’ve been doing a lot of research on the history of the organization’s anniversary, that we are the only group at the Heritage Festival performing that had performed at the original heritage festival. Bob, I think you were there, in 1979? So it’s been a very long journey.

A good portion of the work that we do is educational work. Even though I think we recognize America is a multi-cultural society, when we think of the arts in America most people don’t think of people like us. Or if they do they think of Lucy Liu kicking ass. But it’s great that Lucy Liu exists. They think of Jackie Chan, and these really big stars that are great for our community, but its such a thin layer of the richness of the arts in our community, and there’s so much more substance. I know when I was growing up we didn’t have role models like that. When I was growing up it was more like the “Fu Manchu” stereotypes, you know, we were all very excited by Suzie Wong, but yet again that was also a stereotype.

When I first started dancing I did tap-ballet, and I remember the first time I saw Chinese dancers perform I said “Wow”! It was such a revelation. I was a teenager by that time. When I started taking a class, by no means, I was following a biology destiny but when I started taking Chinese dance movements I said “oh, you know these movements feel so much more comfortable to my body”; these are dance movements that have been developed over time for my body type, and it was a real revelation for me.

We go around the country and when we go around the country we teach workshops in different types of art. It’s kind of interesting because a lot of times we are in situations where there are not a lot of Asians that we’re teaching, so we teach in a general education center. At our community school of the arts in Chinatown we have students that are Chinese; they come from Chinese families they may be new immigrants, they may be first generation, second generation… We also have a large percentage of students that are adopted from China whose adopted families are not Chinese at all.

So the culture and dance becomes this way of connecting to a larger community and the people who come in are connected to each other through the learning of the arts. What’s great about the arts is it’s not verbal unless you’re talking about literary art. For a lot of our immigrant students it’s a great way they can excel without having to speak the language. I think that’s one of the greatest revelations that I have about the arts.

The stereotypes of Asian Americans is that we’re high academic achievers. In an academic setting, success more often than not is defined by high test scores. Yet, a lot of people who work in arts education see arts as the fourth “R”, I know somebody said that. What I and other fellow artists have known for years is the power of the arts to help people learn and to connect to other people. But its only I think within the last 10 years that there has been any sort of research, substantive research that has really borne that out. In the curriculum arts components are generally thought of as extracurricular thrills, they’re not thought off as being essential to learning. They’re delegated to that status of recess and sports. It’s greatly undervalued.

But over the last 10 years this body of research has emerged that has validated the value of the arts in encouraging kids to learn. The arts are a rigorous intellectual discipline; it involves the use of complex symbols to communicate. Music and painting uses non-verbal symbols, poetry uses language in very special ways, much the same way language and math use symbols to communicate. But when we think of education we think of reading and math.

The arts are an essential glue that can tie subject matters together, can help students synthesize different information or cross different disciplines and inspire them to pursue knowledge. Creative activities like acting out a play, it seems like its really fun and its great seeing students upstage like reading lines and doing a play. But it’s creative activities like that, the drama or maybe creating a dance about ocean life that invites students to engage all of their senses. It encourages them to not just read about ocean life, “whales are mammals”, or whatever. It really helps them to engage senses of touch, taste, hearing, and seeing, and to see the world and to represent it in different ways.

Quite honestly kids learn in very different ways; we all learn in very different ways. As educators most of you are you recognize that. I don’t have to tell you that. Some kids learn better by listening, some kids learn better by tinkering with something and taking it apart. When you use arts in the classroom it allows kids to excel at learning in their individual way. Multiple curriculums are based on linguistic and logical math models. But there is a groundbreaking theory by Howard Gardner from Harvard University which, you all probably know, about multiple intelligences. It really shows that the ability to learn draws on very individual ranges of learning styles.

For those in the education realm who are really stuck on scores being the true measure of success, I want to direct people to recent studies that were from the college board that profile SAT and achievement test takers in 1995. It shows that SAT scores for students that study the arts for more than four years were 59 points higher on verbal scores and 44 points higher on math scores than students who had no course work and no experience in the arts. Finally there’s some statistical measure about what the arts can really do.

I think the arts are often vilified by many to be “elitist”. Many say “ewww the arts.” To be fair the arts participation is highly correlated with socioeconomic status. Students who come from homes who are better off, whose parents have a higher degree of education certainly participate in the arts a great deal more than families that are possibly new immigrants or their parents may have a limited degree of education. By the same token you have to think about the value of the arts to learning and actually use it as a tool. Because in many of these studies that are coming out, there is a really good one which I’m going to refer you to, its called Champions of Change: the Impact of the Arts on Learning.

It came out in 1999 it was supported by the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities, and John D. and Kathryn T. McArthur foundation and others. They studied cases around the country and they also used statistical study based on the Department of Education’s database of 25,000 students, a very diverse and wide ranging sample of students. One of the things that came out in that study is that learning through the arts can really help level the playing field. It doesn’t matter if you’re the son or daughter of John D. Rockefeller or, like me, you’re the daughter of a Chinese laundryman from the Bronx, who loved Cantonese opera by the way.

The arts have a really great effect on achievement and when the researchers were able to compare high and low art participants in the lowest socioeconomic segment, they found out that higher arts participation makes a more significant difference to students from low income backgrounds than for high income students. If you’re way down here the arts help you jump much higher than if you were up here, it would help you jump this much higher maybe. It’s called Champions of Change: the Impact of the Arts on Learning, and the author of the study is James Catterall.

Michi Itami:

I was thinking perhaps we could ask Dr. Tam, is it possible that either website addresses or books that we can recommend can be posted after the conference so that everyone can go there and pick up that? To this panel for instance because I think it would be a good idea that for those of us who would rather than having to write everything down post everything. Thank you so much Amy. I apologize for having to be timekeeper. Our next speaker is Michael Griffel who is the Acting Associate Provost of Hunter College, right at CUNY. The topic is beyond the three arts.

Michael Griffel:

When Dr. Tam asked me if I would present something today I said I would like to. I’m certainly not an expert on the issues of the Asians and Asian American population and the education of them. He said how about talking about the role of the arts in general education. I certainly felt that I could do that. The talk turns out to be more a sermon than a lecture, and preaching to the converted may not be necessary. But I do feel very very strongly about what I’m going to say and so I’m very pleased to be able to say it.

Beyond the three “R’s”. Having taught the history of music for the past thirty-three years at Hunter College, I am especially sensitive to the importance of listening carefully to music in order to understand what it is communicating, how it is put together, and what, if anything, makes it a work of art. In the last two years, when I was privileged to teach the “Arts in New York City” course in the CUNY Honors College, I was also able to see first hand how the study of theatre, music, dance, and the visual arts sharpens the ability of students to communicate ideas as well as feelings about life, relationships, society, and their own inner being.

Why, then, when education budgets get cut, are the arts the first to get slashed? Why are they so often considered peripheral, mere luxuries, frivolous, or, in any event, expendable? The answers are complex, but the people who would cut the arts betray a certain ignorance because they underestimate the critical importance of the arts in the overall education of a person, as well as in that person’s life. For the arts bring beauty, balance, escape, romance, and so much more into people’s lives; and it is the responsibility of schools to include the arts in the general education of their students.

I am willing to concede the fact that the traditional three “R”s remain at the core of the educational mission, because the abilities to read, write, and reason are essential for just about every human endeavor. Yet, there are other verbs I would add to these three that seem just as important to me, including look, listen, speak, move, feel, express, and create. The arts are gateways toward learning and practicing these activities that give definition to our human condition.

If we can learn to listen to music carefully, we can also learn to listen with greater care to what people are saying. If we are trained to listen properly, we can better understand another person’s words and respond to them in the most effective and productive manner. We need to understand that listening and hearing are two very different things. To listen is an activity requiring effort; to hear is passive and, all too often, uncritical. In terms of music, if we become educated listeners, we are then more likely to discover how performers or composers create meaning through music. To express our ideas and feelings in music is to unleash our minds and souls and reach out to others with the force of our ideas and emotions. Our artistic creations are among the greatest gifts that we can leave for future generations. We will surely be judged by those who come after us in terms of the art that we leave behind. Our works of art are the X-rays of our essential humanity.

While a composer focuses on a pitch, a rhythm, a harmony, or a melody, a playwright dwells on a word, a phrase, a gesture, or a glance. A painter emphasizes a form, a shade, a figure, or an angle, whereas a choreographer savors a motion, a shape, a body, or a tempo. What unites all these artists, however, as well as the poet and the filmmaker, is the love of expression—the passionate desire to convey and portray the real, the imagined, the possible, the powerful, the vulnerable, the true, the beautiful, and so much more. The visual arts teach us to look at things inquisitively, critically, insightfully. They compel us to look, actively, rather than just to see, passively. Dance allows us to “speak” with our hands, our legs, our torsos, our heads, in fact, our entire bodies. Actions may, in fact, speak louder than words; and dance displays the infinite relationships that one individual may have with another, or with many others, in the large world that contains us all. The arts, then, give people opportunities to teach values, express feelings, make order out of chaos, uplift, ennoble, entertain, and give comfort to their beholders. They also teach discipline, control, and efficiency—ways of making the best possible use of time and space, two of our most precious possessions.

The arts, when taught and understood, are so powerful in providing meaning and pleasure to our lives that people who partake of them will have little need of those escapes from life’s boredom, malaise, and unhappiness that are dangerous rather than enriching, such as drugs and alcohol. Infinite delight in the works of Matisse or Arthur Miller or Beethoven can strengthen a person’s desire for staying alive, for coping with life’s difficulties and tragedies, for arising each day with the conviction to persevere, for deciding, in the final analysis, that life is worthwhile no matter how hard things get, because the arts are there to soothe and delight.

I am pleased to say that at Hunter College the arts are thriving. Music, dance, theatre, film, media, the visual arts, and creative writing are all alive and well there. The recently approved General Education Requirement at Hunter includes a required course in the arts and also allows for a second arts course at a more advanced level if a student opts for it rather than for another humanities course. This seems to me a fair positioning of the arts within the general education of Hunter students, alongside the humanities, social sciences, sciences, and mathematics. In explaining the goals of the arts component of the requirement, the current Undergraduate Catalog of Hunter College states: “This requirement is meant to introduce students to significant works of the creative imagination, familiarize them with a medium of creative expression, and enable them to actively participate in individual aesthetic and creative experiences. Through critical analysis, research, and direct involvement in creative work in a particular medium, students should develop an appreciation of the interrelations of intellectual and emotional responses to the arts and letters” (p. 31). Like Hunter, CUNY as a whole maintains an insistence that students be educated in the arts. In the CUNY Honors College, for example, the required “Arts in New York City” seminar literally takes first-year students into the theatre, the opera house, and the museum. I have watched the amazed faces of these students at performances of such plays as Proof, Major Barbara, and Metamorphoses, and of such operas as The Magic Flute and Madama Butterfly. I have read their wonderful and wonder-filled essays about the art of Norman Rockwell or Alberto Giacometti and listened to their impassioned debates on the elusive meaning of a character’s speech in a play or on the reasons why a flute rather than a violin should accompany a soprano in a given operatic aria.

Among the many hundreds of music major I have taught at Hunter, The CUNY Graduate Center, the Mannes College of Music, and the Juilliard School, a great many children of Asian or Asian American parents have stood out as exemplary students. At all of these schools, Asians form a large percentage of the music-student body. For instance, Asians made up 28 percent of the Juilliard student body in 2002-2003 and have comprised as much as 31 percent in recent years. Music performance is certainly one of the preferred career goals among students of Asian extraction in New York City. These students are extremely hard working, serious, disciplined, ambitious, courteous, respectful, and, of course, talented. They are a pleasure to teach, as they are incredibly receptive to constructive criticism, responsive to suggestions, and highly appreciative of their teachers. With models to emulate such as cellist Yo-Yo Ma, violinists Midori, Sarah Chang, Cho-Liang Lin, and Kyung-Wha Chung, pianists Mitsuko Uchida and Melvyn Tan, conductor Seiji Ozawa, and soprano Hei-Kyung Hong, to name but a few, Asian students are no doubt encouraged to spend their time, energy, and money on refining their art.

It is my conviction that as long as we teach today’s young people about the arts, there will be consumers of the arts in the future, and we will have a better chance of preserving a society in which beauty and truth, culture and civilization, and the exercise of our human potential to express ideas and feelings will continue to flourish. Let us all use our powers to persuade our political and intellectual leaders to protect the study of the arts in our schools and colleges. Thank you.

Michi Itami:

Thank your Michael. I was wondering if anyone has seen Lillian Cho. So we will move on to Stephanie Hsu. You’re executive director? The Museum of Chinese in the Americas right? You’re an education associate right? Very good, and you’re speaking on the issues of identity in Asian-American art and the dangers of “self-Orientalizing”.

Stephanie Hsu:

I found this actually a very interesting panel to be on, we’re a history museum in New York’s Chinatown, been there for about 23 years. We’re actually started by college students who did oral history and salvaging projects in the neighborhood so our collection is very much a domestic artifact based collection from working class peoples, immigrant Chinese who have been coming for 150 years.

I’ve definitely in my two years here seen the education department really evolve with the community. We’re trying to be responsive and visionary even about the needs of schoolchildren who are in Chinatown. The many great public schools, the many parochial schools, Chinese language schools, they are now becoming more and more Fujianese. I think the local public school we work with is now 60-70 percent Fujianese, which means that they are all “ELLs”, or English language learners.

I actually have something to read from, but I’m gonna try and do it in a way that makes sense. Coming from a history perspective, I just wanted to say a couple of people that I’ve been reading who have helped me with this have been the work of David Ng and Anne Chang who do work on racial melancholy and [MARTH], some Asian-American theory. Definitely the sociologists, [Corolla and Marcelo Torres-Arrozco], who are at Berkeley who do sociology work on the children of immigrants as well as John [Ogbu] who has looked at the ways in which children of color in the American public school system, their achievement correlates with the larger perspectives and stereotypes of their socioeconomic or racial group in large society. Also bilingual art therapists who work at The Door, which is a program associated with the university development house which is an amazing program and I will email these to Dr. Tam at the end.

So, the perspective that this paper is coming from is from someone who’s not an education professional, from someone who deals with Asian-American history, someone who deals with community partnerships in Chinatown, and also finding a museum-based education which I think is an alternate site for teaching and learning which is unique to New York City in many ways. Out of the Chinese American youth population with which MoCA works ( that’s the museum) at the museum I’ve identified three distinct groups for modeling a discussion today.

The first are American born Chinese who grow up in neighborhoods with large concentrations of Chinese people. The second group are China born Chinese which terminology which we use at the museum, “CBCs,” who are most recently immigrants from the Fujian province. I refer to anyone who is termed recent as someone who has arrived within zero to three years, because even though English mastery within the bilingual school system takes about five to six years, these children are using English in the classroom, are asking questions and doing writing assignments, but they often have to attend supplemental after school programs where they work on their English so that it take up to three years. Finally, adopted Chinese to enter non-Chinese American families between the ages of zero and five.

It is I think supremely fair to say that for all of these youth there is a definite deficit in knowledge about Asian American history and that is due to the incredible shortfalls of our education system in this country. So for those of us at Asian American history museums, this kind of lack is really like insult to injury. In my eyes, somewhere between multi-cultural education, which tends to paint us as cultural ambassadors, and global history, which can paint us as victims, Asian American students can lose control of their own identity formation. And the arts are one way to seize back those tools of self-knowledge.

The title of this topic refers to the danger of “self-Orientalizing” and by that I mean the tendency to be ourselves in terms of Asian stereotypes, to objectify and render static parts of our identities and cultures that are in fact fluid and actively engaged in producing new meanings. The self-Orientalist project can be engaged in evaluating someone’s authenticity, if someone of Asian descent against some objective standard of “Asianess” that may have to do with language ability, adherence to certain cultural practices, observance of gender or other social roles, or even personal interests and career ambition.

And “Americanness” can be equally troubling for a lot of these youths, especially when a transnational perspective, on current events, for instance, can lead you to be ambivalent on whether or not you want to be seen as American in the context when you’re in society, your family, your international relationships. What I’d like to share with you is just a few examples of MoCA’s work in historically informed identity exploration with these three groups of Chinese American youth.

So, ABCs in Chinatown. MoCA along with other museums has had a history of mounting exhibitions that focus on Chinese American youth culture. But the most illuminating projects come from the youth themselves. Recently an Eagle Scout in Chinatown who is a senior in a high school in New York City was mentored by MoCA staff on a project that he put together entitled “What is home like in Chinatown” and it served middle school youth in Chinatown. This Eagle Scout told MoCA that his high school experience at a competitive specialized public school provided his first sustained experiences with a peer group outside of Chinatown, and he was shocked and unprepared for his encounter with mainstream stereotypes of Chinatown, the place he called home.

He said, and I quote, “they called my home dirty, fish-smelling, foreign, and exotic”. Representations of Chinatown as an ethnic enclave have actually persisted for over a century now, and the community continues to labor under post 9/11 economic hardship as well as new negative perceptions of the community in the light of the SARS threat. This Eagle Scout returned to the Chinese American planning council youth program, of which he was an alumnus, to help other Chinatown youth through this project reflect on their home environment. He turned their writings, drawings, and collages into a book that was donated to the Museum’s archives.

Some of the other issues that I’ve seen being safely explored through artistic expression among Chinatown youth are issues of sexuality, interracial dating, and intergenerational conflict. These youth are seeking new models of expression for exploring these routes and boundaries. Community arts organizations have actually been leading the way in providing access to these non-traditional art forms. The Door for instance has a sort of DJ lesson program, they have turntables, they have production equipment for people to record their own hip-hop and spoken word; the Asian American writers workshops provides classes in a lot of these sorts of literary composition.

A recent casting call, I don’t know if you guys saw this in the neighborhood, but a casting call for an Asian American film in Chinatown drew more youth interest than we ever thought possible. People kept asking us for the fliers and all we were was a street distribution site. So, we think that acting is something that people are getting interested in. When MOCA asked its most recent group of student curators (we have students come in and help us put together exhibits), we asked them how they wanted to form their exhibit, and they said they wanted to act out a movie, have it filmed, and then have it shown in the gallery. This is about agency for them, and they are asking for things that are not readily available in the neighborhood. But the opportunities for involvement are very, very slim, unfortunately.

So the CBCs (Fujianese immigrants). MoCA part-time museum educators are visiting instructors in after-school program classrooms at a local public school. The regular classroom teachers in this program are all dedicated professionals who volunteered to work extra hours with the school’s “ELLs” ( or English language learners ). We saw that these teachers were forbidding the use of Fujianese amongst the students during the program. They told our bilingual educators that we were using too much Chinese when we were facilitating lessons that were on Chinese American history. On the other hand, the Fujianese youth were telling us that their families were saying that they were becoming too American by staying long hours at school when they should be in the home, so a lot of them tended to drop out as the weeks passed.

But in this program artistic expression is an important means of communication. The students draw pictures of everything; we ask them to draw what their school looked like in Fuzhou, what they see in Chinatown’s streets today, memories of their first days in New York. Along with these pictures they write simple sentences in English. One classroom worked on timelines of their lives, rating moments as happy or sad. Nearly every student (surprised me) drew images of 9/11 and rated the tragedy, which touched Chinatown intimately, as a negative experience. These are kids who came in 2000 or 2001.

While leading a lesson on Chinese immigration from the ToiShan region, one of our educators showed a picture of Chinese crowded onto the deck of a ship crossing the pacific. A student, finally frustrated by the English-only mandate, asked in mandarin, “where are the Fujianese”? The MoCA educator got on her feet said “they are here in this classroom, you are the newest immigrants from China to America”. As she said that she saw smiles go around the classroom because they were able to glimpse their place within Chinese American history, something that a lot of us are still struggling to do. If our ancestors didn’t build the railroad, where do we fit in? Being able to make that connection in the classroom was marvelously important.

Finally, Chinese adoptees. There’s a study that says that the largest concentration of families with Chinese adoptees was on the upper west side of Manhattan. One of the more active organizations servicing this population with parenting resources and also supporting adoption networks in the US and China is called Families with Children from China (FCC). MoCA has organized galleries at the tour museum and walking tours of Chinatown for FCC groups from all over the tri-state area. This group of young girls, actually had a birthday party. For her birthday party she brought all her other Chinese adoptee friends to Chinatown for a walking tour, and I thought this was the strangest birthday party I ever heard of.

But these FCC parents they travel to china, they pick up their adopted children from orphanages, they return to the states, often enroll them in private schools, and they try with varying degrees of success, to Americanize and then “Chinese-ify” their children at the same time. So weekend or monthly trips to Chinatown to sample food and to buy traditional Chinese clothing seem to be standard practice. A lot of them walk into our museum on these trips.

But my interactions with the numerous adopted girls on their visits to the museum have convinced me that these cultural immersion trips, times when the girls are surrounded by strangers who all look like them, are perhaps more traumatic than Chinese parents can know. I see a lot of acting out, I see a lot of back-talking, I see a lot of distress. They are between 5 and 10. The one birthday party that I hosted, by the end of the hour they were all clinging to me.

I just wondered what connection these girls feel to the story of Chinese immigration that we’re presenting. I wonder whether they feel that aspects of Chinatown are strange or uncomfortable, vaguely familiar or strangely familiar. I’m always careful to “historisize” Chinatown within the story of American immigration for them not only because that’s what we do as a history museum but because I hope that maybe through learning why the Chinese came 200 years ago these girls will feel a little closer to understanding perhaps why they’re here.

I believe that as these girls grow older they’ll look to Chinatown not just for cultural commodities but they’ll start looking for real connections to the politics of Chinese American identity and we need to be ready for this population.

Time’s up and I will just say that the direction that MoCA is going in is definitely trying to develop some kind of sustained, history-based curriculum that is infused with the arts that allows people to imagine and transgress boundaries in that way. After two years of making paper lanterns during Chinese New Year, I just realized it’s really not enough. It’s really not.

I’ll put stuff on the web definitely, but I just wanted to give a shout-out to the Asian American educators who are coming out of places like Main Street and Teacher’s college because along with alternative sites in the city like museums, after-school programs, and youth programs we can really start to infuse the public school system with a little bit of this knowledge, even though it won’t be handled wholesale and definitely through the arts. Because people will never turn down an opportunity to help kids create, hopefully.

Michi Itami:

Thank you, Stephanie. You know I think it’s a very interesting point she has because I have seen so many people I was involved in a gallery for awhile that was gay and lesbian and gay male gallery and a friend of mine has showed them, it was very interesting. There were so many women, gay women who had adopted Chinese babies. When they have these openings it was a cultural event and I felt that the children had weird reactions to me, “Who is mommy?” and the kinds of things. I think that culturally in New York alone it may become a very interesting point of reference as to what kind of educational places will have to do to outreach to these kids. I think it’s very important emotionally.

Our next speaker is Elise Hisama and she’s director of the Institute for Studies in American Music and also an associate professor at the Conservatory of Music, Brooklyn College, CUNY.

Elise Hisama:

Here’s a handout that’s come around, I think everyone has a copy. My favorite book right now is a collection of essay by Asian American artists, I brought it. Titled Yellow Light: the Flowering of Asian-American Arts. The volume presents first person reflections by American artists of Korean, Indian, Filipino, Chinese, Hmong, Japanese, and racially mixed descent that spans three generations. Statements by these artists articulate their thoughts on the viability of the category Asian-American art and on the issues of identity, aesthetics, and politics. A particularly wonderful feature of this book is the inclusion of seven musicians among the 40 contributors.

In such book collections or at conferences rooted in interdisciplinary fields such as American studies, ethnic studies, and women’s studies, music unfortunately tends to be neglected. Not so in Yellow Light. The editor, Amy Ling, insists that musicians working in diverse genres (jazz, folk, contemporary composition, pop, and hip-hop) be represented alongside novelists, short story writers, poets, playwrights, visual artists, filmmakers, dancers, and performance artists. The result is a richly shaded snapshot of Asian American musicians over the past 50 years.

As my handout shows, Yellow Light joined several other studies of Asian American music that have emerged over the last decade. The readings I’ve listed are meant to give a taste of recent work on Asian American music and is by no means a comprehensive compilation. Happily, enough writings are now available so that it is possible to offer an entire course on Asian American music and several institutions have recently done so, including NYU, the University of Michigan, University of California at Davis and UC-Irvine. The course offered at NYU three years ago was taught by [Jason Kael Hwang], an electric violinist, leader of the Far Eastside band, and composed of the spectacular opera The Floating Box which premiered at the Asian society two years ago. The handout also gives the web address for Jason’s syllabus.

My abstract for this talk claims that I will give an overview of Asian Americans in classical music, jazz, and popular music, but given the time constraints I decided that I should retract that promise, brashly made before coming to grips with the fact that I have 15 minutes, or less. Instead, I will devote my remaining minutes to sharing some of my own research on Asian American music and arguing for the importance of studying Asian-American arts at the City University of New York.

While on fellowship leave this year, I have been working on a book that grows out of my interest in considering how music both reflects and shapes aspects of society. Provisionally titled Popular Music and the Politics of Sound, the book concentrates on American and British popular music since 1970 and explores a diverse collection of musical works within their social and historical context.

The current focus of my research, Asian-American rap, has not yet reached the mainstream listening public, and many people are unaware that it even exists. The best-known Asian-American in hip-hop is probably the Filipino-American turntablist [DJ Cuebert] and his invisible Scratch Pickles Troop. Other Asian Americans in hip-hop include the Mountain Brothers, Cosmonaut, Yellow Peril, and Cotton Candy.

The first two words of my paper’s title refer of course to E.D. Hirsch’s cultural literacy project and to the book of essays, MULTICULTURAL LITERACY: OPENING THE AMERICAN MIND, [inaudible]’s answer to Hirsch’s text. Today I’d like to suggest that Asian American music studies be regarded as a project of poly-culturalism. The history Robin D.G. Kelly has coined the term “poly-cultural”, derived from the term poly-rhythmic, to describe products of different living cultures. In contrast to multi-culturalism, which “implies that cultures are fixed, discrete entities that exist side by side, a kind of zoological approach to culture.”

Poly-culturalism acknowledges the simultaneous existence of many cultural lineages in a single person. It offers a dynamic view of history that argues for cultural complexity and for the recognition of past and present solidarity between people with color. Lately I have become particularly interested in the poly-cultural music of the Asian American rapper and poet [Jaymez]. Born in the Bronx in 1972 as James Chang, [Jaymez] is a second generation Korean American who grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from Bard College with degrees in sociology and multi-ethnic studies.

He recalls that as an adolescent, he connected with other Asians but “sometimes I felt discriminated from whites or other groups.” When he was 15 he wrote his first song, “Black Man Singing in a White Man’s world”, and I quote, “It was a metaphor for the alienation that I as a young Asian kid felt but could never elegantly express until that moment. Since Bruce Lee was dead and Margaret Cho wasn’t big back then, I found my role models in the black community. Chuck-D of Public Enemy, Run-DMC, Malcolm X, and Alex Haley guided me through adolescence and later inspired me to delve into my own roots, my own musical heritage. Those were my role models, since there weren’t any Asian American performers out there I could readily identify with. I identified with their feelings of alienation”.

Like many other children of immigrants, Jay at first rejected the traditional culture of his parents, but after visits to Korea he became interested in traditional Asian music, primarily Korean and Chinese music. He muses, “fusing Korean folk music with Chinese music and hip-hop provided the ideal social landscape I wanted to create”. At Bard College, he learned about the exploitation of Filipino and Chinese laborers in the U.S., the internment of the Japanese Americans during World War II, and other cases of anti-Asian discrimination.

When the Chinese American saxophonist and composer Fred Ho visited Bard, he convinced [Jaymez] to combine his interest in Asian American political issues with music. [Jaymez] called his blend of traditional Asian folk music with contemporary hip-hop a new genre, “Asianic hip-hop”. A self-described “street musicologist” who wants to “promote cultural literacy by fusing folk music with hip-hop”, he hopes that his music will “inspirate the fate of Asian Americans”, that is, inspire and motivate them to develop cultural literacy, “to be proud of their own music and elevate the level of discussion of economics and politics and the military and sexism”.

Noting that his best response has been from the black community, he wants many people to “establish the signs, meaning have a deeper appreciation cultures that are not yours. Once that appreciation is there, I think there will be parity, there will be equal footing.” The song “Seven Train” is part of the score for the 1999 documentary film of the same name. The writership of the #7 (subway train line) is multi-ethnic and multi-racial. The train connects Koreans and Chinese in flushing, which [Jaymez] calls New York’s real K-town; Indians, Pakistanis and Bengalis in Jackson Heights and Bukharian Jews in Rego Park. And I’m going play just a minute and a half video clip from this film called Seven Train. On the second page of your handout I put the lyrics.

[Video plays]

Elise Hisama:

The film chronicles the events in a typical workday for a Korean manager of a fish store, a gay Pakistani sari salesman, and two South American street vendors. [Jaymez] notes that “the seven train represents my flushing experience. My neighborhood is unbelievably wonderful. You’ve got Haitians, Jamaicans, Chinese, Koreans. We’re just a melting fusion of voices, but there definitely is a feeling of unity especially when I’m on the 7 train. The song is an ode to all those hard working people in Queens who happen to ride on that train, especially the immigrants. The train is like a microcosm of Queens.”

The song draws upon a type of traditional Korean music called “pansori”, which is the singing of a long narrative with drum accompaniment. “Pan” refers to a place where people gather together and “sori” refers to the singing voice. [Jaymez] calls pansori “rap for Koreans, it chronicles the lives of the lower classes stigmatized and makes fun of the upper classes through metaphors”. [Jaymez]’s incorporation of traditional Asian music in his rap creates what he calls a form of anti-appropriation, or a way of reclaiming music that has been used in western-produced kung fu films.

The lyrics of “seven train” (and again they’re 2nd page of handout ) suggest that many forgot their own name after a numbing commute including an 18 hour day but are rejuvenated by the sight of a baby with her mother riding the train. The haunting, repetitive use of the refrain revokes the repeated rhythms of the train ride. In contrast to the widespread media representation of encounters between African Americans and Asian Americans as being marked by mutual stereotyping, suspicion, and sometimes violence, [Jaymez]’s music speaks his musical and political alliances with the African Americans. Indeed, many Asian American musicians acknowledge they are influenced by affinities with African American music and musicians.

Fred Ho remarks that “the theme and ethos of African American music and culture are more resonate and relevant to us as oppressed nationalities. Themes such as hope, struggle, redemption, celebration and resistance and perseverance and triumph of the soul and spirit despite persecution, oppression and injustice. Black music spoke to my pain, suffering, struggle, and gave me joy, hope, the spirit of struggle, and the moral fortitude that made me affirm that the oppressors are not our superiors but indeed morally inferior and repugnant”.

Jazz pianist and composer John Jiang notes the impact of an African American music course he took on his own music. “Dr. Wendell Logan was perhaps my most influential teacher at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. In his African American music history course Dr. Logan assigned us Duke Ellington’s A Tone Parallel to Harlem, a work that expressed at a tone parallel to the life of African Americans. Ellington’s work and William Grant [inaudible]’s afro-American symphony inspired me to dream about Chinese American music. Although the black liberation and third world movement and the power of African American music through culture liberated me on a humanistic, spiritual and political level, I could only imagine the possibility of my liberation through and in Asian American music because I was unaware of any existing model.”

Jiang’s compositions (one, “Two Flowers on a Stem” and another, “Turn Pain into Power”) beautifully demonstrate, how years later he would cultivate the ability to create precisely such an Asian American music. Born in the 1950s, Ho and Jiang did not have the opportunity to take any Asian American music courses in the 1970s, but their immersion in African American music allowed them later to forge powerful forms of musical expression.

The plethora of performers, composers, recording scores and scholarships available today makes it possible to teach the music of Asian Americans, and yet to my knowledge no CUNY campus is offering or has offered a course on Asian American music. Given our student population, ready access to Asian American arts organizations throughout the city, multitude of performance venues at which Asian American music can be heard and wealth of faculty resources, CUNY is ideally positioned to become a leader in studies of Asian Americans in the arts.

With the establishment of AAARI and the potential for CUNY to become a national leader in supporting Asian American studies, we are at the brink of a moment of remarkable promise, one that I hope the devastating cuts to arts and education budget across the city will not undermine.

Thus I’d like to conclude by reading a brief poem which is found on the handout, example 2. This poem was found carved on the walls by a Chinese immigrant who was incarcerated at the Angel Island Immigration Station, San Francisco bay, in the first half of the century. John Jiang’s work called “Island, the immigrant suite #2 for string quartet in Cantonese opera.” Singer uses the last line as the title for the fifth movement. The poem is,

“Twice I have passed through the blue ocean. Experience the wind and dust of journey. Confinement in the wooden building has pained me doubly. With the weak country we must all join together in urgent effort. It depends on all of us together to roll back the wild waves.”

Thank you.

Michi Itami:

And our last speaker is Rob Lee, Robert Lee who is the executive director of the Asian American Arts Center (28 years), and his topic is stories of Chinatown.

Robert Lee:

Hi. It’s nice to be among so many people who are interested in the arts, and particularly in the conference in which we’re dealing with so much that deals with education. Education has so much to do with words, and I think we’re really unique and positioned in this conference in that we deal with what is not words, or non-verbal education.

My own organization, Asian American Arts Center, started off as a dance company just like Amy’s. My wife was a dancer, and she was one of the first contemporary Asian American choreographers whose work is now, as you can see in videotape, at the Lincoln Center Performing Arts Library. Much of my work is individual arts, and collecting the work of Asian American artists, going back to 1945 to the present. We have perhaps one of the largest archives in the United States on what this history of work in the individual arts has evolved and developed.

You can see much of what we’ve done on our website, which is www.artspiral.org. Today I would just talk about one of the education programs we have, which is called “Stories of Chinatown.” We implemented this program almost 2 years ago and it’s a collaboration between IS 131, the Mott Street Senior Center, an organization in Brooklyn called “Share the Arts, and [inaudible] Organization. In this program we bring together seniors, some of them from the Mott Street Senior Center, some not; we meet at the senior center, where there’s a kiln and a room, and we bring in the children. They are eighth graders from 131 in collaboration with the principal there, Alice Young.

We bring the kids over once a week to share the stories with the seniors there. They become friends, tell each other stories from young children’s stories, and particularly the seniors tell them their stories. This lasts for about 10 weeks during the semester, in learning the stories they then turn this into artwork, which they put sometimes directly on tiles, sometimes they will translate the stories onto the tiles, which means there might be some drawing in between, and these tiles reflect various stories called sometimes long stories, and some times the public would not know of them at all.

We hope to take these tiles, which are done on permanent clay and are glazed, and eventually, working with the city and perhaps doing this for many more years I hope, place a mural on one of the walls in Chinatown so that the public will have access to a wall where these stories accumulate. If you want to know more about individual story or tile, you can come to our website and read the story.

Some of these stories are just normal stories, portraits of the children and of the seniors, some of them are amazingly alike no matter how simple they are made, portraits of these older people. Some of them are from Italian women, who share and certainly use alot the Mott Street Senior Center which is in Little Italy. Some of the stories do reflect very specific kinds of experiences, particularly this semester focusing on the encounter with difference from the child’s point of view or from a senior point of view; just seeing for example, an Indian woman walking through a certain part of Little Italy near Chinatown. As the story unfolds and the experience happens, this elder person remembers seeing this when she was young growing up in Chinatown. This reverberates for the child and becomes an important story, becomes selected for being placed on the tile.

Other stories are more complex. An artist who flees from China goes on the Chinese navy. They lose the war, and therefore he ends up in Taiwan. He then becomes a self-taught sculptor, makes a portrait head of Chiang-Kai Shek, is a designer, and tells his story of going on this boat and leaving China. Aside from these kinds of stories, we hope to do more other kinds of things in which we will interview leaders of Chinatown, and the children will have an opportunity to interview these leaders and also translate their stories in this way.

In this way we hope to bring out the hidden stories of Chinatown, we hope to bring some pride to Chinatown of its own history, bring out things that are unknown in the mainstream, and emphasize how the arts can be instrumental both in bringing children an effective education but also having the arts have an impact on how Chinatown Asian Americans see themselves, and how the mainstream sees us. I wanted to mention this project because I think it touches upon a lot of issues and questions, particularly how the arts can be instrumental in a child’s education. I think Katie’s mentioned some statistics which are very helpful to know that people are beginning to agree.

If you’re an artist you know and have known all along and if you’re a musician you know very well. To make it all so relevant to very much the Asian American situation, and that is the political situation that we’re in, its not surprising to me that [Jaymez] has identified with the African American experience, picking up very much from the way Fred Ho has done his music. So, the political side of our situation, and the side that our story is unknown that we do not have the means or the technology, usually, to get our story out there so that people can hear what we perceive our story to be so that the mass media and the mainstream has this tremendous power to interpret the experience of what immigrants are or what minorities are contributing to the United States.

Even though Moyer Special will have an interpretation, although we will expect him to do a lot better. And he does, in many ways. Still, we do not have the means to say it ourselves, and when that happens and when an artist does become aggressive and demand the means to say it in his own way, you get something like what [Jaymez] has been doing. I think that’s one aspect of it. I think the other side of it that we have to realize is the disparity of resources going into non-verbal education is that we do come out of what Michi said earlier in her talk about colonialism, in how traditions were confiscated and somehow the Elgin Marbles are in London.

Therefore there are political reasons why non-verbal education is not supported. We go back to our basic instincts and our basic responses, and when we lose touch with those and we lose the educational source from which we can gather those, then it becomes difficult for us to interpret our own instinctive responses. If you’ve ever looked at the Four Character Book, which was Chinese study when we first start school, the first line in the Four Character classic I believe is, “man is good”. However, it’s a value judgment. I wonder if you’ve ever had anything in public education in which value judgment is was heavily emphasized.

I think this is a very philosophical position, it starts off with this kind of value, and it places very much what our instincts are in a certain kind of interpretive context. As a curator, as a critic and someone who’s put on an awful lot of shows for Asian-American artists, that’s my job. My job is to provide a critical context for how you can look and interpret art, but it’s also my job to enable young people to come to our institution to see, and that’s what I spend most of my time doing is to try to get children to awaken to their eyes and using their eyes and learning from their eyes, not through books, not through words, not from labels, not from what the teacher says to them and not from what I say to them. I teach them to look, encourage and reinforce what they see, and they interpret the work far better than I ever could, given the time and encouragement.

Once we are educated into our non-verbal, what pulls out of us what is there, what a good gifted artist can create and can bring to those children, that’s what comes out. We have another form of education in Asia, which is very different from the West. It’s all about creating knowledge. The great American Buddhist movement in the United States is picking off on it. They are teaching people to sit in one place and do nothing. And Zen is even further into that. When I talk to other non-profit arts organizations they can’t believe what we are trying to do. They can’t believe we are doing these things, you know.

But to find peace that high tech culture…is driving to me, a militarized culture…normal life is becoming more militarized, to me. The people are going into Buddhism to find the peace and the harmony that they are seeking. We often overlook particularly in education if not in higher education ways of acquiring knowledge which are not and cannot be materialized, accumulated, archived, and added up. This kind of knowledge the arts are rooted in. This is the kind of arts that if we’re going to have a multi-cultural society, we’re going to need to bring a different form of education and bring this opportunity to bring this kind of outlook not only for ourselves but for all people to benefit from. We stop here.

Michi Itami:

Thank you so much, Bob. I feel so bad that the next panel is 2:35, and it’s 2:37. There are so many questions I’m sure you all have. Maybe we have room for one or two questions.

Audience Member:

If you don’t mind, I feel so moved by, evenI see Bob very often. I’m a therapist, and I’m in a drama group and I’m a member of the museum of MoCA. I feel that this that Bob brings to the community to let old people share, the power of sharing the liberty is the most powerful thing, especially in a book about music. To really promote the quality of living, not just money; I feel ashamed, its all about money. There’s so much quality we neglect, so many things more important than money that we neglect.

Michi Itami:

I think this has been a very interesting panel, and very interesting for those of us that participated as well, I learned a lot. I thank you all, I thank you all for coming, but, maybe there is another question?

Audience Member:

I’m very moved by what’s been said. A comment about Hunter, in the core of the arts, I think it’s great, but I would be more happy if the students did studio art, performing art, not the kinds arts and historical arts that are reserved for museums, which is really what you were talking about. I’d like to see that with little kids, but I forget the name of it. They have that option but I don’t think they require it.

Robert Lee:

Not required, but it is very much provided. Dance studios, huge ones, art galleries, an entire building near the Lincoln tunnel, and in the core requirements also there are tremendous opportunities for performance in theater, in chamber music, in jazz; it isn’t required, you’re right, but its there for those who want it.

Audience Member:

The point is, within our own culture, poly-culturalism, within our own cultures there are different orientations. Since you mentioned Yo Yo Ma, I wanted to mention his sister, because his sister, two years older, was regarded as the more gifted musician and the family said, “why didn’t she get the opportunity?” She did become a medical doctor she has kept that musical appreciation and has sponsored hundreds of kids. But you want to see young children, go to the [Swamley] school near Henry St. settlement, there you will see bilinguals, who are mostly Chinese although there are African American kids there are other kids, who are creative in the humanities the arts are very important part of their school. That was some encouragement for those that don’t know that, go visit it, its right near Henry St., it’s a public school.

Audience Member:

Just a very quick comment, I’m delighted to hear that the arts, music, and other appreciative areas of Asian cultures are coming into being. One area that the Asian culture has which is really phenomenal still is in the culinary arts, I hope so.

Michi Itami:

You should participate next time, we recommend you to copy down, that would be wonderful. Any other comments?

Audience Member:

In teaching, in also supporting the arts and in schools of the Julliard, which is a private institution that is part of the Lincoln Center.

Robert Lee:

Yes, well they’re very much different types of institutions, the Julliard, the conservatory type with tremendous endowment, hardly any grave concerns about funding, and a place like a CUNY college in which the little bit of funding that one starts with gets cut and everybody is really in line for a share of what there is. But I would say over the course of the many years I’ve been at Hunter, the faculty are committed, they’re very strong, they’re highly educated, they have no fear of spending evenings and weekends for production.

I’ve seen the dance faculty, I’ve seen the theater faculty go through seven days a week. You won’t get that at Julliard, in-fact, when a student gives a graduation recital, it’s a rarity for that student’s own private teacher to attend. So that you get some better things at the conservatory and other things that are better really at the limited resource places like Hunter. The library is very strong, rehearsal space, performance space constantly enlarging, so that really Brooklyn, Queens, Hunter, terrific opportunities despite the public image that there is such limitation. It something you’ll have to come over there and see. It’s been an honor to come over and speak.

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