Sonic Poetics of Home and the Art of Making Do in Sinophone Toronto

Home , Elva Hsiao, Fearless Love, Hakka hill song, Olivia Chow, Shouting and Pointing, Socratic (Google)

Yun Emily Wang

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Faculty of Music University of Toronto

Sonic Poetics of Home and the Art of Making Do in Sinophone Toronto

Yun Emily Wang

Doctor of Philosophy

Faculty of Music University of Toronto

2018 Abstract

This dissertation is an ethnography of the “homes” imagined and practiced through sound and music in Chinese-speaking immigrant communities of Toronto. The notion of

“home” and the social imaginary of homelands have been theorized extensively as important linchpins for forming diasporic identities and cohering transnational migrant communities.

Music plays a vital role in these processes, as the ethnomusicology of diaspora has demonstrated.

Although important, the dominance of formal musical performance in both academic and popular discourses tends to eclipse the fine-grained work of everyday life in contemporary immigrant experiences. This dissertation offers a complementary alternative, arguing that diasporic subjectivities emerge more from accumulations of everyday practices than through self- conscious memorialization of the lost homelands.

Based on ethnographic research, I examine how homeland imaginaries mediate diasporic experiences of “home” in everyday singing, speaking, and modes of listening. I also explore how a person’s sonic expressivity interacts with conditioning contexts such as Canada’s multicultural ideology. In the first of three case studies, I explore how ethnic and age identities were contested through sounding and listening in a Chinese nursing home. The second case study focuses on an apartment where queer immigrants gathered for respite from the palpable heteronormativity and

homophobia of Toronto’s Chinese diaspora. The final case study follows a young woman as she aurally forged diasporic intimacy in ethnic retail spaces, a boarding house, and a kitchen. Each case study considers the emergence of a particular kind of diasporic subjectivity through accumulations of everyday sonic practices where mediations between public and private, and collectivity and individuality occur. Re-orienting toward the cumulative effects of everyday life, this dissertation reveals how diasporic “homes” can be unsettling and fractured. It also shows, by the same token, how senses of belonging are born out of continuous negotiations, and should not be taken for granted.

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Acknowledgments

I thank my friends—or, in ethnographic parlance, my interlocutors—from Sinophone

Toronto for their friendship and the gift of their stories. Only some appeared in this dissertation, but every person’s impact is palpable in my work and my life. I am especially grateful to the group of friends featured in chapter 3, who taught me lessons of (be)longing that ripple beyond these pages.

My heartfelt gratitude goes to formal and informal mentors for their wisdom and unflagging patience. My supervising committee at the University of Toronto was a constellation of guiding stars; each member has shown me a version of what it means to be a rigorous and compassionate scholar. I thank my supervisor, Joshua Pilzer, for all the practical and philosophical guidance. I also thank him for modeling unwavering convictions in empathy, curiosity, and imagination, which have inspired and oriented me in more ways than I had known were possible. To me, he has truly been a King Car Whiskey kind of advisor: complex, creative, and among the best any one could ask for despite a relatively short time in the barrel. Through incisive and thoughtful comments, Farzaneh Hemmasi has encouraged and animated my at- times experimental pursuits while keeping me firmly on the ground. She has taught me by example how to truly support a project, and has been a vital influence. I am similarly indebted to

Jeff Packman for steadfast advocacy of this project and for his theoretical acumen, to which I have always aspired. I thank Ju Hui Judy Han for her perspectives from cultural geography, and for showing me that a well-told story can be politically and affectively powerful, and consequently, efficacious.

I am deeply grateful to Deborah Wong for the engaged and generative feedback propelling me to think deeper and further. As well, I thank Robin Elliot for productive comments

that helped situating the dissertation in the Canadian context. I would also like to acknowledge the influence of James Kippen, who has been instrumental in my training as an ethnomusicologist. Many others loom in this dissertation, and I owe each a lasting debt that I vow to pay forward.

I thank the Social Science and Humanities Research Council, the Government of

Ontario, the University of Toronto and its Faculty of Music, and U of T’s Canadian Studies

Graduate Student Network for supporting this work. I would also like to thank the nursing home featured in chapter 2 for allowing me to conduct research there.

Other constituents of my proverbial village include members of my Ph.D. cohort

(variously known as the Brohort, the Brahort, and the much preferred gender-neutral Brewhort around the Faculty of Music): Patrick Nickleson, Rebekah Lobosco Gilli, Caitlin Martinkus,

Edward Wright, Gabriela Jiménez, and September Russell. This dissertation would not have been possible without the exchange of ideas, aspirations, drafts, and ales with each of them. They were and still are an integral part of my education. My heartfelt gratitude also goes to fellow graduate students in the ethnomusicology program for indefatigable collegiality and community

‘round and under the table—especially Nate Renner, “diss sis” Vanessa Thacker, and Alia

O’Brien. I thank Jeremy Strachan for his generosity, friendship, and spare bicycle parts, particularly in the early stages of my doctoral work. Robin Sutherland-Harris and the rest of the

SGS writing group are similarly appreciated, for the camaraderie as I inched toward the finishing line. Beyond the academic circles, I am grateful to Sebastian Cushing and Sarah Riegler, both for the creative nourishments that kept me sane, and for their warm tolerance of my deadlines- inspired quirks. I am similarly thankful to various others on Dupont Street who have crucially enlivened my thinking, whether by caffeinations or conversations.

The ultimate gratitude goes to the people who taught me my earliest and most profoundly lasting lessons about home and all of its richness, complexity, and splendor. The

Chung clan—my grandparents, aunts, and cousins on the maternal side—has been the bedrock of love and nurturance that stretched effortlessly from Taiwan to Toronto. I thank my parents,

Rachel and Jeffrey, for their love and for instilling in me a faith in the good of people and

(perhaps unknowingly) a penchant for the Socratic method. Last and far from the least, I thank

Yu Alice Wang, my sister, dear friend, sounding board, voice of reason, and fellow adventurer, for consistently reminding me to keep a sense of wonder about this world.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ...... iv

Table of Contents ...... vii

Chapter 1 Introduction ...... 10

1 Sinophone Toronto and the Canadian Multiculturalism ...... 14

1.1 A brief history of the Chinese in Toronto ...... 14

1.2 Canadian Multiculturalism as a Conditioning Context ...... 21

1.3 Moving beyond the Chinese diaspora ...... 26

2 The Ethnomusicology of Diaspora ...... 29

3 Making Do ...... 35

4 Homes ...... 38

4.1 Home as an orientation ...... 38

4.2 Jia: Home in Chinese ...... 46

5 Sounding and listening beyond music ...... 47

5.1 Note on the term “soundscape” ...... 51

6 Fieldwork Methods ...... 52

6.1 Personal background ...... 53

6.2 “Data” and documentations ...... 57

7 Chapter outline ...... 60

Chapter 2 Technologies of Song and Aging in a Chinese Nursing Home ...... 63

8 Sounding Chineseness in the Nursing Home ...... 65

8.1 The Centre and Foundation for Chinese Geriatric Care ...... 65

8.2 Conducting Ethnographic Research in the Centre ...... 67

8.3 The Centre’s Quest for Chineseness ...... 69

8.4 “Culturally appropriate care” as filial piety ...... 70

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8.5 Competing Sinophone soundscapes ...... 73

8.6 A fuzzy logic of Chineseness ...... 76

9 Cantopop Nostalgic Oldies as Sonic Routines and Everyday Inculcation ...... 77

9.1 Karaoke Wednesdays ...... 78

9.2 Contact and Routine ...... 83

9.3 Policing the song-scape in the nursing home ...... 84

9.4 Temporal-spatial imaginaries through songs ...... 89

10 Voicing her older Chinese Self: a partial portrait of Ga-Liang ...... 92

10.1 Ga-Liang’s self-originated daily singing ...... 93

10.2 Covers and Repetitions as Routines and Cultivations ...... 98

10.3 Ga-Liang’s Sung Tactics ...... 99

10.4 Ga-Liang’s voice as a node in the diasporic social network ...... 105

10.5 On the other side of the Great Wall ...... 107

11 Silk and Bamboo in the lobby ...... 112

12 Coda ...... 115

Chapter 3 The Politics and Poetics of Sound in Queer Sinophone Toronto ...... 119

13 A Queer diasporic social formation ...... 120

13.1 “Yaomo guiguai (imps, ghouls, demons, and goblins)” at home ...... 121

13.2 The physical “home” and practices of queer kinship ...... 123

14 Theorizing Queer Diaspora in Sound ...... 126

14.1 The problematics of “home” in queer diaspora ...... 126

14.2 Queer undercurrents ...... 127

15 Poetic discourses of noise, harmony, and sexuality ...... 130

15.1 Sex talk ...... 131

15.2 Noise talk ...... 133

15.3 Social harmony as a boundary-making discourse ...... 136

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16 Poetics of Sound in the Queer Diaspora ...... 138

16.1 Everyday noisy sing-alongs ...... 139

16.2 Stylized speech as Mandarin camp talk ...... 141

16.3 Rhythm and intonation ...... 148

16.4 Sung and Spoken Puns ...... 150

16.5 Sung sex noise ...... 156

17 Transnational queer listening ...... 158

17.1 Did the children hear us? ...... 158

17.2 Performative (mis)hearing ...... 162

18 Reverberations ...... 166

Chapter 4 Shopping and Chopping: Sounding, Listening, and Moving toward Diasporic Intimacy ...... 168

19 Zhou Xiaoyan at home in Scarborough ...... 173

20 Sounds like the Pacific Mall ...... 180

20.1 Three sonic “niches” in the Pacific Mall ...... 188

20.2 The critical intimacies of soundwalking in the Pacific Mall ...... 194

20.3 Walking with Xiaoyan in the Pacific Mall ...... 200

21 Walking and listening in a supermarket ...... 207

21.1 The politics and poetics of food in Chinese contexts ...... 208

21.2 Grocery shopping with Xiaoyan and Auntie Chen ...... 212

22 Chopping toward diasporic intimacy ...... 216

Chapter 5 Recapitulation ...... 222

Bibliography ...... 225

Chapter 1 Introduction

I had heard Cai-Hua talk about her “dream home” many times.

The first time that I can remember was over burgers and fries, after she and I and two other friends attended a live performance of 1976, a Taiwanese indie rock band, when they were on tour in Toronto’s Horseshoe Tavern on Queen West. Cai-Hua spoke of her high school years in Taiwan. She was more than ten years younger than all her siblings, who had been well into their thirties and had left home by the time she was in high school. Her parents were reticent and distant. The involuntary quietude of the family home was too convenient of a metaphor for the strained relationships, so she had played 1976’s albums on repeat in her room every night, in part to be heard, but also to create a sound bubble that kept her together. “When the day comes,” she told me, shaking the ice cubes in her empty soda cup, “the day when I could afford such a thing, I’ll have a music-listening room in my house. And that’ll be my room. That’s all I need.”

The next time I heard about the dream home, a group of friends and I helped her pack up her apartment in downtown Toronto. We sat on the floor between cardboard boxes, and she talked about what she’d want in the new apartment, commensurate with her new job: a high tech wall in the living room that changes color based on the tempo of the background music she selects. “That technology exists now,” she explained. She and her partner should each have a room of their own. Subwoofers are a must in every room. She’d fill her room with a non-stop supply of Swedish DJ Avicii’s music—indeed as she spoke, Avicii’s clean, warm beats streamed from Soundcloud, softly playing from her laptop speakers.

The dream home will cost, but “Hey,” Cai-Hua said, “a person can and should dream.”

I spoke to her next time at four in the morning after her friends had tried to distract her from the overnight disintegration of a ten-year relationship with a trip to an underground nightclub. We sat on the floor between cardboard boxes again. In the tiny room she had just moved into, the walls were pallid white in the cold light of overhead florescent. She spoke of her

10 11 dream home again, this time she added a new detail: each room should be soundproof, so that her room could be truly hers both sonically and spatially—she could neither hear nor be heard— but there should also be a third room dedicated to the relationship. That’d be the room for snuggles and for fighting. Cai-Hua scanned the walls and the boxes, “Really, though,” she turned back to me, “anything but this.”

And another time, two and half years later. She had moved to Boston, and offered me her couch when I had a long layover. I had almost forgotten that we once related to each other as ethnographer and interlocutor when she brought up the dream home again. It didn’t have to be Avicii’s music all the time anymore—in fact maybe it’d be preferable to sit in a soundproof room without music. Cai-Hua told me about her recent discovery of John Cage and his 4’33” as she laid out a gongfu tea ceremony platter and flipped on an electric kettle on her desk. Dialogues from the Korean drama her roommate was watching in the living room spilled into the room; Cai-Hua and I sat quietly, listening.

“I am learning to find peace, you see.” Cai-Hua said with an air of assurance. “I am trying to be a calmer person. I am doing the tea thing to cultivate patience.” The water came to a boil. She warmed one teacup with hot water, and picked up a second, but changed her mind. “Yeah, okay, so peace is something I am working toward…ugh.” She sighed at the force of habit, and turned to her computer to stream Nine Inch Nails from YouTube. 1976’s jewel-cased CD album In Clubbing We Trust (2008) sat silently but prominently on her desk. It was the only CD she brought with her to Toronto and then later to Boston, the soundtrack of the first months in each new life. She caught me looking at the CD, and asked, “Wait—were you in that group when we went to see them together? At the Horseshoe? Did we know each other at that time already?” It feels like ages ago, she said.

There had been other times, and I am certain there will be more. Each re-iteration of the dream home is a little different from the last one. Each time she fills her present home with a carefully curated soundscape as narratives of her aural-architectural utopia unfold; echoes of recent and distant pasts and homes ring in her ears.

I am sometimes tempted to read some sort of transnational cultural symbolism into the sounds with which she fills her real and virtual homes, but Cai-Hua never fails to call me out on such lazy and reductionist interpretation. I am also tempted to theorize the dream home with

Gaston Bachelard’s “oneiric house,” the space that holds memories and reveries of ordinary life.1 But Cai-Hua hadn’t heard of Bachelard until I asked. The dream home is her own—a sonic- spatial poetic of intimacy and belonging in its own right.

This dissertation is an ethnography of everyday practices of sound and music in Toronto’s Chinese-speaking immigrant communities. I trace how different notions of “home”— sonorously imagined and sustained— mediate people’s experiences of intimacy and alienation, of dwelling and displacement, and of belonging and marginalization. Thinking through this methodology of “homes,” I argue that diasporic subjectivities emerge from accumulations of everyday singing, speaking, and different modes of listening, not only through the self-conscious memorialization of lost homelands that predominate in diasporic studies of music. In contrast to the narratives dominating both academic and popular discourses, this dissertation provides a perspective on contemporary immigrant experiences from the micro-level, which I believe is timely and necessary.

The notion of “home” and the social imaginary of homelands have been theorized extensively as important linchpins for diasporic identity formations. In migration studies, “homes” are often equated with homelands or their surrogates. They are the object of nostalgic longings, the basis of ethnic imaginations, and the source of cohesion for transnational migrant communities. The ethnomusicology of diasporas adopts this perspective, and has demonstrated music’s vital role in the construction, maintenance, and circulation of the diasporic “homes.” While these processes are important, conceptualizing the diaspora and diasporic belonging in this way runs the risk of implicitly rendering those living in diaspora permanent aliens, forever oriented toward a past and an elsewhere, whose homeland-based senses of self eclipse the making of new homes that take place here and now in the fine-grained work of everyday life.

In this dissertation I offer an alternative, and tune in to other forms of “homes” that remain germane to diasporic life but are more than just imaginaries of homelands. I take as a premise cultural geography’s assertion that space is a complex network of intertwining social relations “stretched out” from the physical constructions (Lefebvre 1974; Massey 1994), and

1 In The Poetics of Space (1958). 2 Throughout the dissertation I have romanized the character for “home” (家) using the Mandarin pronunciation.

3 See, for example Bonacich (1973) and Safran (1991). For ethnomusicological examples, see 13 follow existing ethnomusicological attention on the ways in which sound is integral to the production of space (Abe 2018; Born 2013; Feld 1988, 1996, 2015). I trace “home” as a category of sonic-spatial practice that spans different geographical scales, and that mediates many different types of social relations within and across communities. As “the locus of everyday family life and a repository of objects and memories” (Gieseking et al. 2014, 147), “home” bears witness to people’s attempts to dwell, to plant your feet firmly, to make room according to your habitus (Bourdieu 1977) and your aspirations, to contest or conform to normalizing forces, to respond to feelings of alienation. For many— including Heidegger in his 1951 essay “Building Dwelling Thinking”— “home” is a way of being on earth.

Toronto’s Chinese diaspora offers especially interesting case studies for exploring this understanding of “home” for several reasons. First, conceiving of “home” as a nexus of space, sound, and sociality works really well in a Chinese-speaking community, because in Chinese, family, home(land), and housing are interchangeable concepts expressed in one single syllable: jia.2 The multivalence of jia is reflected in practice as well— generations of a family traditionally live together in a large quadrangle building, with rooms assigned to reflect the family’s internal hierarchy. The reconfiguration of housing and family life in migration, whether through distance and estrangement or through fictive kinship formed for survival, often bring into sharp focus how the sonic, spatial, and social dimensions of jia are imbricated.

Second, transnational migrant communities’ fascination with imaginaries of the homeland is well-documented, since “homeland” is such an important resource for forming ethnic identities within the host society.3 This necessary homeland imaginary is inherently unstable for the Chinese diaspora anywhere, as the borders of “China” have been highly contestable since the end of 19th century. In the Canadian context, the fantasy of a coherent Chinese ethnicity is further complicated by shadows of the Chinese Exclusion Act (1885–1923)— including material traces like the proliferation of Chinese-owned restaurants and laundromats in small town Canada (Cho 2010) or the sweeping Chinese dominance of the real estate markets of

2 Throughout the dissertation I have romanized the character for “home” (家) using the Mandarin pronunciation. 3 See, for example Bonacich (1973) and Safran (1991). For ethnomusicological examples, see Reyes (1999), Sugarman (2004), Um (2000), and Zheng (1994 and 2010).

Vancouver and Toronto, and immaterial reminders such as dubbing the removal of ethnicity- based immigration restrictions in 1967 as “the birth of modern Canada,” or the Canadian multiculturalism that tokenizes the Chinese (Wickberg 2007).

In the following sections of this introductory chapter, I will first contextualize the project in an overview of Toronto’s Chinese community vis-à-vis Canadian multicultural ideology and policy. As well, I will discuss how and why I have adapted term Sinophone to describe a cultural sphere that is characterized by its use of Sinitic languages, but that isn’t necessarily beholden to the legacy and baggage of Chinese ethnicity. I will then situate my investment in sound and in the concept of home in the ethnomusicology of transnational communities and diaspora, and tease out some of the major trends in that literature that I hope to address with this dissertation. Following my efforts to position this project, I sketch out the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of my analyses throughout the dissertation in three sections: I will discuss the concept of “making do” in everyday life, the concept of “home,” and explain why and how I attempt to listen beyond music. Finally, I conclude with descriptions and reflections on fieldwork methods, and provide a brief outline of the three case studies.

1 Sinophone Toronto and the Canadian Multiculturalism 1.1 A brief history of the Chinese in Toronto

The Greater Toronto Area (henceforth GTA)—along with Vancouver, San Francisco, and New York— is one of the major Chinese centers of North America. The 2011 Canadian census reports that those who self-identified as ethnically Chinese constitute nearly ten percent of the population. The presence of the Chinese diaspora can be quite palpable in everyday life in

Toronto: Chinese Canadian politicians or media broadcasters can be seen or heard regularly, identifying themselves as such;4 Chinese restaurants specializing in different regional cuisines can

4 For example, politician Olivia Chow was a candidate in the 2014 mayoral election in Toronto; musician and artist Sookyin Lee has been hosting popular radio shows for the Canadian Broadcast Company.

15 be found across the city; municipal public services such as the Toronto Public Library system,

Service Ontario, and the Ontario Telehealth all offer services in Mandarin and Cantonese.

A typical account of Chinese Toronto will name the sextet of Chinatowns. The

Downtown Chinatown is perhaps the most recognizable concentration of Chinese eateries and businesses on Dundas and Spadina. There isn’t an iconic Chinatown archway that demarcates an entrance, as in many stereotypical Chinatowns. Instead, two tall red poles integrated into a streetcar station form the ideographic character for the word “gate.” The area is sandwiched between other landmark neighborhoods such as Kensington Market, Queen West, and the

University of Toronto’s St. George campus—a prominent piece of the geographical mosaic in

Downtown Toronto. Marked by an archway that was built decades after its heyday, the historic

Chinatown East on Broadview and Gerard St. features a scattering of Chinese and Vietnamese businesses primarily catering to ethnic Chinese immigrants from across Southeast Asia. The streets are quiet and sparse these days, contrasting the tourists who filled the Downtown

Chinatown.

The majority of Toronto’s Chinese population live, work, eat, and shop in the sprawling

“ethnoburbs” (Li 2009) of Scarborough, Mississauga, Richmond Hill, and Markham.

Unsurprisingly, the community—to the extent a tenth of Toronto can be described as a community—is stratified based on socioeconomic background, migratory pathways and generations, places of origin, and dialect preferences, and such stratification is loosely reflected in the geographical configurations of these four ethnoburbs. Richmond Hill tends to attract wealthy homebuyers from Hong Kong, and increasingly, Shanghai and Shenzhen. Markham is known for condominium parks inhibited by upper middle-class Taiwanese families, for whom the prestige of the nearby Unionville High School matters a great deal. Residents of Mississauga (to

16 the West of the City of Toronto) and Scarborough (to the East) tend to either have a family history in the neighborhood as Cantonese-speaking immigrants from earlier years, or, if they are new to Canada, are Mandarin-speaking middle- and working-class “mainlanders” from the

People’s Republic of China. Many non-Chinese ethnocultural minorities and immigrants live in

Mississauga and Scarborough as well, and there are numerous ethnic “pockets” with varying degrees of self-imposed demarcation in these two areas. This is to say that racial and ethnic ideologies are formulated and practiced in rather different ways between the six Chinatowns across the GTA.5

Within the pockets construed as Chinese, the geopolitical tensions between the PRC,

Hong Kong, and Taiwan often manifest between different intra-ethnic groups, and a wide variety of regional allegiances are frequently performed in everyday interaction: living in

Toronto, I hear Shanghai people loudly trash-talking Fuzhou people in Mandarin while riding the bus in Scarborough as often as I see second generation Cantonese elders sneer with contempt at twenty-year-olds just landed from Beijing in Szechuan restaurants.6 But there are also moments of cohesion across factions of this vast, variegated diasporic community: the two local

Chinese newspapers, Epoch Times and Singtao Daily; one-stop Internet forums for Chinese people living in Canada, Yorkbbs.ca and 51.ca; Fairchild TV, a satellite service specializing in Chinese programming; and the Chinese Canadian radio station FM 88.9 provide a solid basis for an

Andersonian (1983) imagination of a cohesive Chinese Toronto.

5 Here I am thinking toward geographer Wendy Cheng’s The Changs next door to the Diazes (2013), which argues that in multiracial ethnoburbs where the majority of the residents are “minorities,” people develop a sense of their racial and ethnic identities not just in relation to the white majority but also against each other. 6 See Dale Wilson (2006) for another example of similar intra-ethnic tension in New York’s Chinatown.

The spatial and infrastructural establishment of Toronto’s Chinese community certainly did not happen overnight, and indeed the diversity of experiences, identities, and subjectivities observed in the community is the cumulative result of 150 years of Chinese immigration. Until

1967, the history of Toronto’s Chinese community more or less paralleled that of New York’s.

War and famine in mid-19th Century across Southern China, specifically the Pearl River delta, today’s Guangdong province and Hong Kong, pushed poverty-stricken peasants into the

California Gold Rush at first, and then later to the Fraser River of British Columbia. The 1870s saw another large wave of immigration largely as laborers imported to build the Canadian Pacific

Railway that connected British Columbia with Canada’s eastern provinces.7 These early immigrants were predominantly indentured young men who left children and wives in China, whose sequestered squalid living quarters became the earliest Chinatowns, and who never managed to return. Those who survived starvation and scurvy during the voyage, malnutrition and diseases in Canada, and construction accidents found themselves unemployed with no means of returning after the railway was completed in 1885. Many moved further eastward searching for work until they reached Toronto, forming a network of smaller Chinese enclaves along the way.8

7 There is perhaps a bit more to this second wave of immigration than the push-pull factors typically invoked to explain North America’s 19th century Chinese immigration issues. Arlene Chan notes in The Chinese Community in Toronto: Then and Now that the Andrew Onderdonk, the American contractor hired to oversee the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, had wanted to hire Chinese laborers partly because it would have been cheaper, and partly because “a race of people that could build the Great Wall of China could easily construct a railway” (Chan 2013, 19). In other words, Chinese immigration to Canada had been a product of a rather essentialist conception to begin with. 8 For more detailed accounts of the history of the Chinese in Canada, see the works of Arlene Chan (2011 and 2013), Kay Anderson (1991), Peter Li (1998) and Lisa Mar (2010).

At the turn of 20th century, Chinese immigrants were a convenient scapegoat upon whom white Canadians dumped their frustrations and anxiety about the struggling economy. Wide- spread anti-Chinese sentiment lead to the introduction of the Chinese Immigration Act that deterred further Chinese immigration by way of a hefty head tax.9 The head tax was set at 50 dollars at first (roughly a quarter of an average laborer’s yearly earning), and then raised to 100 in 1900, then to 500 in 1903. The Chinese were also prohibited from voting or owning land, and segregation laws and work restrictions, such as prohibiting work outside of the “ethnic” businesses of restaurant and laundry industries, were put into place, resulting in ethnic ghettos.10

The head tax did not work as expected. By the time the Chinese Exclusion Act was introduced in 1923 to outright ban Chinese immigration, Toronto’s Chinese community had already grown from several laundries near today’s City Hall to networks of family and hometown associations.11 During that time, the last of the Chinese dynasties (the Qing) fell and the Republic of China was established in today’s PRC in 1911. Following the two world wars, the Chinese

9 The Chinese head tax, and later the Chinese Immigration Act, were the first and most ostensible cases where one group of people is explicitly targeted—even though as early as 1910 the “White Canada forever” campaign had already paved the way in an immigration act that restrict any race deemed unsuitable for Canada’s climate. Redress for Chinese Canadians took place in 2006 under Harper’s regime, during and following which Canadian government generally insists that the Chinese has made important and significant contribution to the Canadian society. 10 The Canadian Pacific Railway and the head tax era are both important if not traumatic historical events for both the U.S. and the Canadian diasporic Chinese communities, commemorated frequently in performing arts (e.g. Chinese Canadian composer Chan Ka Nin’s 2001 opera, Iron Road) and literary works, as well as a scholarship too vast to possibly review here. I gloss this history rather quickly here not to minimize its weight but rather because it has been documented quite extensively, and is beyond the scope of this project. 11 The Chinese Exclusion Act was introduced on July 1 that year, which was then called Dominion Day and now Canada Day. Multiple historical accounts have suggested that Chinese Canadians called July 1 the “Humiliation Day” and boycotted the national day celebration for many years.

Exclusion Act was repealed in 1947, having been deemed to contravene the United Nations

Charter of Human Rights. Though Canadian citizenship (as opposed to British) became law in that same year, most Chinese were not eligible for citizenship and were legally designated as permanent aliens.

Events in China and Taiwan shaped immigration patterns to Canada in the 1950s and

1960s. Following the Chinese Civil War of 1949, the Chinese Communist Party established the

People’s Republic of China (PRC) on the mainland, forcing two million supporters of the

Republic of China’s (ROC) nationalist party (Kuomingtang, or KMT) into exile in Taiwan and

Hong Kong. Some of these two millions later migrated to the U.S. and Canada. The exilic ROC government encountered a great deal of resistance in Taiwan, where Japan had just ended its fifty-year colonial rule in 1945. Partly to show domination, and partly out of paranoia against communist spies, the ROC government placed Taiwan under forty years of martial law where media, culture, and travel were all tightly censored and controlled. Meanwhile, on the mainland,

Mao’s Great Leap Forward movement (1958–1962) and the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) produced their own forms of emigration. Prosecuted intellectuals seeking political asylum constituted a significant part of immigration to the US and Canada from the Chinese-speaking part of East Asia during these years. During these years, diplomatic relations between the United

States and the ROC (–1972) and later the PRC (1972–) also shaped immigration patterns.

1967 is often described as a watershed moment in the history of Canadian immigration, because in that year earlier immigration restrictions based on nationality were abolished in favor of a new point system that determines immigration eligibility on the basis of skills, education, language ability, and family connections. The new point system was said to reflect Canada’s national values. It was also a harbinger in many important changes to immigration policies

20 throughout the 1970s, including the Immigration Act of 1976 that established, in law, the objectives of immigration policy and the judicial independence of the immigration board. The act also outlined early versions of immigration classes.

Changes in immigration policies took place concomitantly and relatedly with the emergence of Canadian multiculturalism. What I describe generally as Canadian multiculturalism throughout this dissertation encompasses a wide range of policies, governmental programs, and ideological centers of gravity in everyday life enunciated by the Canadian

Multiculturalism Act of 1988, which states the government’s commitment to “equitable participation of individuals and communities of all origins.”12 Canadian multiculturalism is a significant and relevant backdrop to this dissertation, and I will discuss its history as well as its complicity in perpetuating essentialist ethnocultural stereotypes in greater detail in the next section. I mention Canadian multiculturalism here to show that Chinese immigration to Canada has historically been—and continue to be— a phenomenon co-produced by global political economy and the national projects of multiple states.

Following these structural shifts in Canada, the 1970s and 80s saw immigrants from

Hong Kong and Taiwan who were skilled workers or students. In the 1990s, in anticipation of

Hong Kong’s 1997 “return” from British occupation to the PRC, Canada saw another wave of immigration from Hong Kong. In the last decade, as China emerged as a major player in global economy, there had been another wave of immigration from PRC to Canada.

The history of Chinese immigration to Canada—and more specifically to Toronto—is well known, in part owing to advocates from the community who kept archives, such as Jean

12 Canadian Multiculturalism Act, 1988, 3(1)-(c).

Lumb, and wrote books, such as Arlene Chan, and in part because the City of Toronto has made a conscious effort to include a Chinese Canadian history in the municipal archive and exhibitions. But the sentiments often associated with this history of discrimination and racism aren’t always felt to the same extent across the many different factions of the diaspora, and especially not among the newer immigrants. Many of my interlocutors or people I have encountered during fieldwork did not know or care about this historical narrative of the Chinese

“as a people,” so to speak. It is also not uncommon for people to take the celebratory campaign of Canadian multiculturalism at face value.

My point in outlining this history, then, is not so much to capture the texture of contemporary life in Chinese Toronto, but rather to alert the readers to the broader sociopolitical contexts within which the specific practices I examine in this dissertation take place.

My objective in this dissertation is decidedly different from the proliferating literatures that 1) reconstruct the details of how the Chinese have managed life and made meaning in the face of legally sanctioned discrimination in Canada (Mar 2010 and Cho 2010, for example) and 2) deconstruct the essentialist impetus of Canadian multiculturalism that perpetuates fossilized notions of “culture” (Chazan et al 2011; Day 2010; Wickberg 2007) which imply that any non- white immigrant is a fundamentally inassimilable permanent alien (Lee 1999). But it is nonetheless important to keep these larger forces in mind.

1.2 Canadian Multiculturalism as a Conditioning Context

As we will see, in this dissertation I write against the idea that the ethnocultural identities, self-consciously articulated—often through the performing arts, and often invoking stereotypical representations of a cultural Other—cohere ethnic communities and scaffold people’s senses of self. The position I take here is predicated on a critical view of how “culture” is conceived, what

22 shapes culture, and how culture operates in Canada’s political landscape—especially since

Canadian multiculturalism is so often discussed in a celebratory way as a utopic foil to US assimilationist ethnic discourse. It is therefore necessary to briefly outline the history of Canadian multiculturalism, and perhaps more importantly, to explicitly state how and why I see its attendant policy and ideology as a conditioning context that profoundly influences what it means to be Chinese in Canada.

To provide a legislative framework for the Canadian Multiculturalism Policy endorsed by the government in 1971, in July 1988, The Canadian Multiculturalism Act—or, in its formal title, An Act for the Preservation and Enhancement of Multiculturalism in Canada— was passed by the parliament. This policy was in turn based on the recommendations of the Royal

Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism appointed in 1963. The Royal Commission strived to create a sense of national unity between the British and French parts of Canada. It was instructed to also consider other ethnic groups, but failed to do so. This attempt to bridge the

Anglophone and Francophone Canadians evolved into the Multiculturalism Policy of 1971. The

Multiculturalism Policy was allegedly updated to reflected “increasingly multicultural reality” of

Canadian society—that is, the abundant presence of “cultures” beyond the British and the

French—and in theory to assist the preservation and development of diverse ethnocultural practices. In reality, the Multiculturalism Policy was largely symbolic and resulted in few concrete, substantive changes in government operations. It also espoused a tokenistic and exoticizing conception of ethnic diversity—perhaps most notably in its lack of support for multilingualism (i.e. euphemistic “cultural groups” still have to conform to either French or

English cultural logics). Following a parliamentary standing committee’s report in 1987 that the

Policy reflected only the interests of European immigrants at the expense of new immigrants from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, the Canadian Multiculturalism Act was enacted by the

23 parliament in 1988. The Act sought to protect cultural heritage, reduce discrimination, and assist implementing multicultural programs within institutions. In addition to programs for cultural and linguistic retention and intercultural exchanges, the Act also pointed to immigrants’ concerns about employment, housing, and education. It outlined specific mandates for federal institutions, required annual reports on the fulfillment of the Act, and established protocols for provincial agreements and arrangements.13

In short, Canadian multiculturalism encompasses a cumulative set of government- endorsed policies and mandates from the past 50 years. It was developed initially to unify

Anglophone and Francophone Canadians—and its service for so-called visible minorities has largely come as an afterthought, although today’s multicultural discourse takes care to represent non-European ethnocultural minorities. Canadian multiculturalism has also become a point of national pride. The 1971 Policy was the first state-endorsed policy in the world that championed a multicultural imaginary of the nation, and both the Policy and the subsequent 1988 Act mandated an outward projection of an image of multicultural Canada on the international stage.14

Canadian multiculturalism has been lauded as much as it has been criticized in the academy and in popular discourse. Rather than opining on its philosophical validity here, I tease

13 This is an intensely abridged version of the history of Canadian Multiculturalism. For a more comprehensive historical account and analyses, including analyses of how the Multiculturalism Policy and Act served as political maneuvers in key elections, see Richard Day’s Multiculturalism and the History of Canadian Diversity (2000). Relatedly, the Government of Ontario has its own multiculturalism policy in accordance with the federal Act, which governs Ontario’s local administrations and ministries such as the Local Health Integration Network, which provides funding and regulations for the nursing home featured in chapter 2. 14 This projection and image management continues to this day. The 2016–2017 Multiculturalism Act Annual Report, for instance, details how Canadian model of “managing diversity” leads the rest of the world.

24 out two particularly relevant aspects to demonstrate how Canadian multiculturalism can be understood as a conditioning context that demands self-conscious and stereotypical representations of ethnocultural diversity—in music and in daily life.

The first has to do with the politics of recognition and what sociologist Richard Day describes as the public problem of ethnocultural diversity in his seminal work Multiculturalism and the History of Canadian Diversity (2000). In the book, Day presents an extensive archeology of the discursive moves utilized in key policy documents throughout the 19th century (including the

Royal Commission, the 1971 Policy, and the 1988 Act itself), and the ways in which this discourse of multiculturalism spread into popular press and academic studies. Through in-depth discourse analysis Day reveals a tautology of ethnocultural diversity—that is, people who embody the kinds of differences discursively constructed as Other in that historical moment. Canadian diversity, Day argues, is at once descriptive of a pre-existing fact and prescriptive of a necessary act: in this discourse, Canadian society has always included people of diverse ethnocultural origins living together in harmony, so the mandates of the multiculturalism policy seem only natural, as it is merely a reflection of reality. But since it is after all a necessary state policy that explicitly seeks to manage diversity—through mandated recognition, protection, assistance, and administration—it also seems like Canadian multiculturalism is a crowning achievement of the governing powers; a happy product of egalitarian believes. For Day, this circular logic insidiously naturalizes and conceals: 1) a history of settler colonialism and racism in Canada and the

Multiculturalism Policy’s Eurocentric roots, and 2) that ethnocultural diversity in this discourse is presented as a public problem necessitating solutions—or at least management.

A crucial element of Day’s critique of multiculturalism as both a fact and an act is the politics of recognition. In analyzing Canadian Multiculturalism Act’s insistence on the

25 government’s responsibility to recognize the ethnocultural minorities, Day engages with Charles

Taylor’s famous derivation of Hegelian “recognition” (1992) and Taylor’s conception of recognition as identity. Day unpacks the ways in which multiculturalism assumes and demands those who embody diversity to achieve a full ethnocultural identity through the government’s recognizing them as such. The legibility of a minority community in Canada, in other words, depends on its intelligibility as an ethnocultural Other. In the context of my project, this means that performances of Chineseness should always be heard and understood in relation to the demands of Canadian multiculturalism.

Second, the reach of Canadian multiculturalism is far, wide, and woven into everyday life. There are the conspicuous official multiculturalism programs at the federal, provincial, and municipal levels, such as Asian-Pacific Heritage Month (May of each year, when Asian-Pacific ethnic festivals are held and special ethnocultural programs are aired on the CBC), the federal

Inter-Action multiculturalism grant for cultural exchanges with ethnic minorities, or the Ontario

Multicultural Capacity Grants, among others. In less obvious ways, through granting agencies,

Canadian multiculturalism also acts as a gatekeeper that curates ethnocultural sounds in the music scene, as ethnomusicologist Parmela Attariwala has demonstrated in her dissertation “Eh

440: Tuning into the Effects of Multiculturalism on Publicly Funded Canadian Music” (2013). In this work, Attariwala draws on her experience serving on the arts councils of Canada, Ontario, and Toronto, and outlines how the ideology of multiculturalism become ethnocultural stereotypes in practice. Further beyond these explicit promotions of Canadian multicultural ideology and its attendant representational politics, governmental organizations of public health, business development, correctional facilities, and many others are also informed and governed by the Act—which, all together, culminate into the Day’s observation. It is nearly impossible to live in Canada without being affected by multiculturalism.

1.3 Moving beyond the Chinese diaspora

In Forget Chineseness (2017), an expansion of his polemically titled “Fuck Chineseness: On the Ambiguities of Ethnicity as Culture as Identity” (1996), historian Allen Chun cogently argues that the concept of Chineseness—or what Wang Gungwu calls the fantasy of cultural China

(2006), or Aihwa Ong’s “flexible citizenship” (1999), or any other number of attempts to wrestle with the evasive Chinese identity that stretches across diasporic communities that formed as a result of centuries of emigration—must be understood as a historically contingent, hollowed out concept that serves different political agendas of its producers. What Chineseness really constitutes hardly matters, Chun notes, since its function lies entirely in the fact that there seems to be a Chineseness that coheres those who identify with it.

I take Chun’s point seriously in thinking through the identity politics of Toronto’s

Chinese diaspora, where mandates of Canadian multiculturalism often demand and preconfigure what it means to be Chinese in Canada. Chineseness and its attendant cultural practices here are more than a way to retain collective memories, feel a sense of historical continuity, and perform differences. Chineseness in the Canadian context is also about subjecting one’s self to the demands of a rather simplistic conception of culture and a tokenistic form of diversity—a self- essentialist trade-off for legibility.15

In an effort to unsettle this overdetermined Chineseness, which is almost ubiquitous in

15 In addition to Day (2000, see also Edgar Wickberg’s work on this issue (2007). And in fact my recapitulation of the history of the Chinese above was intentionally written with a distance, because I think that story is complicit in the uncritically triumphant discourse about Canadian multiculturalism.

27 writings about Chinese diaspora, I adapt Shu-mei Shih’s term “Sinophone” to describe the people and the social spheres featured in this dissertation. Shih first coined the term in her book

Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific (2007) to mean Chinese-speaking, and it has since then gained noticeable traction within Chinese studies in the last ten years (Chiang and

Heinrich 2013; Shih 2013). For Shih, the shift from “Chinese diaspora” to Sinophone is a decidedly political move, as Sinophone relocates the impetus of Chinese identities from China as a place of origin to the practice of speaking.16 Sinophone also reimagines the Chinese community as something that draws its boundaries around mutual intelligibility rather than bloodline lineages (2007, 23). 17

Sinophone for Shih “debunks ‘Chinese diaspora’ as the organizing concept for the study of various immigrant people who left China from centuries ago up to the present.” This allows her, then, to get out of the trap of essentialist and totalizing concepts of “Chineseness” and “the

Chinese.” Such debunking also opens new possibilities for belonging, dwelling, and as I demonstrate in this dissertation, for making oneself feel at home. Indeed, Shih proclaims, “to decouple homeness and origin [in China] is to recognize the imperative of living as a political subject within a particular geopolitical space in a specific time with deep local commitments. To

16 Shih acknowledges that the term is not perfect, and notes that “instances of Sinophone culture in flux show how the Sinophone can only be a transitional category and a partial description of the complexities of culture in a given location” (189). One problem of the term is that the other cultural spheres denoted by –phone (e.g. Francophone and Anglophone) tend to be products of colonialism, where as Sinophone describes dispersals through (mostly) voluntary migration. The concept of Sinophone also clearly privileges language over other cultural forms, and perhaps too readily welcomes a critique of logocentricism. 17 In outlining how Sinophone can be an apt metaphor for simultaneously being mutually intelligible and yet still sensitive to nuanced differences—what I describe asa “fuzzy logic of Chineseness”—Shih gave an example: “the majority of Taiwanese may speak Mandarin, which is very similar to the Chinese standard putonghua, but the particular inflections, accents, diction, and even aspects of grammar are divergent, not to mention enunciation” (189, emphasis mine).

28 link homeness with the place of residence therefore becomes an ethical act that chooses concrete political engagement in the local” (190). In other words, Shih’s Sinophone is a theoretical framework which allows for a commitment to the here and now.

While the term Sinophone may be taken simply as “Chinese-speaking,” in my deployment, I follow the political nuances that Shih highlights in her formulation: Sinophone offers a geographically emancipated alternative to the “Chinese.” In the diasporic context, I use

Sinophone to discuss a set of cultural practices without having to evoke China as a homeland. In the Canadian context, I use Sinophone to circumvent an overdetermined Chinese ethnicity.

Finally, although I do not intend to use the concept of Sinophone to elevate speech and language above all the other sonic forms of everyday expression, I do highlight how the “–phone” of

Sinophone is evocative for a project on sounding and listening practices: at its core, the

Sinophone cultural sphere is delineated around mutual intelligibility— that is, listening interpretively to understand each other, and sounding in ways that are intelligible. Sinophone, adapted for this project, then, can perhaps be understood as a culturally informed and situated mode of engagements with sound.18

Shih’s theorization of the Sinophone is part of a larger intellectual project of cultural theorists, to at once decenter the contested figure of China in the global diasporic networks and

18 In the earlier iterations of this dissertation I had outlined a tripartite model of Chinese sonic lives that encompassed music, speech, and everyday sounds such as kitchen clamors. Accordingly, I had explicitly stated that I draw on ethnomusicology, linguistic anthropology, and the nascent field of Sound Studies for analytical frameworks. While this tripartite model is tidier than this version’s endorsement of a holistic approach to sounds, I eventually moved beyond that model because it reproduces the rather artificial categorization of sounds I find problematic in these three academic disciplines, even if I focus on the interstices between two types of sounds.

29 to resist giving into U.S. cultural imperialism (2007, 190).19 These scholars’ works, in other words, seek to untether people from the de facto homeland, and in so doing emancipate them from the homeland-diaspora dichotomy, while giving credence to the connections forged in the dispersed communities. My dissertation contributes to this endeavor. I also hope that Sinophone may provide a nimbler and more productive way of thinking across different migration generations without having to invoke those terms, which are notorious for their inadequacy in describing experiences and cultural ties. The term “diaspora” intersects with the problems of migration generation. There isn’t a clear consensus as to exactly which generation does and does not count as part of the diaspora (Tölölyan 1996; Zheng 2010), but the language of migration generation carries a strong assimilationist overtone and is a vestige of studies on earlier migration patterns, when people might move once and then settle for life, and when cultural retention occurred within diasporic formations. The terms have not ceased to be relevant, but Sinophone can perhaps attend to some of emergent characteristics in the more recent waves of migration.

2 The ethnomusicology of diaspora

Special issues on music and diaspora in the journals Diaspora (1994), Asian Music (2009),

Ethnomusicology Forum (2007), and the Society for Ethnomusicology Student Newsletter (2015) all point to how ethnomusicological studies of diaspora have gained traction in recent decades. Although each of these special issues suggests that an ethnomusicology of diaspora was on the horizon at the time of publication, Bruno Nettl’s edited volume Eight Urban Musical Cultures: Tradition and

Change had perhaps already heralded this in the field back in 1978, as it outlines such central

19 Chun also explains in detail how the geographical boundaries of “China” had historically been rather unstable and hotly contested, and how a China-based conception of Chineseness is Han- centric and erases ethnic minorities in today’s PRC.

30 issues as cultural retention, demarcation of ethnic communities, and identities based on cultural differences—questions that continue to concern the ethnomusicology of diaspora to this day.

There are several observable trends in this literature, especially in terms of how scholars have conceptualized the roles of music in diasporic communities. The first traces a clearly defined musical genre across several national borders, focusing on processes of cultural production in the diaspora. In so doing, these works explore the productions, transformations, and feedback of culture between homeland and diaspora, often demonstrating how conditions of immigration inflect cultural processes in audible ways (Chavez 2017; Harris 2012; Rao 2000,

2016; Ng 2015). By studying musical production in the deterritorialized form afforded by the diaspora, these scholars demonstrate that culture does not need to remain planted in the soil— following the botanical metaphor of diaspora—to operate (Averill 1994; Hemmasi 2010; Slobin

2003), and indeed may stretch across the geopolitical borders of nations (Sugarman 2004; Chow-

Morris 2004). This approach generates important theoretical insights both about the ontological status of musical cultures and the concept of diaspora through musicological analyses, while also making a case for diasporic and transnational perspectives as productive ways to intervene in the literature on the musical genres in question.

The other trend involves analyzing the roles of music in the social life of a diasporic people. Following diaspora studies’ emphasis on the role of a real or imagined homeland in diaspora, works that take this approach often emphasize music’s role in sustaining that connection with the homeland (Moser and Racy 2017).20 The specific mechanisms of such

20 Political scientist William Safran’s oft-cited definition (1991) of a diaspora include six perameters: 1) dispersal from a specific original “center” to a periphery/ foreign regions, 2) retention of a collective memory, vision, or myth about their original homeland—its physical

31 homeland connections vary: some focus on performers of music as representatives of the overall diasporic community, and theorize that music—typically traditional—engenders a cultural sphere that stands in for an expansion of the homeland (Alajaji 2015; Chow-Morris 2009;

Ramnarine 2007; Riddle 1983; Slobin 2003), or an in-between space that allows people to negotiate between the homeland and the host society (Alajaji 2013; Um 2005; Zheng 2010).

Music can also mark the boundaries of a tight community in diaspora (Gopinath 1995; McGuire

2014) or stratifications within the community (Reyes 1999; Wilson 2006), or serve as a sounding archive documenting a people’s migratory history (Silverman 2012; Shelemay 1998; League

2017). In these formulations of music in diaspora, music’s portability and capacity for emplacement (Collins 2010; Wrazen 2007) are often highlighted. Some studies focus on transnational circulations of people, practices, and sounds between places of origin and destinations of immigration (Zheng 1994); yet others zoom in on non-specialists’ consumption of music from the homeland as symbolic engagements with that homeland (Kyker 2013; Lu 2011;

Um 2000).

Often, works on music’s social utilities in diasporic life also emphasize how music signifies and legitimizes differences between those living in diaspora and those belonging to host environments. Drawing on Clifford’s (1994) and Hall’s (1994) theories about diasporic cultural

location, history, and achievements; 3) beliefs that they are not fully accepted by their host society and therefore feel partly alienated and insulated; 4) the belief that their ancestral homeland as their true, ideal home that they would eventually return; 5) believe that they should be committed to the maintenance or restoration of their original homeland and to its safety and prosperity; and 6) a continuous effort to related, personally or vicariously, to that homeland in one way or another, and their ethnocommunal consciousness and solidarity are importantly defined by the existence of such a relationship.This formulation is of course somewhat outdated and has its problems, which I will discuss at length in a later section. I note Safran’s definition here as an example of the prevalent conception of diaspora.

32 life and identity formation, these ethnomusicological studies pivot the emphasis on homeland into arguments about music’s unique role in flexible identity negotiations (Zheng 2010 and

Alajaji 2015 are particularly good examples), and, ultimately, for imagining a coherent ethnicity.

This dissertation is also situated a small collection of ethnomusicological studies on the

Chinese diaspora in the United States and in Canada, the majority of which adopts the second approach I have outlined above—in which music is taken as a space of intensified identity negotiation or ethnicization.21 I follow some of these scholars’ footstep in concentrating on one city rather than making broad claims about the entirety of the North American Chinese diaspora. Ronald Riddle’s Flying Dragons, Flowing Streams: Music in the Life of San Francisco Chinese

(1983) is one such example.22 In it, Riddle seeks “to paint a general picture of the role of music clubs and other musical groups among San Francisco’s Chinese” (223) in the early 1970s. Riddle mainly focuses on Cantonese opera clubs as “the conspicuous center of musical activity, as [they] offered Cantonese opera every day of the week, an attraction well attended by the Chinese and also de rigueur for tourists,” but he also notes the presence of “choirs of Chinatown’s eight

Christian churches, drum-and bugle corps that are sponsored by Chinese-language schools and civic groups, and marching band and other musical organizations of the local public schools”

(226). That Cantonese opera is a particularly important part of the musical life of the Chinese diaspora in the US and Canada is echoed by Nancy Rao’s historical studies (2000, 2016).

21 I bracket off other established and well-known Chinese communities (e.g. across Southeast Asia) because those communities face a different set of historical and social conditions and I find it problematic to lump them all together. That being said, Fred Lau’s work on Chinese in Thailand is important and worth mentioning here. 22 The commonly referenced “earliest” account is a brief description in Louis J. Beck’s New York’s Chinatown (1898), in which Beck discusses the sounds emanating from Chinese opera houses on Doyer Street in Manhattan (78) in erroneous (Zheng 2010, 87) and extremely racist terms. I prefer Riddle.

Su Zheng’s Claiming Diaspora (2010) is a pillar in music studies on Chinese diaspora, and in the ethnomusicology of diaspora in general. Grounded in New York City in the early 1990s,

Zheng’s work primarily concerns first-generation Chinese immigrants, and argues that the diasporic experience is simultaneously an opportunity for transcendental hybridity and a mourning of the estrangements from home. For Zheng, music—Chinese or otherwise, although

Zheng focused mostly on genres conventionally described as Chinese music—provides a space for diasporic people to become the postmodern diasporic figures that they are. Similarly rooted in New York and specifically in the Manhattan Chinatown, Dale Wilson’s 2006 article explores how Fuzhou immigrants reconstructed “traditional” wedding music and ceremonies from memory to fend off Cantonese bullies within the broader Chinese community. Wilson’s work explores a diasporic issue through a Chinese case study, rather than trying to capture a comprehensive picture like Riddle and Zheng. In the Canadian context, Kim Chow-Morris’

2009 article and Colin McGuire’s dissertation (2015) and articles explore how transplanted

Chinese aesthetics or specialized practices (such as martial arts) manifest sonically in diverse genres and locales. Some of the case studies explored by these Canadian Chinese specialists include the instrumental ensemble jiangnan sizhu (silk and bamboo) in Montreal (Chow-Morris) and lion dances accompanied by drums in Toronto (McGuire). Though not exclusively a study on the diaspora, Wing Chung Ng ‘s The Rise of Cantonese Opera (2015) includes a chapter on

Cantonese opera clubs in Vancouver, demonstrating the importance of oversea communities in the emergence of Cantonese opera.

McGuire’s work is based on long-term participant-observation in an all-men Kung Fu club in Toronto’s Downtown Chinatown (near the intersection between Spadina Avenue and

Dundas Street West), and builds on his skills as a martial artist. His work and my dissertation on mostly women in domestic spaces are complementary both in theoretical orientations and in

34 ethnographic coverage. We have each attended to what the other couldn’t. In conjunction with

McGuire’s, I see this dissertation attesting to the range of diversity within Sinophone Toronto.

Beyond the Chinese diaspora and beyond musical genres that are clearly rooted in China there is also a literature on the roles of music in negotiating hybrid, emergent Asian American identities, often focusing more directly than the diaspora literature on the emergence of Asian

America through racialized and gendered bodies (Grace Wang 2015; Wong 2004; Hsu 2012;

Yoon 2001). Although my project does not engage frontally with this literature, it has informed much of my critical thoughts about ethnicity in a multiethnic, multiracial context.

This dissertation contributes to the ethnomusicology of diaspora, and specifically the identity-based approach, in several ways. First, the vast majority of the literature at large is organized along genre lines.23 While passing observations abound in the many works cited above, few attend specifically to the interstitial spaces between different musical genres, between music mapped onto different places, and between different categories of sound. The only exceptions are theorizations on musical-cum-social hybridity, which actually reify rather than dissolve boundaries between genres. I see this dissertation as a useful complement to the existing literature, as I take different genres of music and sound as constituents of a bricolage that is the complex mess of daily life. I also complement the literature, which focuses so much on the time people spend listening to or making music, by studying the hours and days between these explicitly musical moments.24

23 The literature still focuses predominantly on traditional musical styles, although there are increasing and notable exceptions that addresses mass mediated popular music (e.g. Hemmasi 2010; Kyker 2012; Um 2005). 24 See, for example, Simon Frith (2003) and Tia DeNora (2000).

3 Making Do

In this dissertation I trace the concept of “home” as a kind of “making do,” the makeshift creativity championed in de Certeau’s theoretical work on everyday life (1984). The study of everyday life is informed by the domain of theory generally known as practice theory (Bourdieu

1984; de Certeau 1984; Giddens 1984). As a response to the privileging of ideology or political economy as the organizing principle of social life, where individual people are thought of as merely cogs in the machine, practice theory foregrounds practice—concrete things that people do—as the interface between larger social formations and individuals. Taking the material conditions of social life seriously, and shifting attention from unveiling totalizing structures to theorizing processes, this body of literature attends to specific actions, interactions, and indeed,

“the manner of using [culture]” (Bourdieu 1984, 2), and considers these practices as the constitutive “stuff” of society. In this framework, a person’s improvised actions and the cartographies of ideological forces are taken to be co-constitutive.

Sociologist Anthony Giddens’ theory of structuration exemplifies the relationship between structures, agentive actors, and practice. 25 In The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of

Structuration (1984), Giddens formulates the concept of structuration, the mediating process between recurrent patterns of actions carried out by agents (structures) and “situated activities” that systematically reproduce social structures (systems) (1984, 25). Giddens conceptualizes a

25 I am aware that there is a whole debate about intentions in agents or agentive acts. That debate is beyond the scope of my project, and in any case I take an agent to be someone whose action have intended, unintended, or subconsciously intended effects in the world, and that whatever happened would not have happened without this agent’s intervention. In other words, the same way that Giddens conceived of an agent.

36 cyclical, recursive process through which an individual’s action is somewhat informed by structures, and that action contributes to the reproduction or minor adjustments of the systems.

Social systems in Giddens’ formulation are the endlessly repeated result of individual practices.

“Structuration” is therefore a theory of neither the structure nor the individual, but rather, a holistic process that encompasses both.

In many ways the structures in Giddens’ theory of structuration are similar to Pierre

Bourdieu’s habitus. Famously known as the embodied perceivable field of possibilities, Bourdieu articulates his concept of habitus in Distinctions (1984) as “a structured and structuring structure”

(171), conditioned by conditions of existence, that serves as a scheme for generating “classifiable practices and works” (ibid.) as well as taste. Individuals can alter their field of possibilities through acts of perception and apprehension, which is to say that for Bourdieu, too, the individual remains agentive and full of potential to change social orders.

Similarly conceiving of each individual in large structures as both the product and producer of that structure, Michel de Certeau’s tactics is a theory of how people might concretely respond to systems and structures. He theorizes tactics as “the clandestine forms taken by the dispersed, tactical, and make-shift creativity” to subtly subvert strategies, the techniques of at-times violent social ordering. In de Certeau’s consideration, these ephemeral, improvisatory tactics in everyday life are the substance of social life. He explains tactics through quotidian examples— renters living in a rented apartment “furnish [it] with acts and memories” (1984, xxi) much like how pedestrians detour from the roads.

While Giddens and Bourdieu write in rather lofty language, de Certeau’s work brings to the fore the quotidian, everyday quality of these practices as the substance of social life. Similarly following these practice-oriented lines of thinking, earlier everyday life studies considers the

37 practitioners of these tactics—or, the recursive acts that reinscribe a system in Giddens’ terms—as a sort of “expert sociologists” who are capable of make sense of their lived experiences by deploying a series of everyday techniques (Douglas 1970). Everyday life studies take the objective reality of social fact as ongoing accumulations of concrete daily practices, and as such considers the quotidian as an artful world-making process. As well, Erving Goffman’s Presentation of the Self in

Everyday Life (1959) theorizes a series of impression-management techniques through which people perform who they think they are, somewhat improvisatorially and spontaneously, during face-to-face social interactions. Cultural studies scholar Ben Highmore takes a slightly different approach, addressing the aesthetics each individual person could produce through routine, habits, and the objects (books, clothes, things) with which they surround themselves (2004, 2011).

Through this aesthetic of everyday life, Highmore presents an argument in accordance with the goals of everyday life studies—the quest to understand how people explain their own lived experiences, and the social worlds of which they are a part.

My thinking in this dissertation is indebted to the above-mentioned theorists of practice in everyday life. Rather than charting specific sounds in a self-contained system of meaning, I focus on practices of sounding and listening as the pivoting points between the emergent subject and structuring structures in the social, historical, and political contexts. I trace moments of “making do” in these sonic practices as my key interlocutors move across national, cultural, and ideological borders.

There are three particularly poignant aspects of the kind of “making do” championed by practice theory that emerged in my observations and that I seek to foreground in the ethnographic chapters to follow:

1) First, an emphasis on future-oriented potentials. “Making do” in de Certeau’s

formulation is spontaneous and responsive. It is not a premeditation, but rather a series of

moves conjured on the spot. For me, making do is characterized by a looming possibility

of doing something unexpected. That looming possibility is what gives my interlocutors a

sense of agency, as they became aware of the opportunities to show their creativity vis-à-

vis the structuring structures.

2) Second, making do is not just about resistance, refusal, or squeezing by in the interstices

between the stable terrains of social hierarchies. It is also about tweaking, hacking, and

adapting as one dwells in a relatively stable structure.

3) Finally, at its heart, making do is a tactic of production. It makes a bricolage, a new story

woven together with fragments of the old.

In thinking through the ethnographic material, I also hope to push the concept of

“making do” one step further, and argue that the ways in which my interlocutors make do in their private lives are mediated by public cultures, with the attendant constraints related to modes of production and circulation, ideological inflections, and preconceptions about culture, identity, and ethnicity. These constraints still very much condition my interlocutors, and at times become part of their own repertoire.

4 Homes 4.1 Home as an orientation

Among the other important but inadequate concepts I explore in this dissertation—such as “diaspora” and “Chineseness”—my approach to the concept of “home” is perhaps the least straight forward. In this section I outline how I came to think about the concept of home, and

39 indeed the plural possibilities of “homes,” as an open-ended orientation rather than just social imaginaries of homelands.26 In so doing, I hope to capture some of the complexities of home.

Home is a spatial poetic (Bachelard 1958) that spans multiple geographical scales

(homelands, home nations, residential quarters), and that enacts the comfort of familiarity and belonging at the same time as it does the pains and liberations of not belonging. In migration and diaspora studies, the figure of home looms large. Unsurprisingly, home in this literature refers mostly to the migrant’s place(s) of origin, typically with noticeable cultural differences from the place(s) that the migrant currently reside—in other words, homelands. Real, imaginary, and emotional connections to this kind of home have been central to theories of diasporic identity and experience. Edna Bonacich’s (1973) foundational work famously distinguished two categories of immigrants, settlers and sojourners, based on whether or not they plan on returning home.

Similarly, other categories of migrant subjects are often articulated with various relationships to home: an exilic migrant is someone who cannot return (Hemmasi 2010 for instance); a refugee has fled from home (Reyes 1999). Studies of diasporas as established immigrant communities also rely on home, theorizing that real or symbolic tethering to homelands is the defining characteristic of a diaspora (Safran 1991; Waldinger 2008).27 This type of homeland imaginary is important because it provides a basis for demarcating the boundaries of diasporic communities,

26 I follow Charles Taylor’s formulation of social imaginaries as “that common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy”…”often not expressed in theoretical terms, but…carried in images, stories, and legends” (Taylor 2004, 23). 27 The term diaspora was originally used to describe the Jewish dispersal around the world, but since the 1990s it has been used broadly and liberally to describe communities and cultures of immigrants from all kinds of places (Brubaker 2005), perhaps most notably Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic (1993). In accordance with the general practice in humanities, and following Su Zheng (1994, 2010) and Shu-mei Shih (2007), I am adopting the more liberal use here, and will bracket the question about whether you can use diaspora to describe what had formerly been known as “the Chinese Overseas.”

40 for imagining the cohesion of those communities, and for making sense of the differences people live and feel against their surroundings (the “host” country) by feeling like they belong to a somewhat coherent history located somewhere else. Particularly relevant to ethnomusicology, this “home” can also often manifest in the form of diasporic cultural retention, wherein the specifics of a cultural practice become fossilized in the diaspora, rather than changing along with those “back home.”28 “Culture” in this context can sometimes become a shorthand for homeland connections.

Although home is demonstrably useful and meaningful, its centrality isn’t without problems.29 An obvious one is the slippage between homeland as a place, and home nation as a political entity. For instance, in her 2015 monograph, ethnomusicologist Sylvia Alajaji demonstrates how problematic it has been for her interviewees when the Republic of Armenia is conflated with the historical West Armenia, the latter being their “spiritual” home. The same problem is relevant for the Chinese diaspora, as “China” as a political entity has been

28 Cultural retention was much more useful of a concept in the earlier models of migration, when people moved transnationally perhaps only once in their entire lives, and return visits were unlikely or extremely rare. In general it is now widely accepted that cultural retention happens alongside innovation and hybridization as part of the ongoing process of identity negotiation and as a kind of diasporic assertion in complex transnational cultural politics. Scholars in the last two decades have mostly attended to how the retained cultural practices participate in issues of authenticity, cultural appropriation, and exoticism. With all the disclaimers about whether Taiwan can be considered a Chinese diaspora, Nancy Guy’s work on Peking Opera on Taiwan (2005) is a great example of this particular phenomenon. Another example of cultural retention is Colin McGuire’s 2015 dissertation on traditional Chinese martial art and drumming in Toronto’s downtown Chinatown. Also exemplifying to different extents are works by Bruno Nettl (1978), Peter Manuel (2015), Louise Wrazen (2007), and to a lesser extent, Carol Silverman (2012). 29 Here, I also bracket the seemingly logical move from problematizing home as origins to theorizing hybridity or syncretism, which is also especially prominently featured in music (for instance, Wendy Hsu’s work on Asian American rock (2012). Hybridity and performances of hybridity are important processes, but I actually think tracing hybridity in music reproduces the insistence of home/origins and its attendant problems.

41 reconfigured so many times throughout the twentieth century. Although Su Zheng demonstrates in her 1994 article that the schism between home nation, homeland, and cultural home can be productively excavated in thinking about an expansive diasporic network,30 all in all, “home” as homeland proves to be inadequate and problematically unstable in analyses of diasporic identity formation. Another common problem of this conception of diaspora’s “home” is that it oversimplifies the pathways of migration to just two points on a map: the home and the host country.31 This is obviously problematic when it comes to migratory histories that may span across multiple geographical locations, multiple generations, and multiple political entities competing to be the legitimate home nation (Alajaji 2015; Silverman 2012; Zheng 2010).

In addition to its conceptual inadequacy, the homeland/diaspora dichotomy is also problematic in its implicit politics: anthropologist Robin Cohen (2008) and Kachig Tölölyan

(1996) both note that an overdetermined homeland in diasporic discourses misrepresents the diaspora as far more homogeneous than it actually is, and creates opportunities for essentialist views of who the people living in the diaspora really are. I push Cohen and Tölölyan’s observations a step further, and argue that a conception of diasporic identity resting so heavily on the homeland, and that is so intensely oriented toward a past and an elsewhere, renders the people living in diaspora permanent aliens fated to never belong—neither to the past and the places they came from, nor to the present here. This particular issue of home is especially

30 Su Zheng theorizes three levels of networks that allowed Chinese musicians in the U.S. to simultaneously engage with people back home, with other diasporas, and the awkward in- between places like Taiwan which may been considered a Chinese “diaspora,” or a Chinese homeland, or something un-Chinese, depending on who you ask. 31 Or, what James Clifford calls a “teleology of origin/return” (1994, 306).

42 relevant for the Chinese in North American contexts, who are already suspended in a long history playing the role of the permanent aliens.32

There is another less discussed, but equally important problem with putting homeland in the center of diasporic identity formations. In her critical reflections against diaspora, Shu-mei

Shih points out that it is actually a rather privileged position which enables longing for the homeland from diaspora, and that this longing can eclipse critical views on how the diaspora reproduces homeland’s forms of social marginalization. Shih notes that such insistence on homelands and attendant claims of rootlessness “by some nostalgia-driven, middle-class, first- generation immigrant is, for example, oftentimes narcissistic to the extent that it is not aware of its own trenchant conservatism and even racism” (2007, 190). In other words, privileging home in the diaspora is to also privilege those who had a secure belonging to a homeland that could be lost through the process of immigration.

As we will see, the three case studies I have chosen to include in this dissertation demonstrate many of the inadequacies of the kinds of home and homelands perpetuated in diaspora and migration studies. At the same time, however, I am sympathetic to Alajaji’s contention that home and homelands, broadly speaking, are still observably significant to so many people’s lives (2015, 12-3). Even if the kind of privileged people who can comfortably take up diasporic nostalgia for the homeland are not the main focus of this project, to completely throw out that aspect of diasporic life to the exclusion of my interlocutors’ experience of

32 See Robert G. Lee’s Orientals (1999). Lee shows how U.S. stereotypes of the Chinese throughout the twentieth century (the indentured labor, the yellow peril, the domestic servant, the model minority) have each embodied American xenophobic anxieties of the corresponding era. In other words, Lee argues, while the specifics of these stereotypes have changed, the Chinese had historically been the incomprehensible menacing outsiders whose status is impossible to change.

43 marginalization seems to be oversimplifying the situation, and would miss out on the theoretical questions posed by home, which are clearly important to so many people. Home remains relevant to my interlocutors in part because the they are subjected to [Chinese] homeland imaginaries in Toronto if they are at all “read” as Chinese, and in part because, however problematic, these imaginaries can still be a resource in everyday “making do.”

Instead of either abolishing the concept of “home” or conceding to a version of “home

[as] complex and multiple”(Alajaji 2015), which tells us little that we don’t already know, I take a rather different theoretical approach inspired by reflections on “home” from geography, anthropology, and philosophy, where scholars have variously asked “whether or not home is (a) place(s), (a) space(s), feeling(s), practices, and/or an active state of state of being in the world”

(Mallett 2004, 65). Or perhaps, home may be many of these things at once. These thoughts on home do not take for granted the trappings of “diaspora,” and may productively point to ways of broadening our imaginations of home—the kinds of home that everyone deals with and that don’t presume an immigrant’s alterity.33

I am drawn to Martin Heidegger’s assertion that “dwelling” is a state of being and an act of bringing the environment, space, and forms of social relations into alignment with one another. This “bringing into alignment” is often accomplished through material constructions— that is, buildings. A building is a testimony of dwelling, which I take to be an orientation in life that is akin to de Certeau’s make-shift creativity (1984); the improvised assemblage. Home in this sense is more about a willingness to make a life regardless of geographical location or space.

33 There is actually a rather expansive literature on home and housing studies across these disciplines along with sociology. In this dissertation I draw on only what helps me think through the issues of home in diasporic contexts. For a useful and much more comprehensive review, see Shelley Mallett’s article (2004).

In addition to Heidegger, I also take as a premise cultural geography’s assertion that space is a complex network of intertwining social relations “stretched out” from physical constructions (Lefebvre 1974, Massey 1994), and this imbrication of the social and the spatial is applicable in considerations of home as well. Though often (rightly) critiqued for its romanticization of home, Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1958) is an early and oft-cited example of how experiences of a familiar house are co-constituted with memories, reveries, and intimate moments between the people who also occupied that house, and how other houses are similarly mediated by those family relations. Shifting away from the experience of home, other works also address the ways in which ideologies about family manifest in housing designs, or how the physical and material space afford certain kinds of social practices.34 Growing out of the idea that home is at once material and social, Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling argue in their book

Home (2006) that the romanticized portrayal of home and the implied homogeneity in experiences of home erase its potential for struggle and conflict, which most often fall on women’s shoulders, as does most of domestic labour. Home is therefore not just a safe haven sequestered from politics and publics—rather it is a site through which people may engage with these things. Blunt and Dowling focus on ideologies of gender and gendered power, but I think their critical approach can be useful for thinking about other identities as well.

An illuminating example of how Heidegger’s notion of dwelling and Bachelard’s spatial poetics of the house come together is anthropologist Anne Allison’s Precarious Japan (2013). In this monograph, Allison teases out alternative forms of sociality that emerged in response to “the breakdown or liquidization of the relationship between human time and capitalist value at the

34 Gieseking et al. (2014) also discuss how the private home (with a foyer and a door and individual rooms) and the concept of domesticity emerged concomitantly in early modern Europe with the public sphere.

45 level of the (re)productive family home that marks the form of precarity and unease experienced in post-postwar Japan” (118). Allison examines the faltering of Japan’s postwar “My Homeism,” where social stability and security was built on men’s home-like sense of belonging to their work, and women’s confinement to domestic spheres. Precarity, Allison notes, is a condition of constantly needing each other to survive as the nationalistic “My Homeism” comes undone in late 20th and early 21st century. Allison’s precarity is, in short, a new kind of home in homelessness. Though she does not engage directly with Heidegger, to me, Allison’s conception of home—as sociality and making do in the face of the disintegration of such structures as family, shelter, nation, or any other conventional homes—is in the same spirit. Home here is an insistence to survive despite the insufficiencies and impossibilities of normative belongings, which are mediated through spaces of different scales.

Home, conceptualized as such, is extraordinary in its all-encompassing, multivalent, pervasive, intimate ordinariness. Rather than trying to pin down one definition and one theoretical framework, in the process of researching and writing, I have intentionally kept the concept of home somewhat open-ended, welcoming new possibilities introduced both by my interlocutors and by considerations from different intellectual lineages. Part of my methodology, then, is to trace and think through the many different, entangled possibilities of home. I problematize some of them and celebrate others, with the hope of finding out how all of these conceptions of home configure social structures and mediate experiences of being a person.

The practices and experiences of “homes” I hope to transduce in this dissertation may sympathetically vibrate with intimacy, privacy, domesticity, family, care, comfort, familiarity, and belonging. It may also easily explode out of all of these things in domestic violence, oppressive gendering through uneven distribution of domestic labour, inherent heteronormativity and

46 patriarchy in modern imaginations of family, or other ways in which people inextricably don’t get along and don't belong. In such cases, home may be optimism and recovery: making do in making new homes, and making do by making yourself at home.

4.2 Jia: Home in Chinese

The multivalent Chinese word for “home,” jia (), helpfully encapsulates some of these complexities.35 The written character for “home” is an ideographic representation of a pig under the roof—that is, food, shelter, and the attendant sense of security.36 In literary Chinese and spoken Mandarin, the syllable jia may refer to a range of spatial constructions including jujia

(domesticity), zhujia (residence, household), jiaxiang (homeland), guojia (nation as home). Jia may also refer to a family (jiating), parents (jiazhang, lit. an elder of the jia), and the head of a family is expressed as “master of a jia” (yijia zhizhu). Jia can also refer to a person who embodies some sort of notable mastery or expertise. An artist is a hua (painting) jia, a master musician is a yinyue(music) jia, an ethnomusicologist is a minzu (ethnic) yinyuexue(musicology) jia. Here, jia is a capacious potential.

The meanings of jia are relatively clear in the above examples, but there are many situations where jia simultaneously refers to multiple, superimposed concepts, or where it is syntactically impossible to distinguish one from another. For instance, in asking whether there is someone zaijiali (inside the jia), one could be asking “is there someone home to answer the door,”

35 This is only relevant to Chinese contexts: it has been pointed out that home conflates kinship, family, and the housing in Anglo-European conceptions (Gorman-Murray 2006; Mallett 2004; and Long 2013). 36 One version of the etymology of this character notes that the pig is supposedly pregnant, denoting long-term food supply and stability.

47 or “do you have family,” or (as is often the case) both.

Certain aspects of Chinese family structures are also often articulated in housing terms, and can manifest in actual housing arrangements. To get married would be to cheng (establish) jia

(home). A counting word for spouses is fang (house/room), and newlyweds might describe themselves as having just married “yi (one) fang (house/room of) xifu (wife).” In traditional

Chinese quadrangle houses as well as contemporary urban apartments, hierarchy within an extended family is often reflected in spatial arrangements: grandparents, as heads of the family, traditionally take the room located in the center of the quadrangle or the largest room in the apartment, and their two eldest sons (and their spouses) would take the two rooms immediately adjacent as second and third in the hierarchy, and so forth.

In short, as a multivalent concept jia moves fluidly across family, social structures and relationships, spaces and spatial practices, and to certain extent, about personhood as well.

In the conversations and interviews I have held with interlocutors about the concept of jia, each of these dimensions have came up, and as we will see, all of them are practiced in everyday life as well. Jia is a sign for the spatial poetics of home in Sinophone Toronto.

5 Sounding and listening beyond music

In reviewing literature on music and diaspora I have hinted at a suspicion that investigating music as a uniquely fertile site of identity negotiations in the diaspora might only lead to confirmations of something we already know. Saying that music is uniquely suited for identity negotiation among people who meant to use music to articulate how and with what they identify seems a bit tautological to me. In this section I attempt to unpack some of my discomfort

48 around the centrality of music in ethnomusicology in general, and in the ethnomusicology of diaspora and immigration in particular. I am not writing against music per se, although Lila Abu-

Lughod contention in her article “Writing Against Culture” (1991) looms in the background.

Rather, I outline some of the considerations that lead me to reexamine the ontological status of music. I also outline how these considerations had informed my fieldwork strategies and shaped my ethnographic ear (Erlmann 2004).

In asking who, exactly, are the humans with the power to organize sound into music, ethnomusicologist Matt Sakakeeny succinctly captured perhaps the most pressing issue about ethnomusicology’s tendency to elevate music’s “conceptual status above scrutiny” (2015, 113)—a critique that has also been put forth by anthropologist Michelle Bigenho (2008). Sakakeeny’s point here is that ontologies of music are socially and historically contingent, even if “the qualities that make certain subsets of sounds ‘music’ are so often presumed to be self-evident” in ethnomusicology (ibid). Implicit in this presumption is a universalist view about which sounds are and which are not music.37 This view continues to naturalize and justify the rather colonial approach of viewing sonic cultures exclusively through the lens of Eurocentric ideologies of music.

Sakakeeny notes that treating music as an unquestioned object of study consequently reproduces in ethnographic processes all of the same problems with bracketing music out of sound (2015). Bigenho echoes this line of interrogation as well. Critiquing mainly the

37 I recognize that this statement, like Sakakeeny’s assertion, risks minimizing the field’s long dedication and effort toward a more relativistic view of music in human life. I do not wish to gloss over decades of ethnomusicologists’ agony over the colonial legacy of the discipline, or their work in interrogating the implicit Eurocentrism in music studies. I actually see the arguments to decenter the concept of music as a logical extension from ethnomusicology’s earlier engagements along the decolonization front. But here I would rather err on the side of the polemical.

49 ethnomusicological works that focus on music as formal structures, Bigenho also notes that Euro-

Western ideologies of music involve a mutual exclusivity between art and politics. The value of music, problematically assumed to be inherent in ethnomusicology, becomes a scholar’s excuse for insufficient social and political contextualization. Bigenho also takes to task ethnomusicologists’ favorite fieldwork truism that conversations about music provide fieldwork entryways and vantage points, suggesting that perhaps such fieldwork methods will reproduce the skewed view that uncritically enlarges music’s centrality in social life. Music, as it turns out, might just be one of ethnomusicologists’ most pervasive shadows in the field.

Sakakeeny’s solution for this problem of music is to turn to sound studies, and he describes this field as one that “came of age after relativism, multiculturalism, and popular culture studies had begun to dismantle the canons and hierarchies that music studies had helped construct,” which allowed the field to “productively challenged music studies by developing new questions that do not assume a privileged status for music as a formation of sound.” But turning fully to sound studies may potentially just relocate the same problem to sound, especially when there are works in Sound Studies whose allergies to music negatively reinscribe its ontological exceptionalism (Cardoso 2017, for example).

The other possible way out may be to take seriously the ways in which interlocutors listen, since music and other socially meaningful sounds “as a set of performative acts and objects of inscription…invite particular modes of listening” (Sakakeeny 2015). Here, I find Steven Feld’s formulations of acoustemology especially helpful. Acoustemology, Feld explains, is “knowing in and through sounding, with particular care to the reflexive feedback of sounding and listening”

(2015, 14). Based on a relational framework of social life, and taking as a premise that sounding and listening are relational practices, Feld notes that the theory of acoustemology works

50 especially well for studies that center around “situated listening in engagements with place and space-time” (15). Acoustemology is a mode of knowledge with an ear to agency and positionalities of the sounding subjects and objects; it does not take sound for granted. Though

Feld has been developing this concept for over two decades, the theoretical potentials of listening highlighted in acoustemology have also been explored extensively in recent ethnomusicological scholarship that seeks to decenter music (Daughtry 2015; Kapchan et al 2017; Ochoa 2014).

Simply put, and adapted for my purpose here, perhaps a more productive way forward would be to not focus so much on music or on sound as acoustic phenomenon, but rather to consider how sound and music shape and are shaped by a situated aurality (Ochoa 2014) through which people come to know their surroundings, themselves, and their places in the world. We may hear more possibilities by studying sound and music as instruments of listening that can tell us a great deal about how people locate themselves in the world.38

I don’t want to suggest that the conceptual boundaries between sound, music, and speech are so fluid as to be non-existent or non-operational. They are very much alive for my interlocutors—and indeed, for me as an ethnographer approaching the field with my own presuppositions about music and sound, and my own theoretical proclivities. What I mean, however, is that we should just acknowledge that music occurs in the context of a lot of other sounds that are not conventionally considered music. By trying to not presume that music holds a uniquely and singularly illuminating place in our ears, we might actually find out more about

38 Ruminating on listening as ways of being, Deborah Kapchan notes that “just as sensing one’s hand relies on the interactions of the hand with its instruments (opening a door, cutting a tomato, caressing a child), so the limits of our hearing depend on the instrumentality of acts of listening: what we hear depends on how we listen and what we listen for” (Kapchan 2017, 4-5).

51 music’s role in everyday life.39 More importantly, we might find in those liminal spaces between musical and non-musical sounds, or between music and speech, another category of sounds that are typically heard and studied in formalized, structured ways, and that comes with its own epistemological baggage— we might also begin to hear identities, subjectivities, and personhoods that have fallen through the cracks.

5.1 Note on the term “soundscape”

In this dissertation I try to listen broadly beyond music. I also try to listen with my interlocutors. I pay attention to the sounds and moments of unsounding that are meaningful and important to them in some ways, taking as a premise that these sounds are inscribed with their particular ways of listening, which are often different from my own. I try to get a sense of how they listen, and I argue for the role of this listening in the formation of their subjectivities in relation to others.

This is therefore a project about people, rather than a study of the formal qualities of sounds. It is decidedly not a comprehensive documentation of the soundscapes of Sinophone

Toronto, out of which some sort of ethnic truth can be deducted—in fact I hope it will become clear that I stand against the possibility of such a thing. This project is oriented in in markedly different ways from R. Murray Schafer’s The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the

World (1993) and the Soundscape Studies it has inspired.40 I use the word “soundscape” throughout this dissertation to refer to the holistic aural experience in a given social and physical

39 Perhaps more than was possible for sociologist Tia DeNora, who drew exclusively from interviews about music consumption patterns in her Music and Everyday Life (2000). 40 See Feld’s critique of soundscape (2015).

52 space, which may encompass all kinds of sounds that fall under different conceptual categories and everything in between. I use “soundscape” basically to avoid incorrectly ascribing intentional, attentive listenings to my interlocutors. I explicitly do not use the word to invoke

Schafer’s injunction for a musicalized listening of the dins of post-industrial everyday life.

6 Fieldwork Methods

A project on everyday sonic practices and subjectivity necessarily demands a set of ethnographic points of entry, research techniques, interpersonal rapport, and forms of documentation that differs from projects investigating a clearly delineated musical genre or a performance space. As I broaden the conception of “home” and seek to listen beyond music, I maintain focus throughout this project through what Lila Abu-Lughod describes as the ethnography of the particular (1991), and I try to “show the actual circumstances and detailed histories of the individuals…always crucial to the constitution of experience” (162). In fieldwork,

I spent a lot of time and amassed innumerable interactions as I got to know only a handful of individuals very well. Because of such an individual-orientated approach, it is necessary to reflect on my own subject position and the accesses and foreclosures it afforded. I also note my speculations of how I am perceived by interlocutors, especially where such perceptions may color our interactions.

Below, I will first disclose my background and how, through my appearance or the languages I spoke, I was interpolated by interlocutors in fieldwork. I then outlines the places to which I went, things I did, and techniques I improvised explicitly for “data collection,” within the various constraints I encountered. These relatively straightforward descriptions serve to explain why I attended to the three case studies and the small handful of individuals in this dissertation

53 when Toronto’s Chinese diaspora obviously offers so many other possible research avenues that are perhaps tidier, more coherent, and more music-oriented. As well, I hope to demonstrate the co-constitutive and intersubjective nature of ethnographic encounters: I chose the sites and interlocutors only as much as they have chosen to speak to me, let me into their lives, and tolerated my incessant questions about sound. I saw only the sides of them that they allowed me to see because of how they saw me. Lastly, I reflect on the act of writing as an integral part of producing an ethnography of profoundly intimate ordinary life, and explain some of the stylistic choices I have made in writing this dissertation.

6.1 Personal background

If the ethnographer’s job is to transduce experience (Wong 2017, 255), then readers of this dissertation deserve knowledge of precisely what this transducer was made of. I identify and am often legible as Chinese (with all the attendant qualifiers and explanations, of course). I speak

Taiwanese Mandarin as my mother tongue, and live in Toronto. But I grew up in Taipei,

Taiwan in a family that lived through nearly all of the island’s major sub-ethnic and geopolitical struggles: my Mother’s side of the family is what English scholarship describes as “local

Taiwanese,” which referred to descendants of the Han Chinese who traversed the Taiwan Strait from Southeastern mainland China (today’s People’s Republic of China) sometime between the

16th to 18th centuries.41 As these migrants were mostly from today’s Fujian province and spoke its dialect Hokkien, what is known today as Taiwanese dialect is essentially a variation of

Hokkien. That side of my family lived through Japanese colonization (1895—1945), and prefers

Japanese loanwords and popular culture over the products of American cultural imperialism on the island. My “mainlander” Father is the son of a mid-ranking military general to the Republic

41 Bensheng ren, literally translating to “people of the province.”

54 of China, the exilic government that fled to Taiwan in 1949 during the Chinese Civil War, and that placed the island—including the dissenting local Taiwanese and indigenous people—under martial law for forty years.42 My paternal grandfather was originally from Wuhan, which is also where the main interlocutor from Chapter 4 is from, and we talked about Wuhan a fair bit even though I have never been there. For decades my grandfather held out hope for recovering the mainland and the prospect of returning to Wuhan, mostly in the form of alcoholism and refusing to invest money in patching up his decrepit house. He passed onto his children the Wuhan dialect, customs, and identity, which my father then tried to instill in me, perhaps rather unsuccessfully. Everyone in my family spoke Mandarin as that was the official language taught in school and used at work, though each person spoke with a different accent and leakages from different dialects.

The cultural-linguistic babel of my family is actually not that uncommon in Taiwan, where the word “Chinese” represents something at once pluralistic and deeply suspect. In 1998 my father’s employer, a U.S. information technology company, sent him and a large segment of the Taiwan branch to gain a foothold in the newly reformed Chinese market in Beijing, since they were already trained and could communicate with mainland Chinese people. My whole family moved together, and I learned to navigate a post-socialist China that differed in every respect from the glorious “motherland” portrayed in Taiwan’s standardized textbooks and TV shows I grew up with. Because Taiwanese (or technically Republic of China) citizenship was not recognized by the Chinese government, we lived in a somewhat sequestered “foreign expatriates” area. I attended an American high school meant for children of ambassadors, and acquired

English along with a palate for imported American breakfast cereal from the sole American

42 Waisheng ren, “people from outside of the province.”

55 grocer in the area. I also picked up a Beijing accent in my spoken Mandarin.43 Then I left China for college in the United States, which was where I first begin to see myself as an immigrant (as opposed to an “expatriate”), where I came out as queer, and where I subsequently hid for about a decade from my parents in China and extended family in Taiwan. I immigrated to Toronto as a newly landed permanent resident in 2012 and came out to my family. I learned Cantonese in

Toronto because it had been the lingua franca of the Chinese diaspora here.

I outline my background here neither to claim any presupposed cultural expertise or

“insider’s view” to Sinophone Toronto, nor to hint at some sort of exceptionalism of experience.

Rather, I do so to explain my own profound uneasiness with “home,” which inevitably colored interactions with everyone I met and informed how I decided between equally feasible fieldwork sites, even if I only became aware in retrospect. I also explain my background to give a sense of how I was likely viewed and how my spoken Chinese was heard as I moved around in the

Chinese diaspora as a diasporic Chinese person myself: in Mandarin I sounded like I was from

Taiwan, but that impression was often complicated by occasional mainland inflections. In

Cantonese and Taiwanese I was audibly clumsy and sometimes mixed up the two dialects. These things impacted my rapport and interactions, and also determined who would or would not let me into their physical and virtual homes, and how long I was able to stay.

43 Some scholars utilize the distinctions between Mandarin (official language of the imperial court based on Beijing dialect), putonghua (PRC’s version of standardized Mandarin), guoyu (standardized Mandarin on Taiwan and Hong Kong), and huayu (the word for Mandarin in Southeast Asian diasporas) to articulate different geopolitical identities. Because speakers of these sub-dialects are mutually intelligible, and because these terms are used rather interchangeably among all of my fieldwork interlocutors, in this dissertation I will simply use the umbrella term Mandarin.

My legibility as some sort of Chinese provided access to the nursing home which forms the focus of chapter 2. My general fluency in signs of Confucianistic filial piety and deferent body language made me a popular volunteer. As a cisgendered woman and presenting as such, I was included in many gendered activities (washing dishes and mopping tables, rather than fixing

TVs, for instance), which gave me contact time with the elders and with the other volunteers, who were predominantly women. But I couldn’t access the sociality fostered among the large contingency of middle-aged female homemaker volunteers through complaints about husbands and children. My inability to participate in those conversations also meant I was often grouped with young, unmarried women in their early 20s, many of whom I have talked with extensively, and following whose footsteps I was able to rent a room in a family house as part of the research.

This also meant older women often felt free to set me up with their sons, or to give me maternal advice about Chinese femininity and how I was really failing at it. For reasons I decided to leave out of this dissertation, I never revealed anything about my personal life to fieldwork interlocutors in the second and fourth chapters. I more or less relied on people’s assumptions to pass, although I never explicitly lied.

I explain in greater detail in chapter 3 how I met and became included in the queer diaspora group back in 2014, but the short version was that one member suspected I might identify as queer, and tentatively invited me to an audition-esque gathering. Though I hadn’t planned on writing about them at the outset of the project, I found myself increasingly looking forward to group gatherings, especially after long stretches of concealment in the other two field sites. My connections with both Taiwan and the PRC allowed me a degree of flexibility between different sub-ethnic groups: the die-hard pro-independence Taiwanese and Hong Kong people and the pro-reunification mainlanders both had reasons to believe that I’d be sympathetic to their sides.

6.2 “Data” and documentations

In the first months of my fieldwork from May to August of 2014, I tried to engage with as many different dimensions of Sinophone Toronto as possible. I had established contact with many Chinese-identifying people already, partly by having lived in Toronto for two years, and partly because Toronto is a major hub of the diasporic network, and some of my earlier contacts also ended up here. In the spirit of “snowball sampling” I asked to be put into contact with others who I didn’t already know, went to concerts of varying genres from different parts of the world, had coffee, went on day trips, attended festivals, and played mahjong in people’s houses. I also took a shotgun approach and volunteered at the geriatric center and the Centre for Immigrant and

Community Service, walked around and talked to people in ethnic malls and supermarkets, registered for Cantonese and erhu classes at two different cultural centers, attended Chinese

Canadian Christian church services, applied and interviewed for jobs at Chinese grocery stores and variety shops, and briefly worked at the massage parlor I describe in chapter 4. During this time I conducted in-depth interviews with about twenty people, in part as a way to put people at ease and establish rapport, as I imagined most people wouldn’t let a stranger conduct participant-observations in their homes. None of these interviews were included in this dissertation, although I did develop sustained friendships with several interviewees, who oriented me in the community, and provided more substantive interviews later.

In September 2014, I narrowed down my fieldwork activities to sites and individuals who were willing to let me hang around and tag along. With each of them I explained my project, although it was rather nebulous at that point. Some of people found the project to be too flaky, and others moved away or their life situations changed. By early 2015 I decided on three foci: the geriatric centre, where I applied for their own institutional research ethics board’s approval; the queer diaspora; and the young woman I feature in chapter 4, Zhou Xiaoyan. I also met semi-

58 regularly and hung out with roughly twelve other people, each of whom has told me interesting and evocative stories about their lives over meals or bubble teas. Half of them described themselves as second-generation Chinese Canadians, and the other half were relatively new immigrants. I did not refer to any of these interviews in the dissertation, but they were crucial in how I formed a broader sense of life in Sinophone Toronto, which contextualizes the specific practices in the following chapters. From June to September 2015 I also conducted interviews in

Taiwan with circular migrants, who split their time between Toronto and different parts of

Taiwan. I followed up with them in Toronto throughout 2015, and then again in Taiwan during the summer of 2016. However, as the dissertation took shape, I realized these interviewees’ stories demand a rather different analytical framework from the rest of the fieldwork material. I decided to leave that material for a future study, although seeing people in their homes in both

Toronto and Taiwan as they narrated their varied ideas about belonging has enriched my understanding of the complexities of “home” immeasurably.

In the geriatric centre (chapter 2), I hung around in the capacity of a volunteer. The research ethics board discouraged formal interviews—for good reasons, as I wasn’t to linger in the elders’ bedrooms, and conducting interviews in the common area posed privacy concerns.

The personal histories I do include about the elders in that chapter are pieced together from numerous short conversations in the hallways and elevators. Rather than formal feedback interviews, I asked the elders if they agreed with my interpretations in simplified, shortened questions. In some situations I have had to make interpretive leaps, for instance when an elder gave me a different answer every time. I alone am responsible for any resulting errors.

With the queer diaspora (chapter 3), I attended weekly social gatherings, and conducted multiple one-on-one, lengthy, open-ended interviews with each member of the group. I also

59 engaged with them regularly through social media and the texting app, Line. I showed early drafts of my analysis to group members, and incorporated their feedback after some of them attended a talk I had given about them at the University of Toronto’s East Asian Library. With

Xiaoyan (chapter 4), I went shopping in malls and supermarkets, watched TV, drove around, and cooked. Conversations were basically continuous during these activities, and I conducted one open-ended interview in person, and then one follow-up feedback interview by phone when she had temporarily moved back to China.

I made copious audio recordings, all with the built-in voice memo app on an iPhone 4, as it was the most unobtrusive of my options. With each group I asked for general verbal consent to record sounds from their daily life when I informed them of my research agenda, and I typically asked again on the spot. Except for in formal interviews, I tried to never be the one who introduced music into the conversation. Though people in each chapter had different reasons, every single person represented in this dissertation is written anonymously with identifying details removed and swapped out.

At all three research sites, I spoke a combination of Mandarin, Cantonese, Taiwanese, and English. Each interlocutor possessed different degrees of fluency in some of these languages, but in general, I spoke mostly Cantonese and Mandarin in the geriatric centre, Mandarin and

Taiwanese in the queer diaspora group, and Mandarin with Xiaoyan. English loanwords and names peppered conversations in all three field sites, but with few exceptions—which I note and unpack throughout the dissertation—they were deployed for ease of communications rather than identity-making. All the Chinese to English translations are mine.

Finally, I take seriously ethnography’s etymological root pointing to writing, and consider the writing choices I make an integral part of a methodology that seeks to demonstrate how

60 minute practices of the quotidian are a constitutive aspect of social life. In order to show rather than tell my interlocutors’ creativity of making do—culling together a wide range of unexpected resources; tactically improvising; adapting to an environment—I write with the goal of producing an impression of each interlocutors’ aspirations, desires, tendencies, and struggles, as well as the range and abundance of what de Certeau calls the “lexicons of practice” out of which people assemble their worlds. The result pushes on some of the conventions of the dissertation as a genre. There is a great deal of ethnographic detail in each chapter, which helps form impressions but which may only contribute to my arguments indirectly. In adopting this somewhat experimental style, I hope to put forth a methodology toward an ethnomusicology of everyday life that reaches toward the textures of the quotidian, beyond that which can be rendered discursive in self-reporting interviews (DeNora 2000).

7 Chapter outline

The dissertation includes three extensive case studies in three chapters, each attempting to capture a few glimpses of the sonic lives in a different “pocket” of Sinophone

Toronto. Chapter 2 tells a story of how Ga-Liang, an elderly woman, grew into an older version of herself in a Chinese Canadian nursing home. I trace the influence of Canadian multiculturalism in how the administration of the institution manages eldersly residents, specifically by creating a daily routine of Chinese traditional and popular musics. One elderly resident, whose navigation of this environment I take to be just one example among many other possibilities, subtly subverted this imposed musical routine by singing outside of designated music hours and in unusual ways. Often incorporating mechanical sounds from medical equipment that peppered the soundscape of the home, she asserted her bodily sovereignty and disrupted the nostalgia so often prescribed for her. In this chapter I also interrogate how constructions of ethnic

61 and age identities intersect, and how they are contested through sounding and listening practices.

Ultimately, by tracing various homes in this intensely ethnicized context, this chapter explores the tension between an individual’s agency, enacted through many improvised tactics (de

Certeau 1984) in everyday life, and the ideological structures or strategies that transform and are transformed in the process.

At the core of chapter 3 is a rather simple question that follows the situatedness of chapter 2: what happens when a person is unable to dwell comfortably in the surrogate home of the diaspora? I explore this question by tracing the making of alternative homes and the possibility of belongings from the multiply marginalized standpoint of the queer diaspora. The chapter focuses on a private residence where a group of queer thirty-somethings gathered for respite from the palpable heteronormativity and homophobia of Chinese Toronto. In this carefully maintained safe space, they sang along with Mandarin popular songs, spoke in a campy manner, invoked a social poetic of noise and silence, and performatively enacted a queer sensibility around which their intimate sociality congeals.

Chapter 4 proceeds from the group interactions highlighted in chapter 3, but pushes further on how people form connections, focusing on moments when mutual intelligibility does not translate into friendship. In this chapter I take a somewhat experimental approach, and I follow one young woman as she listened to the thickly layered soundscapes in an ethnic mall and supermarkets and in the gendered domestic space of the kitchen. Listening tactically and interpretively, she negotiateed her strained relationships with other Chinese women she encountered in the diaspora (myself included), while also fostering intimacy in the fictive kinship that she listened for.

Each chapter focuses on a specific place and its people, emphasizing simultaneous engagements with multiple different types of “home” through the composite everyday soundscape that includes music, speech, and sound. In both fieldwork design and then later in selecting which observations to analyze for the dissertation, I had intended to show the breadth and heterogeneity of Sinophone Toronto by including a wide range of identities based on regionalism, age, gender, sexuality, and to a lesser extent, social class. The presumed “homeland” in chapter 2 is Hong Kong and its adjacent Cantonese-speaking areas; stories in chapter 3 orbit around Taiwan and its diaspora; and the Mandarin-speaking people in chapter 4 are wrapped up in events that took place on the mainland. Each chapter also gravitates toward one conceptual category of sound: chapter 2 foregrounds music, while speech and environmental sounds play important roles in chapters 3 and 4, respectively. The case studies spread over these social and sonic categories in this way in part by serendipity, and in part out of the necessity of maintaining focus in each chapter. I certainly do not want to leave the impression that there is some kind of mapping between different geopolitical entities and different types of sounds. Though the case studies may at times feel so different from one another that they don’t seem to belong to the same project, each of them in fact wrestle with the same questions of home against the same “ghosts”

(Roach 1996) of earlier Chinese immigrants and deal with the same ideology of multiculturalism trickling into mundane daily life.44 Each case study also considers the emergence of a particular kind of diasporic subjectivity through accumulations of everyday sonic practices—rather than through self-conscious expressions of homeland memorialization—where mediations between public and intimate, collectivity and individuality, and stabilities, mobilities and displacements occur.

44 Here I am thinking toward Joseph Roach’s concept of “ghosts,” as past iterations of culture that continues to haunt the present, in his Cities of the Dead (1996).

Chapter 2 Technologies of Song and Aging in a Chinese Nursing Home

In this chapter I examine the roles of music and sound in the conflicted constructions of two intersecting identities—Chineseness and the state of being elderly—in a nursing home in suburban Toronto. The nursing home was established by Chinese Canadian gerontologists specifically for ethnically Chinese elders in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), and its day-to-day operations rest on the shoulders of the Chinese-speaking staff and of volunteers.45

The chapter includes two intertwining threads. On one hand, it details how traditional and popular musics were deployed as signifiers of Chineseness by the administration. This performance of ethnicity was partly to meet the expectations of governmental funding agencies, partly for the broader Chinese diaspora of Toronto, and partly for the residents who are deemed to need “culturally appropriate care” as Chinese elders. I also examine how the staff of the Activities Department created routines and cycles of time by broadcasting the same group of roughly twenty-five Cantonese popular music (Cantopop) ballads, which represented for the staff a nostalgia for an old China that they considered to be appropriate for the elders’ age and identity. In different ways, both instances of such self-conscious signification of Chineseness through music were informed by Canadian multiculturalism, by practices that are legible as signifiers of ethnic unity across Chinese Toronto, and by the conflation of advanced age and cultural authenticity.

The administration and staff experienced conflicts with the residents and the volunteers. These conflicts were on-the-ground negotiations that revealed the contradicting priorities of each faction of the nursing home. The conflicts also elucidated the ways in which the institution and the individuals participated in a broader network of diasporic meaning-making in everyday activities in an institution with its own rules, routines, and rhythms—what sociologist Erving Goffman calls a “total institution” (1961).

45 All identifying details of the nursing home and every individual included in this dissertation have been removed to protect their anonymity.

The second thread examines some of the sounding and listening practices of one resident in the nursing home, my friend and interlocutor Ga-Liang. Ga-Liang pushed back on the assumption that elders needed to constantly be managed and cared for, and resisted the labels imposed upon her by defiantly walking out of a traditional Chinese music concert. She also utilized the sounds that resonated within the walls of the nursing home as resources for expressive narrativization: every day, insistently in her own way, Ga-Liang sang (and still sings) the Cantopop routine broadcasted in the nursing home outside of the designated music hours. The broadcasted routine of songs became her own through her vocalization. I argue that by singing, she gained a sense of bodily sovereignty within the institution’s medical routines and procedures that dictated much of her daily life; she reclaimed a present against the homeland nostalgia prescribed for her; and she carried out the work of becoming a Chinese elder on her own terms. While mediated by the routines designed to manage her, singing these songs allowed Ga-Liang to articulate and enact her identifications. The ways in which these Cantopop ballads repeated and circulated in the nursing home, whether at the hands of the staff or in Ga-Liang’s renditions, exemplify part of my argument: on one hand, Cantopop ballads signified a legible Chineseness— and potential for ethnic cohesion—through their reference to a cultural elsewhere in the past. On the other hand, the familiarity produced in the daily repetition of these ballads is what rendered them a sonic home in the here and now that someone like Ga-Liang might inhabit as she developed a sense of her Chinese self in later life.

While the ethnographic moments included in the chapter center around the type of sound conventionally considered music, this music was never heard in isolation from the other sounds—utterances, non-linguistic vocalizations such as coughing or laughing, beeps and chirps from medical equipment, and the clamour of dishes or Chinese mah-jong tiles. The music of the nursing home was heard and listened to against all of these environmental sounds, both in my theorization and in my interlocutors’ practices. Music was the sonic object that had been aurally and interpretively parsed out from the variegated composite soundscape of the nursing home. The music of the nursing home was also never free of audible traces of the materiality of mediation— crackling, popping speakers and intermittent audio feedback resulting from a faulty cable. As such, even though the stories in the chapter are often about music, the many extramusical sounds reverberate in its negative spaces.

There are three sections to this chapter, each loosely centered around one space. In the first, I provide the necessary cultural political context for the nursing home residents’ institutional life. In the second, I describe in detail one aspect of the nursing home’s musical life, focusing particularly on Karaoke Wednesdays, which took place in the cafeteria. In the third section, I explore different dimensions of Ga-Liang’s daily singing on her favourite sofa. I end the chapter with a recapitulation of the first section, crystalized in a special performance that took place in the lobby, from which Ga-Liang walked out. Each section reveals a different register of the complex processes through which individuals and institutions work out conflicting interests and goals. Ultimately, I hope to demonstrate that, caught in this complex entanglement, the many versions of Chineseness invoked, sustained, challenged, and expressed in the nursing home were a confluence of many individuals trying their hardest to balance between tactical (de Certeau 1984) self-essentialism, commerce and operational budgets, insufficient time and labour, the conditioning forces of multiculturalism (which expects a certain kind of Chineseness), but also memories, nostalgia, being in the world, friendships, and much more.

8 Sounding Chineseness in the Nursing Home 8.1 The Centre and Foundation for Chinese Geriatric Care

The Centre for Chinese Geriatric Care in Scarborough, a suburb of Toronto, is visible from two miles out amidst a sea of greying single-family houses. In contrast to its bleak surroundings, the Centre is seven stories of red brick walls adorned with iconically Chinese roof vectors in jade green. This architectural grandeur mirrors the Centre’s prominence across the Chinese communities in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). The Centre is one of many nursing homes that belong to the Foundation for Chinese Care and Community Services, which is one of several not-for-profit Chinese Canadian service and charity organizations. Many of them own and run geriatric care facilities specifically for Chinese elders.

The Foundation is preoccupied with delivering “culturally appropriate care” to Chinese elders, and this preoccupation is often justified by the self-narrated history of the geriatric care facilities: in the1980s, a Chinese gerontologist working in a mainstream nursing home—one that wasn’t targeting a clientele of a particular race or ethnicity, or that rather catered to white

Canadians—found many immigrant elders’ health deteriorating far faster than their non- immigrant counterparts. The elders experienced the typical impact of culture shock—inability to understand and to follow medical commands, trouble eating and digesting Western food, and social isolation. Many were miserable, and the quality of care tended to be compromised by language and cultural barriers. The young Chinese gerontologist aspired to make things better for these disenfranchised nursing home residents, and this aspiration was catalyzed into action when, one day, a paralyzed old man grabbed his sleeve and whispered to him in Cantonese: “Please, just let me die.” Shortly after, the young gerontologist teamed up with over thirty other Chinese Canadian physicians, and in 1987 they opened a new nursing home with an explicit mandate to offer “culturally appropriate care” to Chinese elders in Toronto.

With financial support from municipal, provincial, and federal government as well as donors across the Chinese Canadian communities, one nursing home became two, and eventually a foundation was established. These days, in addition to a range of community services, the Foundation’s primary role is to host fundraising events for the Centre.

Within its brick-red tower, the Centre was further divided into four parts: a long-term live-in nursing home, a “mature residence” condominium for elders who wished to live on their own but among other elders,46 an elderly daycare, and a community outreach program that delivered meals and organized activities for elders in the area who are not otherwise involved with the Centre. There is also an in-house medical centre, and a centralized kitchen in the basement.

The Centre’s operation relies on a very large staff and over one thousand of volunteers from Sinophone Toronto. The staff and volunteers are predominantly women, and most are first generation immigrants from Hong Kong or Cantonese-speaking Southern China. Most of the

46 This is an increasingly popular housing model in Scarborough. During my fieldwork year (2014-2015), two other similar condominium buildings were in the construction phase just two blocks away, and two more were in development, nearly all catering to Chinese-speaking residents. A “mature residence” is basically a condominium with features designed for people in their later life— built-in seats in the showers; anti-slip bathtubs; emergency intercom in every room; bigger elevators that can accommodate wheelchairs and walkers; residential staff promoting active social life; and so forth. Legally, the ownership of a unit only lasts for the remainder of the occupant/buyer’s life— so when one occupant passes away, the unit goes to the next buyer on the waitlist rather than becoming inheritance.

67 volunteers in the nursing home are homemakers ranging in age from early 40s to early 60s. Some of them began volunteering because they were already regularly visiting family or friends in the nursing home, and wanted to extend their labour of care to other residents. Some, on the other hand, saw volunteering as a form of paying forward the care their parents had received in another time and place. Yet others were former or retired staff members who wanted to maintain ties with the Centre and its people. Local Chinese Canadian high school students volunteered on weekends as well, in part to fulfill their provincially mandated community service requirements, and in part to satisfy their parents’ wish that they learn to respect and care for the elders. Many of the weekday volunteers consistently appeared at the same time every week for years and developed close friendships with one another, with the staff, and with the residents. In short, the Centre was deeply enmeshed in the social networks of the broader Chinese diaspora of Toronto.

There is some contention over precisely how one should refer to the people who live in the nursing home. “Resident” is widely accepted nowadays and a clearly less pejorative alternative to “patient,” although the word highlights the institutional and controlled nature of the nursing home, which some organizations wish to avoid by adopting the more capitalistic word “client.” The Centre used “resident” in English and keilao (“elder”) in Cantonese, the latter with implied respect. I use a mixture of resident and elder, both to reflect the Centre’s practice, and to highlight the residential nature of this setting and issues of age identities.

8.2 Conducting Ethnographic Research in the Centre

From July 2014 to June 2015, I conducted participant observation in the capacity of a volunteer in both the nursing home and the elderly daycare program, although all the ethnographic stories in this chapter are drawn from my time in the nursing home. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays I reported to the Activities and Programming Department (henceforth Activities) in the nursing home shortly after noon, and stayed until anywhere between six to eight in the evening. I also went to the nursing home for special events on weekends.

In general, volunteers’ presence in the nursing home is quite contained and structured—

68 there was not much loitering or aimless hanging around. Although many of the long-term volunteers had fairly stable schedules and assignments,47 I was primarily a “floater” for Activities. Most days I assisted one of the three Activities staff or a more senior volunteer as needed, and by November I was trusted to carry out basic tasks alone. I washed dishes, disinfected plastic mahjong tiles, fixed a small steamer and translated user manuals from English, giftwrapped delivered towels and socks, decorated Christmas trees or the cafeteria, set up chairs, brought elders to different places, painted people’s nails, organized CDs and DVDs, and planted (and later, inadvertently killed) tomatoes in the courtyard.

On most Tuesdays and Fridays I arrived at the elderly daycare at around eight in the morning, and stayed until four in the afternoon. I helped the arriving elderly participants take off their coats, park wheelchairs, locate their favourite newspapers. Then, while structured activities such as bingo, mah-jong, and arts and crafts went on, I hung out with the other volunteers. I also helped to serve meals and snacks.

Theses wide-ranging tasks gave me the opportunity to see many different parts of the nursing home, and to meet and briefly converse with numerous people, including nursing and administrative staff, visitors, families, and other volunteers. Although I had initially hoped to conduct formal interviews, I refrained from doing so in accordance with regulations of the Centre’s own Research Ethics Board, who had granted me permission to carry out research in a discipline unfamiliar to them. The ethic’s board’s primary concern was that formal interviews with the residents or daycare participants may be intrusive and legally complicated, as some of them were not able to give their own consent for a variety of medical reasons, and there is no telling of the emotional repercussions of an interview. The board was also concerned that a formal interview would be too taxing for the residents, and too distracting for the staff. But even without formal interviews, the many conversations gave me a sense of the general understanding of the affective dimensions among the people occupying different spaces in the Centre. With some of the volunteers or staff I had chatted casually for an hour every week over tedious tasks, and these conversations provided me a great deal of information as well.

47 For instance, many women in their 50s would head to the meals coordinator at lunch time to help the elder eat, and then come to Activities at around two in the afternoon to prepare for the afternoon activity. Some might then return to Meals and help with dinner preparation.

The nursing home is architecturally and socially sequestered from the other three parts of the Centre. There were around 150 elders in the nursing home and I was in regular contact with about forty of them. I developed friendships with volunteers and Activities staff, having worked together, and having shared many hours waiting for the bus in Toronto’s chilly winter over steamy custard buns from the Cantonese bakery across the street from the Centre. These relationships provided me with access to a range of different perspectives on institutional life at the nursing home.

8.3 The Centre’s Quest for Chineseness

The notion of a “culturally appropriate care”— which implies a passive care-receiver in possession of a stable, internal “cultural” state to be catered to—is under interrogation in this chapter, of course. That phrase is also a verbatim quotation from nearly all the print publications, internet presence, and media coverage on the Foundation and the Centre. Other similar organizations also place an emphasis on “cultural appropriateness,” and often include similar stories about how they came into being. Some of these organizations also advertise their religious affiliations, and subsequently mobilize additional resources and networks through church congregations, meditation groups, and so forth.

The Foundation and Centre do not have such an affiliation. Catering to a clientele from so many different parts of the world—Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, the Chinese diasporas from across Southeast Asia and along the Pacific Rim—“culture” becomes the sole factor unifying these divergent groups of people and is especially intensified in the Centre. Operating in the context of a multicultural Canada, this anxiety over “cultural appropriateness” often manifest as a quest for Chineseness.

I witnessed such anxiety and the concerns over culture when I met with one of the Centre’s directors, K.P., to obtain approval from the Centre’s internal Research Ethics Board. The Centre has forged deep connections with many different sectors of the Chinese Canadian world, and as a result it has been a popular site for research. Most of the researchers have been social workers or gerontologists, and the administration was, at first, perplexed by my request for participant observation. If I was there to document the life of Chinese culture after migration,

70 wouldn’t it make more sense to visit the Chinese Cultural Centre of Greater Toronto, not far from the Centre? Was I there to excavate the “real culture” as remembered by the elders— which K.P. thought would have made sense—but, if that was the case, wouldn’t a trip to the archive be better?

Eventually, K.P. approved my request to conduct participant-observation in the nursing home on sound and music, but he suggested that I should reorient my project toward an examination of just how very culturally appropriate life in the Centre can be. In other words, he wanted a corroborative study that the sound and music in the Centre was sufficiently Chinese. As K.P. and I walked out of the conference room at the end of the meeting, he told me in a pensive tone about the Centre’s explicit efforts toward “culturally appropriate” care. “So we hired a Chinese-speaking staff, and we serve Chinese food, and we make sure Chinese holidays are celebrated,” K.P. reflected, “and then I am left with the question— what’s next? What else do we need to ensure is Chinese or Chinese enough? Music? But then, what kind of music?” K.P.’s musings revealed to me the extent to which the Centre actively and intentionally performs legible Chineseness, and how music might participate in signalling Chineseness to current and prospective residents and their families.

8.4 “Culturally appropriate care” as filial piety

The emergence of organizations like the Centre and the Foundation in late 20th century— all similarly providing “culturally appropriate care” to ethnicized elders— happened concomittantly with two other trends. The first is a cultural turn in gerontology, in which the medical benefits of staying in a familiar and comfortable cultural sphere are increasingly accepted. While I am not a gerontologist and do not have the necessary expertise or disciplinary perspectives to critically engage with that trend, I have observed a proliferation of English- language literature that intersects anthropology’s attention to culture with gerontology’s efforts toward care, and specialists in the nursing home have told me in casual conversations about the increasing centrality of “culture” in elderly care.

The second and perhaps more important trend is the pattern of migration from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan to Canada from the 1970s onward. The figure of early 20th century

Chinese lone sojourner selling his youth and manual labour was supplanted in the late 20th century by wealthy businesspeople from Hong Kong planning for their children’s global mobility.48

What hides in the shadows of this latter figure— the hardworking, white-collar, “model minority” putting their kids in top schools49— is often a recently retired parent or parents who also immigrated to be close to family and, more importantly, to help take care of their grandchildren.50 Many of the elders I encountered at the Centre told me different iterations of the same story: they came to Canada twenty or thirty years ago when their children were busy launching careers and needed help at home. Then the grandchildren grew up, and, as one resident told me, “the workers work, the students study, the old people are left all alone.” This began around the 1990s, right around the time when many of these nursing homes became established.

Embedded in the demographic shifts of Chinese immigrants in Canada in the last thirty years, the “cultural appropriateness” of the Centre is important not just to the elderly residents, but to their children as well. In general sending one’s parents to a nursing home, rather than tending to them yourself, is considered immoral and in violation of the principles of filial piety. To ameliorate residents’ children’s anxiety about failing their filial duties, the Centre publicizes a discourse through press releases and publications that “cultural appropriateness” will result in a higher quality of life and better health for the elders, and should therefore be considered an upgrade from home care—an outstandingly filial option. A framed poster hung near the entrance of the nursing home articulated this point: on the poster a rosy-cheeked elderly woman sat in a wheelchair in front of the Centre, dressed in Mandarin silks, laughing with her adult son. In the corner of the poster is a close shot of rice and a bok choy dish and a top view of a mah-jong table. Above this assemblage of symbolic representations of Chineseness familiar both within and

48 I am borrowing philosopher Thomas Nails’ phrase in The Figure of the Migrant (2015) here, to talk about a general impression with political potentials, rather than referring to a specific demographic category. 49 I invoke this phrase with a critical distance, thinking toward Madeline Hsu’s The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority (2015). 50 This is based on what people told me at the nursing home, media coverage in Chinese Canadian newspapers such as Singtao Daily and Epoch Times, and documentaries on Chinese nursing homes in the U.S. and Canada.

72 without Chinese communities, the headline reads, “Mom says: I am finally home.” The success of this discourse is evident in the Centre’s waitlist—some people are obliged to wait as long as a decade to secure a place. An interview in a special feature on ethnic nursing homes in Toronto’s Globe and Mail captures both the resistance to and embrace of institutions like the Centre: an adult child of a nursing home resident notes that an elderly living in a nursing home would be pitied— “your kids don’t want to look after you”—unless the nursing home was somewhere like the Centre, in which case the elderly would be congratulated for their good fortune (Bascaramurty 2012).

At the Centre, a popular four-character didactic Chinese idiom, laoren shibao (lit. “the elders are our cultural treasures”), is frequently whispered by staff and volunteers to each other as a reminder to pay the elderly residents extra respect. This is especially the case when the Centre devotes significant energy and resources to constructing a cultural space by organizing concerts of genres of traditional Chinese music and dance or by purchasing and playing DVDs of traditional operatic genres for the elders.51

The state of being old and the concern about “culturally appropriate care” are intertwined at the Centre. The notion of “cultural appropriateness” in the Centre became practically synonymous with the ideal of aging well (Lamb 2017), and a coupling of old age and cultural purity undergirds—indeed naturalizes—the Centre’s pursuit for cultural appropriateness. Stated in another way, the Centre operates on the truism that old people are vessels of old practices and old versions of culture, which seem somehow purer, more authentic, and therefore more authoritative.

Part of how the Centre and the broader Toronto Chinese diaspora construct elderly identities for the residents, then, is to repeatedly associate the residents with cultural icons that are considered “traditional.” By the same token, the elder status of its residents provides the Centre with an unspoken authority as an institution of culture and of Chineseness.52 This coupling of notions of cultural purity and advanced age is neither unique to the Chinese diaspora

51 See also ethnomusicological critiques on the processes of traditionalizing these genres. 52 In ethnomusicology, a parallel can be found in Tyler Bickford’s work (2012) where he argues that children’s music constructs the social category of children.

73 or to the Centre: anthropologist Jennie Keith (1982) notes in a review of the anthropology of aging that as a discipline, anthropology has long relied on the very same conceptual conflation, and that many anthropologists seek out elders for the “purer” version of the cultures they study.53

8.5 Competing Sinophone soundscapes

Earlier I suggested that the existence of the Centre could be read as a response to a very particular moment in the history of Chinese immigration to Canada. Daily life in the Centre similarly had a “time-stamped” quality, particularly in the sonic-aural realm.

This “time-stamped” feeling comes from two aspects of the Centre’s everyday soundscape, the first of which is the dominance of spoken Cantonese. Outside of the Centre and around the neighbourhood I often heard people reminiscing about the good old days when Cantonese was the only language you needed to survive in Chinese Scarborough. “Things are different now,” a DVD shop’s shopkeeper told me once: “The era of Canto has passed; Mando is taking over.” She pointed to a yellowing sign taped to the door of the store with a faint air of resentment. The printed sign read “Hiring: must know English and Chinese.” The word “Chinese” was crossed out by hand, and replaced with a handwritten “Mandarin and Cantonese.” That sign bore witness to a local history: until about a decade ago, Chinese has been practically synonymous with Cantonese in Toronto, both in terms of language and of cultural practices.54

This shift of linguistic landscape is reflective of another shift in the demographic makeup of Chinese immigration to Canada. In the past ten years, the influx of Hong Kong-ese

53 The anthropology of aging explains the relationship between aging and “culture” in two predominant ways: the first demonstrates that aging is a sociocultural process— to become old involves not only the elapse of time, but also the aging subject’s identification toward a particular category of age. “Culture,” in whatever format, is an important part of that process, often by way of circulating representations of oldness: what an old person should look like, act like, and sound like; what they should reasonably expect from their bodies and their minds. The second argues that “culture” is an important resource for the aged to draw on as they make sense of the various stages of life, the eminent final one being death (Danely 2013, 2015, 2016;Myerhoff 1980). 54 As opposed to, for instance, New York’s Chinatown, where Fuzhou immigrants are also numerous and prominent (Guest 2003, Dale Wilson 2006).

74 immigrants in anticipation or response to the 1997 handover has slowed down, and a significant portion of that immigration cohort has moved back to Hong Kong. In their place is a new wave of Mandarin-speaking mainland Chinese from the post-socialist People’s Republic of China (PRC), whose comportment and purchasing patterns sharply remind the earlier Hong Kong Chinese of the PRC’s increasing economic and political influence today.55

In Toronto’s diaspora, as in Hong Kong, Mandarin is increasingly replacing Cantonese as the lingua franca. Within the Centre, in contrast, Cantonese maintained a hegemonic dominance. Cantonese remained the default version of Chinese, even though increasingly there were residents, staff, and volunteers (including myself) who were Mandarin speakers. For example, of the Activities staff who were in constant contact with all the elders, including three full-time members and one ad-hoc member, two were native Cantonese speakers from Hong Kong, but only one of them also knew Mandarin. The two Mandarin-speaking staff were from different provinces of the PRC, and had learned Cantonese on the job. They were often given less important tasks, and took the brunt of the Cantonese-speakers’ frustration on account of their linguistic insufficiency. The volunteers were screened based on whether and how much Cantonese they spoke— a mandatory volunteer orientation conducted entirely in Cantonese and English and a brief placement interview over the phone ensured that all volunteers actively participating in Centre life speak at least some Cantonese. Volunteers who did not speak Cantonese at all were often assigned to administrative tasks, or to tasks that did not involve conversation (laundry, for instance).

Among the staff and the senior volunteers, the popular justification for their subtle but active maintenance of Cantonese as the prime language of the Centre was of course that the elderly residents spoke Cantonese, and they were too old to learn another language. But there were many who did not speak Cantonese, or had learned Cantonese as adults. Quite often a resident would say that they were from Hong Kong, but then tell stories about their childhoods in Shanghai, Shandong, Guilin, Guangxi, or other cities in mainland China. Many of them had relocated to Hong Kong in 1949, after the communists had taken over the mainland. These

55 (see Kuehn, Louie, and Pomfret, Diaspora Chineseness after the Rise of China).

75 elders spoke accented Cantonese, not unlike the Cantonese spoken by the two staff from the PRC, or by me.

Many Cantonese speakers also knew at least some Mandarin, and vice versa, and pronunciation from one spoken language bled into the other all the time. The elders who did not speak any Cantonese at all tended to have a harder time participating in activities, unless they learned Cantonese, although even the most monolingual Mandarin speaker could have their needs met with numerous bi- or tri-lingual staff around.

The choice of language in Chinese popular music further complicates this artificial divide between Cantonese and Mandarin, and subsequently between Mandarin and Cantonese speakers. English scholarship on Chinese popular song generally reflects how popular music genres are organized by the languages sung: Mandopop (guoyu liuxingge; popular music in Mandarin), Cantopop (yueyu liuxingge; popular music in Cantonese), and so forth. But the boundaries between these linguistically informed genres are demonstrably porous, as many popular music artists have recorded in both Mandarin and Cantonese. Films and TV shows—an important medium through which many Cantopop and Mandopop songs became popular in the first place—have often been released in both languages.

In popular music scholarship, the Canto/Mando-pop singer’s linguistic fluidity is often portrayed as an ambitious attempt to conquer a new market. Taiwan’s Theresa Teng (1957– 1994), for example, was known for learning Cantonese and becoming wildly popular in the world of Cantopop. The PRC’s Faye Wang is another such example. Many songs also circulate in a Mandarin version and a Cantonese version, sometimes after having been adopted from a Japanese version first, each sporting completely different lyrics. This is because the lyrics written for Mandarin, when pronounced in Cantonese, often had a very different tonal contour that rendered the lyrics impossible to “fit” into the existing melody.56 I will discuss this kind of song in greater detail later in this chapter. My point here is simply that while the division between Mandarin, Cantonese, and their music and speakers are often talked about in clear-cut, definitive terms, examples of the contrary abound.

56 For a comprehensive discussion on text-setting (or t’ien tzu, lit. “fill in with words”), see Bell Yung 1983.

8.6 A fuzzy logic of Chineseness57

In the Introduction I discussed the vagueness and multivalence of the concept “Chineseness” in diasporic formations. I drew on historian Allen Chun’s assertion that every iteration of Chineseness is sociohistorically contingent, and is operative in form rather than in content.58 In this chapter I push Chun’s idea one step further to foreground the cohesive potentials of Chineseness alongside its problems.

Many postcolonial theorists have argued that the seemingly monolithic “Chinese diaspora” is ultimately an imaginary produced by the colonial gaze of the West (for example Shih 2007, Chow 1993), and that on-the-ground diasporic life is full of contradictions between the many different conceptions and performances of Chineseness. To the extent that I agree with this view, I continue to struggle with a kind of schizophrenic experience of Chineseness in which I simultaneously live and feel both the internal fractions and the inexplicable cohesion of a Chinese diaspora.

I suspect that the predominant move in critiquing Chineseness—citing the heterogeneity of all the things that fall under the category of “Chinese”— is ultimately a kind of circular logic. To argue that there are all kinds of different Chinese people in the diaspora, one would have to name a few of those kinds: people from Hong Kong are different from people from Taiwan, for example. But this move implies a degree of palpable coherence within each of those subcategories, which then necessitates the same critique all over again: “there are all kinds of different Hong Kong-ese or Taiwanese in the diaspora,” and so on. Given that notions of the existence of a coherent Chinese people across different sub-ethnic groups still exist, I suspect a more interesting approach might be to shift attention toward how people negotiate between imaginations of an overarching, coherent Chineseness, and the internal differences they live and experience in day-to-day social interaction.

57 This issue is actually relevant throughout the dissertation, but in its current form it makes more sense to exist in this chapter, given my discussions about different cycles of time and social rhythms. 58 See Allen Chun, Forget Chineseness (2017) and companion article “Fuck Chineseness” (1996).

In considering how a person might engage with and negotiate between multiple registers of Chineseness at once, I am inspired by Henri Lefebvre’s formulation of social rhythms in Rhythmanalysis (1992), and Benjamin Highmore’s “drifting in and out” (2004). For Lefebvre, there are always multiple social rhythms at work simultaneously, and Highmore notes how an important dimension of everyday life lies in fluidly and adroitly “drifting” between these different rhythms. Sometimes a person may be tuning into abstract clock time; sometimes they note the day of the week or month; and sometimes cycles of biology dictates the search for breakfast. For Highmore, this “drifting” is the experience that constitutes everyday life.

Perhaps different iterations of Chineseness can also be thought of as layers of rhythms that are simultaneously at work, and that a person might drift in and out of any of these layers without necessarily having an explicitly performative goal. In drifting in and out of the different heterogeneous orders and different symbols, interpretations, and iterations of Chineseness, there is, I think, a fuzzy logic. A person may not fully identify with one version of Chineseness they encounter or have tuned into, but that version is recognizable enough and acceptable enough to them to be intelligible. Whatever version of Chineseness is signified, there may be an element of “okay, close enough” in the process of recognizing that signifier as such. This logic of vagueness is what provides the buffer room that makes it possible for different versions of Chineseness to be operative at once, and for that fantasy of a coherent umbrella Chineseness to remain operative and meaningful.

9 Cantopop Nostalgic Oldies as Sonic Routines and Everyday Inculcation

In this section I examine an explicitly curated collection of roughly twenty-five songs from the Golden era of Cantopop (1970s and1980s) that circulates around the nursing home and is incorporated into daily life through monthly, weekly, and daily routines. As a part of the Cantopop canon often dubbed “Nostalgic Oldies,” these songs traffic notions about Chineseness and about what it means to be old, and tell a story about specific moments in the history of Chinese immigration to Canada. The songs permeate the nursing home, and are part of the

78 administration’s and the staff’s top-down strategies (de Certeau 1984) to create a cultural space teeming with Chineseness. As these songs become routinized, however, their referentiality becomes less meaningful than their sonic materiality, which gives texture to daily routine. In other words, over time, the songs’ indexicality of Chineseness and connections with the diasporic homeland become less central, but they continue to be significant in maintaining the regularity of routines.

9.1 Karaoke Wednesdays

Wednesday afternoons were always busy in the nursing home, with the commotion of extra volunteers gathering residents from across all floors to the fourth-floor cafeteria. The Activities and Programming Department ran a strict weekly schedule to ensure the hours between the residents’ waking and sleeping were mostly filled. The scheduled programs were shuffled around every couple of months—blackjack on the third floor on Thursday afternoons became blackjack on the second floor on Tuesday evenings, for instance—to keep the routine from getting tiresome. But Wednesday afternoons were always reserved for karaoke hour for all the floors.

On Karaoke Wednesdays, Activities’ team of three staff members began setting up immediately after lunch. Occasionally the director joined as well.59 They wiped the cafeteria tables with disinfectant; prepared tea and coffee with attention to various residents’ dietary constraints; plugged the mobile TV set and DVD player and a pair of Shure SM58 microphones into a mixing board and speakers; and drafted a list of that week’s participants. The staff

59 It may not be apparent from context here, but Activities had always been severely understaffed—the three staff members were responsible for designing and implementing small group activities for over one hundred and fifty residents in seven floors. All three of them were constantly running from one program to another, and were often under a great deal of stress, especially when regular volunteers canceled. I mention this here because ethnographies of nursing homes (Buch 2013, 2015; Henderson and Vesperi 1995) often portray the staff in a rather negative light. My impression is that the Activities staff members were trying their best despite being so strained.

79 members were all trained as gerontological caregivers, but a few were adept at tasks like hosting blackjack or running a soundboard from years of troubleshooting on the fly.60

Typically around six volunteers began arriving around one o’clock, and set to work bringing residents to the cafeteria. Some volunteers’ skills became part of Activities’ intricate balancing act on Wednesday afternoons, but for the most part volunteers were given simple tasks that could be done by anyone. By two o’clock, all the forty to fifty participating residents had settled into a carefully designed seating pattern that balanced the needs of the hearing impaired, non-Cantonese speakers, friends and foes.

Special “performer” volunteers arrived shortly before two. They signed in to the volunteer’s log, but did not assist in any of the tasks. The performers brought their own karaoke DVDs,61 and an Activities staff would queue up a song at the suggestion of the performer. During my fieldwork year at the nursing home, there were three performers. Two of them were women in their late fifties, and there was one man in his early sixties. All three had been participants in one of the Centre’s community outreach programs, the karaoke club. None of them considered themselves musicians or have had any formal training or professional aspiration, but all had been karaoke enthusiasts for a long time.

The DVDs that the performers bring warrant some explanation here, especially to those who are not familiar with karaoke technology found across East Asia and in its diasporas (see Lum 1996). A typical, dedicated karaoke machine found in homes or commercial establishments would have thousands of songs stored, and these songs could be transposed higher or lower at the singer’s whim. The karaoke DVDs at the nursing home, on the other hand, are really karaoke- like videos with separate voice and accompaniment tracks drawn from commercially successful audio albums. A typical karaoke DVD is a compilation of a Cantopop artist’s greatest hits. Each of these songs features a video of that singer giving a live performance, or a placeholder video of random good-looking people walking on bridges or lying in the grass. Superimposed on the video

60 Although not directly relevant to my argument here, it is worth noting that there were safety protocols for something as prosaic as wiping tables. Often experienced volunteers taught these to the new volunteers, and the staff was typically quite mindful of volunteers’ work conditions— ensuring people took breaks, shared snacks, and so forth. In other words, there was sociality and friendship among volunteers and the staff here, too.

80 are lyrics that change colour in synchronization with the vocal track, which can be turned off and on. The accompanying instrumental track is always part of the video. This type of karaoke DVD can be purchased easily and cheaply—three discs for five dollars, for instance—in one of the ubiquitous media stores in any of the six Chinatowns of Toronto, or in nearly every strip mall or commercial plaza in Scarborough. Activities used them widely across the nursing home, often playing a random one from the stack in the office as background music.62 In the context of a volunteer performer using a karaoke DVDs as accompaniment, the important thing here is that the DVDs did not allow for transpositions or creation of new playlists. The volunteer performers kept a handwritten list of which tracks on which DVDs had the songs in their vocal range that they enjoyed singing. Often the song sequences were kept roughly the same from week to week, largely for convenience—the performer went through all the “good” songs on the first disc before moving on to the second, and so forth. The live karaoke performances were interspersed with announcements, puzzles, or games hosted by an Activities staff member. In total, the performers sang about fifteen to twenty songs each Wednesday (see Appendix for a comprehensive list of songs).

These songs were exclusively Cantopop songs popularized in Hong Kong in the 1970s and the1980s,63 and majority of them were sung in Cantonese,64 which reinforced the nursing home’s privileging of Cantonese language. The songs were repeated often, as only twenty or so

62 I have also heard some of the Activities staff discussing with the performers the wide-ranging qualities of such DVDs, noting that the ones brought back from Hong Kong are better and the ones picked up from across the street was obviously pirated and so forth. Quite a few also buy their DVDs at Pacific Mall, which I discuss in detail in Chapter 4. 63 It is important to note that many Cantopop songs associated with the Golden era were covers from earlier songs in other East Asian popular music genres, or numbers from regional operatic styles that were recorded with Cantopop instrumentation. I bracket off issues relating to popular music production culture industry here for now, and will just say that these songs are associated with the 70s and 80s, as the timeline of their production is beyond the scope of this project right now. 64 While Cantopop should by all accounts be sung exclusively in Cantonese— the genre is named after the language, after all— in reality the musical genre is porous and often involve Mandarin. Singers straddle both Cantopop and Mandopop worlds; some songs have with two sets of lyrics, one in Cantonese and one in Mandarin; and many people can sing and speak both Mandarin and Cantonese. I will explore the relationship between Cantonese dialect and Cantopop in greater detail in future work.

81 songs were in rotation at any given time, which meant song lists from week to week overlapped significantly.

While the performers sang there was always an array of other sounds simultaneously resonating in the cafeteria. Sporadic beeps and alarm tones from wheelchairs or other attached medical equipment dotted the soundscape. The speakers, mixing board, and microphone were old and haphazardly put together, so the shrill sound of audio feedback, or crackles and pops from the mishandling of a microphone also complemented the performances of nearly every song. The staff, volunteers, and residents often talked during the performances. In this thickly layered soundscape, staff, volunteers, and residents often clapped along.65 The staffs encouraged the elders to clap, especially if they had been in a bad mood or if they had fallen asleep. Some would also softly hum along to select lines, and some preferred waving their hands in air like orchestra conductors. These gestures, I think, were important ways for individuals to participate in the event, but also demonstrated a collective mode of listening that parsed out the singing from a cacophony of sounds. The clapping or waving or humming demonstrated that mode of listening, and the staff gently encouraged as many as possible to participate in that listening. A few times I saw a staff member asking overly chatty volunteers to take the talking outside. Though not by any means systematic, the volunteer performers also took stock of the clapping as an indicator of whether the elders enjoyed a particular song or not.

Between the performance of live karaoke songs, Activities staff frequently led an aural identification game for the elders. A staff member played one of the regular songs on the DVD, turning off the vocal track and the TV screen, and then ask the residents to guess the name of the song. Those who guessed correctly received raffle tickets, which could then be exchanged for a small gifts. The game was intensely practical for the overworked staff—of all the possible alternatives, it required the least amount of preparation. But the game also bolstered the presence

65 Clapping to beats one and three in a slow 4/4 bar, or on beat one in a faster tempo. This kind of “clapping along” is typical of Cantopop fans, and can be heard in any Cantopop concerts. There are of course other musical cultures known for the audience’s participation via clapping, but in general the clapping here is very noticeably different from, for example, the clapping along to a gospel choir in the United States. If anything, this kind of clapping along is far closer to what can be heard at a Japanese enka performance.

82 of these twenty songs, and helped to instil in the elders a very particular way of listening to this very particular repertoire.

I observed clapping, waving, humming, and this mode of listening that tunes out sounds other than these songs frequently across the nursing home outside of Karaoke Wednesdays. Activities ran several other weekly programs that involved, ultimately, the same body of songs. During Music Appreciation, one such program, about ten or so residents from the same floor gathered to watch the karaoke DVDs with the vocal track turned on, often over the afternoon snacks that had just been delivered. Another program, A Beautiful World, featured two or three staff and volunteers giving manicures to a small group of elderly women. This was a remarkably intimate and gendered part of the weekly schedule— a volunteer might find herself holding the soft, wrinkled hand of a grandma, painting intricate patterns on her nails, and receiving soft- spoken advice from the grandma about life, love, and marriage. These conversations were accompanied by a compilation CD that the staff had curated and burned, which contained the same twenty or so songs. The elders who were done having their nails painted leaned back in their chairs in relaxation as they hummed along with the background music, or waved their hands in the air to the rhythm of the music.

Although the Activities staff would not take credit for explicitly curating and maintaining this body of songs as the unofficial soundtrack of daily life in the nursing home, there was a fairly clear feeling that certain songs were sanctioned and encouraged. The body of twenty songs that became a regular feature of the nursing home was the result of a fortuitous confluence of the volunteer performers’ song selection process, the many Activities programs around the nursing home outside of Wednesday, the clapping and waving, and one individual resident’s self-imposed daily routine which I will discuss below. These contributing factors fed into one another. The volunteer performer might sing a particular song more often because she detected the elders’ clap more and seemed to enjoy the song more than others. But the elders responded more favourably precisely because they had heard the volunteer performers sing this song more often.

9.2 Contact and Routine

In the seminal lecture “Linguistic and Poetics,” Roman Jakobson famously outlines the constitutive factors that determine the functioning of an instance of communication: the addresser (speaker) sends a message to the addressee (hearer), and the message must be referred to a context. Between the two parties in communication (addresser and addressee), there must be a common code to encode or decode the message, and there must be a physical channel—a contact. Verbal processes that foreground the factor of contact fulfil what Jakobson terms the “phatic” function, following Malinowski (354-5). Phatic communications “may be displayed by a profuse exchange of ritualized formulas, by entire dialogues with the mere purport of prolonging communication” (355). In other words, contact happens and is foregrounded in repeated and sustained communications. Repetition is the key here.

The classic example for phatic communications is to answer the phone with “hello? hello?” so as to establish contact, or to exchange small talk about the weather. In either case the content of the message is not nearly as important as the fact that talking has happened and physical contact is established— the person saying “hello?” is not actually making a greeting, just like the small-talker does not actually want to discuss the weather. These communications are clearly phatic in function, though, because their scripts are so practiced and are designated for channel-establishing rather than message-sending. A person who has never been exposed to small talk about the weather would not know the phatic function of that conversation.

Jakobson’s concept of phatic communications is a useful heuristic for explaining the relationship between the indexicality and the repetition of routinized songs in the nursing home.

The meaning of the songs played or sung (the message) mattered a great deal, at least initially, but just as important are the ways in which such songs were played and sung (the contact)— specifically, the set up for karaoke DVDs, and hearing the songs coming through the old speakers, the music video played on the TV, and so forth. The phatic aspect of the nursing home’s routine of songs came to the fore as the residents experienced the songs day after day and week after week. The sonic materiality of the songs became the texture of the comforting, stable routine the elders had come to expect from the staff. For the staff and administrators, consciously maintaining the routines meant to be adequately managing the elders and providing care, but for

84 them as for the elders, settling into the phatic contact of the routine also became a way to symbiotically dwell in the nursing home.66

9.3 Policing the song-scape in the nursing home

The body of twenty to twenty-five Cantopop songs was carefully, if not always explicitly, sustained through the weekly routines in which Activities staff, volunteers, and the residents all participated. In short, everyone was to some extent complicit, and everyone was a collaborator. Staff, volunteers, and administrators talked about these songs as if they were selected entirely out of respect for the elderly residents—“It’s a nursing home, of course we’d play music appropriate for the elders!” or “This is what old people like!”—and they told me that there was not much more to say on that subject. I posit, however, that iterations of at-times conflicting notions about Chineseness and old age were projected into and enacted through these songs, and into the sociocultural spaces demarcated by the permeation of the songs. Moments where various people inadvertently broke the boundaries of this song-scape, and when people felt the need to police these boundaries, were especially revealing.

My own entrance into this field site was wrapped up in one such boundary-breaking moment. Shortly after I had started at the nursing home, the director of Activities, Edith, contacted me. Edith had found out from my volunteer registration paperwork that I could play a few musical instruments. She told me that the first Karaoke Wednesday of every month doubled as a birthday celebration for all the elders with birthdays in that month. Edith explained that she thought perhaps a live performance would be a nice change of pace from the karaoke DVDs and make the birthday celebration more special, and asked that I play “the traditional Chinese birthday song” (our communications were in English; emphasis mine). I was confused—I

66 In an earlier version of this chapter I engaged with Ben Highmore’s formulation of routine in everyday life (2004), but I removed that section for clarity. Similar ideas that repeated, routinized practices sediment and harden into subjectivity and/or social structure can be found in Bourdieu’s discussion of habitus (1977), or Judith Butler’s description of gender (1993), or Foucault on molding the docile bodies (1977). I plan to engage with these ideas more substantially since they each have different critical effects and discuss them in greater detail in the introduction. Here I prioritize Jakobsen’s “phatic” as a way to think through how these songs might function beyond their referentiality.

85 consider my upbringing and myself Chinese enough, but I had never known there to be a traditional Chinese birthday song. Internet and library searches yielded no result, nor did a thorough review of my notes from courses and exams in ethnomusicology. I asked Edith to clarify, but she did not respond to my email. Wednesday rolled around, and I brought a guitar to accompany the generic birthday song—the one that plays from Hallmark’s birthday cards and is sung by Applebee’s wait staff. I had been to numerous Chinese birthday parties, and had sung that version with Mandarin or Cantonese lyrics.

Edith could not make it to the cafeteria that day and I later realized that her work was primarily on the administrative side, and she had limited involvement with the on-the-ground operations of Activities. She had told Activities staff Martha to expect live accompaniment from me for the birthday song. When I arrived, Martha stared at the guitar for a moment, and said, “Well, okay, I guess.” It was clear to me that she was irritated, and she sighed and loudly complained that the day was going to be difficult.

After the usual announcements, games, and segments of karaoke singing, I helped Activities staff Edward set up the microphones. Edward announced to the elders that they had lined up a live musician for the birthday song, and gestured for me to begin. I played the introductory phrase on the guitar, and sang the Cantonese lyrics into the microphone: “pengyao laih hing ho,” the first line to the tune of “happy birthday to you.” Edward, Martha, and staff Gloria all stopped what they were doing and turned to me in shock, and I trailed off immediately after that first line, sensing that something was wrong. An awkward silence swept the room. Staff member Gloria gestured for me to go on, and waved at the other staff and volunteers to sing with me. As the staff, volunteer, and some of the residents hesitantly began to sing— most everyone did know this birthday song—Gloria also led in the clapping.

As soon as the first verse concluded, Martha pried the microphone out of my hand while Edward urgently scrolled through the playlist of a DVD he had just popped in. Martha announced, “Ah, yes! How nice to see a real musical instrument!” She turned and whispered to me, “ok, you go now,” and turned back to the elders, “And now we will sing our regular birthday song.” Edward hit play on the DVD player, and the staff, residents, and volunteers joined in singing “Jusao Goh” (“Song of blessings of longevity”), a Cantopop Nostalgic Oldie recorded and

86 released in 1977. “Jusao Goh,” as it turned out, was what the staff had in mind by the “traditional Chinese birthday song.”

I later found out that “Jusao Goh” was played every month on the first Wednesday, and was indeed a tradition within the nursing home. The song was also the preferred birthday song across contemporary Cantonese-speaking communities, but the version I brought was just as well known. The staff’s response to the wrong version that I had prepared made it clear to everyone in the cafeteria (staff, volunteers, residents) where the boundaries around the body of songs lied. “Jusao Goh” was within the lines; the generic birthday song was not.

Cycles of time were often articulated through music in the nursing home— the same songs in different Activities programs every day, karaoke performers every week, “Jusao Goh” every month—so playing the wrong version of the birthday song also meant that I had broken a well-established routine that needed to be restored.

Or, perhaps more precisely, what was meaningful to the daily life in the nursing home was not just the musical content of the songs, but the specific orchestration on the karaoke accompaniment track, the sonic textures of synthesizers and drum machines coming through old speakers, and the karaoke videos playing on the small TV—in short, the whole staging of karaoke Wednesdays. Perhaps also by this logic Activities staff’s “guess the song” game was never played with the staff humming a tune—an adaptation that would have been significantly easier in terms of logistics—but was always played on the karaoke DVD equipment.

After playing that wrong birthday song, I continued with karaoke Wednesdays as one of my volunteer assignments (as a regular, non-musical volunteer), and observed the routines being built around this body of songs. I also got to know Activities director Edith better, and realized that her primarily goal was to liaise between Activities in this particular nursing home and the general nursing home scene in Toronto. Edith’s interest in live music was in part influenced by several other nursing homes having hand bell choirs, guitar accompanied sing-alongs, and so forth. In that vein of thought, a few months later Edith asked another relatively new volunteer, John, to play some live music. In his early to mid-forties, John was one of the extremely few younger men who volunteered at the nursing home. He was between jobs at that time, and wanted a reason to get out of the house during the day. Knowing both Cantonese and Mandarin and being roughly the same age as many of the staff, John felt that he had a general sense of what

Edith might have meant with the generic description of “Cantonese oldies,” but just to be certain, he asked for more details. Edith told John to ask any one of the Activities staff for a “song book” (ge buen), and to work off of that. Later, John showed me the songbook that Gloria had dug out from the Activities office, a windowless space of roughly two by three meters, with shelves of paperwork, discs, and old PCs, attached to the cafeteria.

These songbooks were made by the Activities staff to help the elders follow along the body of Cantopop songs. As we will see in the next section, elderly resident Ga-Liang sang from the songbooks. They had brightly-coloured covers with sticker labels that read “Staples Presentation Books” still intact. Inside, clear plastic protectors held letter-sized sheets of paper with song lyrics printed in large type for the elders to read easily. The lyrics of each song occupied one whole page, and there was no musical information. Lyrics to the chorus sections were only printed once, and there was no instruction pertaining to when and how many times the chorus should be repeated. The songbooks were essentially makeshift memory aids designed for a singer or a listener who knew the songs by heart.

The next Wednesday, John showed up with his guitar, having learned a number of songs out of the songbook. Preparing these songs required quite a bit of work, and he had enlisted my help over the weekend in locating tablature and other necessary information for learning them. Martha looked at the guitar, and said immediately, “Oh, I think you brought music which is not quite the right kind.”67 Her exasperation was quite noticeable. John showed Martha the song book as a way to assure her that he’d prepared the correct songs. Later, while setting up the DVD player and TV set, Martha went ahead and queued up the karaoke DVDs as usual, and turned to John apologetically. “I don’t think we can use your guitar today, I am so sorry!” she said. “You see, we only have one working microphone today, and the guitar is too quiet and needs a microphone, so I am getting the DVDs ready now.” John said that his guitar was actually an electro-acoustic one, and can be plugged directly into the broadcasting system, so that shouldn’t be a problem. Martha responded, “Oh, but no, see, that’s not compatible, this won’t work.”

67 This conversation was in Cantonese. Translated by the author.

I was surprised to hear Martha talk about the audio equipment—anything electronic had always been the designated task of Edward, the only man on the Activities staff.68 I had been wiping the tables with disinfectant next to John and Martha, and having overheard the conversation, I chimed in and showed Martha that John’s guitar (1/4 inch jack) could very easily be plugged into the mixing board, just not at the same place she would plug in the microphones (XLR), and that the coils of cables lying around that we never use would work perfectly for John. Martha began to show irritation. Raising her voice and speaking increasingly quickly, she said, “Well, there is not enough room on the mixing board! We need to plug in the microphone, and the DVD player, and all these other things. This won’t work. We’d better wait for Edward. I don’t want to break anything.”

There was an awkward moment in the room, and I refrained from pointing out that there were ten channels on the mixing board, seven of which had never been used. Then Martha spoke again, now soft with apologies. She told John that the elders would not like his songs. At that moment Martha couldn’t articulate why, but she instinctively insisted on keeping to the regular sonic staging. “I know you put in a lot of work, and I know these are the correct songs from the song book,” Martha said, searching for a way to pinpoint the importance of the routine and regularity, “But I just think that this really needs to be a DVD thing. It just sounds more right that way.”

Martha’s words articulated the staff’s preference to maintain established routines and proven formula. Beyond the immediate logistical concerns, however, the phatic dimension of these songs may accrue a different kind of significance as they circulate in the nursing home: the songs are valued not only for their referential content, but also and possibly more so for the contact. As contact, the songs mediate between the staff’s effort to structure life, and the residents’ everyday experience dwelling in this structure. The songs are like old newspapers that are reused as wallpaper—their materiality becomes part of the textures of daily life in the present. John may have prepared all the right songs, but his impending live performance ultimately

68 Division of labour was intensely gendered in the nursing home.

89 threatened to ruffle the routinized everyday life that had become a durable part of the nursing home’s sonic architecture.69

9.4 Temporal-spatial imaginaries through songs

In the last section I argued that the contact aspect of these songs allowed them to serve as routines through which people took up the physical space of the nursing home, made themselves at home, and gave shape to daily life. By emphasizing contact, I do not mean to suggest that the referential content of the songs (or, in Jakobson’s terms, the message) is completely irrelevant— my argument is rather that they might not be meaningful in the way and to the people they seem to be. If the phatic aspect of these circulating songs is what holds meaning for the elders—to the extent that it might seem natural for old people to be listening to Nostalgic Oldies (Cantopop from the 1970s-1980s)— it might be for the middle-aged staff, volunteers, visitors, and for the institution that the poetic aspect (the “content”; the message; the referential) is important.

Through the referential aspect of this repeatedly circulating body of songs dubbed Nostalgic Oldies, it was the (generally speaking) middle-aged staff, volunteers, and visitors who projected their nostalgia for Hong Kong in the 1970s and 1980s onto the elderly residents. The middle-aged people in the nursing home collectively created and sustained a cultural sphere based on a temporal-spatial imaginary that they considered suitable for the elderly residents, drawing on the referentiality of these songs— the past, elsewhere, the “homeland” for which a

69 One note on the relationship between old age and different musical mediations such live music, karaoke, or recorded music: at conference presentations and so forth I have been asked multiple times to address the possibility that old people prefer live music perhaps because they grew up before recorded music became so ubiquitous, and to speak about karaoke’s significance in Asian communities. These questions are ultimately about how the message of each medium means to a group of people of certain age or ethnic identities. These are important questions that I hope to explore and address in a separate article, but I do think that “old people prefer live music” is in itself an ideology of age identity that is neither universal nor politically neutral. The Centre did not have musically inclined children performing for the residents, like many mainstream nursing homes do, and as such none of the elders were in regular contact with live musicians. My impression was that they did not like the logistic chaos and unpredictable audibility of live performances, which supports my argument for the routines of karaoke sounds. But even if they did enjoy live performances, I still think there is a case to be made for the sounds they have grown accustomed to and that are part of their everyday life. I think if there is one to be taken from works on mediation and remediation, it is that it’s impossible to generalize how each medium produces meaning, so I refuse to do so with the elders here.

90 diasporic Chinese elder should be nostalgic. But this temporal-spatial imaginary (1970s-80s Hong Kong) ultimately tells us more about how the middle-aged people conceived “oldness” and “Chineseness” than about what the elderly residents think of as oldness and Chineseness.

This argument is ultimately about the anachronism of the body of songs. I have noted repeated how these songs are discursively construed as “the elder’s songs,” and that “the elderly like them,” and in general around the nursing home there is a fairly strong association between being old and liking the Nostalgic Oldies. But if an elderly resident was eighty-five years old in 2015, which would make her closer to the young end of the nursing home age range, then she would have been forty in 1970, and close to sixty in the late 1980s at the downward turn of the Cantopop industry. Though nowadays dubbed Oldies, these songs were not meant for a middle- aged fandom in their heyday.70 It is more likely that today’s eighty-five-year-old would have overheard this music emanating from her teenage children’s room, rather than having been an avid listener herself. I think the staff were aware of this conflation of generations, as I will explore later in this chapter. Some of the elders were aware as well, and had their own attachments to other songs outside of the ones circulating.

Stories and at times speculations from the other volunteers, staff, and some of the elders also point to the geographical and temporal spread of these songs that muddied the water for the staffs’ association between old age and Nostalgic Oldies. Many of the popular songs in the nursing home had been theme songs to popular television shows in the 1980s. These shows typically played daily in the evenings for two to three months at a time, and so the residents of the Centre may have become familiar with the songs through TV shows. The shows, mostly produced by Hong Kong’s TVB broadcast company, were popular culture staples: reruns, VHS box sets, and then later DVDs have long been easily available. In Toronto’s Chinese diaspora, beyond the nursing home, karaoke DVDs are popular, as are the Toronto radio stations and TV

70 Unlike enka (Yano 2003). I have drawn several comparisons between Cantopop’s stylistic features and the Japanese enka throughout the chapter, and this is because enka’s influence on Cantopop and Taiwan’s Hokkien-sung Taiyupop is well documented. The two latter Chinese genres also frequently retrofit lyrics to enka tunes as a quick way to come up with a new song, and certain celebrity figures such as Teresa Teng are also known to record in Cantopop, Mandopop, and enka, which is to say that there is a lot of transnational flow of influences there.

91 channels that play the Nostalgic Oldies.71 All of these things, I think, point to how the middle- aged staff and volunteers were part of the broader diasporic community when they were not at work or paying a visit, and that the notions of old age, nostalgia, and Chineseness that I am gently critiquing here also circulate within the Torontonian Chinese community.72

Notions of oldness, the past, tradition, and Chineseness are wrapped up together in a cycle where each naturalizes the others: the relationship between the residents and whatever iteration of “tradition” goes under-interrogated, because the residents are old and it seems that oldness and “tradition” should go naturally together, since both implies a state of having endured a lot of passing time. And since the old people are Chinese, the traditions they embody must be traditional Chinese—after all, even anthropologists are known for consulting elders for accurate depictions of “traditions.” And because the residents seem to be living in such a traditional and Chinese way (and music is part of that narrative), their status within the social category of “old” is corroborated. In this kind of cyclical process, the songs become multivalently layered with different constructions of oldness: they are oldies (huaijiu jinqu in Mandarin; huigao gamkuei in Cantonese: nostalgic oldies) conflated with traditions and consumed by old people.

The un-questioning way in which Edith described a 1977 Cantopop song as “the traditional Chinese birthday song” exemplifies precisely this cyclical naturalization of the relationships between oldness and tradition and Chineseness. Similarly instantiating are all the

71 Along with Cantopop and Mandopop songs from later decades. 72 The 1970s and 1980s being the height of Cantopop and mass mediated popular culture meant that it was significantly easier to find and buy DVDs of these songs than genres that are chronologically align better with the elderly residents (the 1930s’ Shanghai Shidaiqu, for instance)— which is to say that it may have been partly a logistical consideration for the overworked and under-budgeted Activities staff to just find something Chinese enough and old enough, without really interrogating. Cantopop and Mandopop produced after the 1980s in Hong Kong and Taiwan are also quite easily found in these DVD stores, but I had rarely seen discs containing earlier genres. For some reason, the nursing home was generally rather unenthusiastic about updating their technology and infrastructure. There was no wifi in the entire building, even though very slow internet was available in all of the offices. Computers were uniformly slow and outdated, which made it necessarily to rely on physical copies of DVDs rather than streaming. I suspected this has to do with finance and information security (the nursing home is legally obligated to protect residents’ medical records).

92 numerous moments when the Activities staff explained that they chose of songs “because old people like this music,” demonstrating the conflation of these conceptual categories, and the extent to which this conflation was never interrogated by the staff. The social category of “oldness,” occupied by the residents, obviated the need to interrogate the conceptual coupling between oldness and tradition.73

There have been several other genres of music prominent in the nursing home, the deployment of which have all been informed by the staff and administrators’ idea that old people prefer old or traditional music, and that Chinese old people prefer old Chinese music. Films of Shanghai-style Chinese opera were sometimes played for a quieter afternoon activity;74 religious groups within the nursing home organized their own prayer groups that sometimes involved devotional songs;75 and each resident of course had their own preferred media to consume in their own rooms. Nonetheless, Cantopop Nostalgic Oldies were by far the most frequently heard genre of music in the nursing home, largely owing to the durability and structuring effects of Karaoke Wednesdays and their utility as everyday background music.

10 Voicing her older Chinese Self: a partial portrait of Ga- Liang

In this section of the chapter, with the Centre’s routines of songs continuing to cycle in the background, I explore a moment in which the institution’s self-essentializing agenda

73 Something one can deem “traditional” has been shown to play an important role in diasporic formations, the most topically relevant is perhaps Dale Wilson’s 2006 study on the ways in which Fuzhou immigrants in New York’s Chinatown refashion “traditional” wedding ceremonies based on the narrative accounts of elders. 74 These were chosen based on the same logic as the Nostalgic Oldies. 75 I wasn’t privy to any of these prayer groups, however, as they took place in the early mornings and late nights—that is, outside of volunteer hours. Theresa Allison’s detailed explanation (2010) of the difficulties of conducting a truly immersive ethnographic study in a medical institution resonates a great deal with my own experience. Allison obtained a Doctor of Medicine and was already a practicing gerontologist before she pursued a doctorate in ethnomusicology, and worked on the medical staff as part of her fieldwork. This was not a possibility in my case.

93 conflicted with an individual’s need for an alternative way to practice and assert her personhood, which was just as deeply situated and important. In so doing, I show that there were multiple signifying practices of Chineseness simultaneously at work in the Centre. I also highlight this particular moment of conflict because it reveals the kind of contestations that happened on the ground, that were present but perhaps less obvious without the conflict.

10.1 Ga-Liang’s self-originated daily singing

Between various Activities programs such as Karaoke Wednesdays and large institution- wide events, my friend and interlocutor Ga-Liang also came up with her own daily routine. Activities’ officially scheduled events always ended at four in the afternoon, and the hour between four and dinner at five was marked by a sense of relaxation and serenity. The residents took naps, watched TV, or read the newspaper. As the volunteers departed and the Activities staff retired to their office in relief, the sounds of chatter and activity subsided from the cafeteria and the lounges, leaving only a constant, barely audible “soundtrack” constituted by faint talking from the TV, occasional beeps and chirps from various medical equipment behind the nurse’s station, the shuffle of newspaper, and the slurping of tea. It was during this hour, and against such a sonic backdrop, that Ga-Liang sang every day.

Ga-Liang was in her late 80s. She was about five feet tall, and had a happy round face, grey hair, and the kind of gigantic thick-framed glasses that were trendy among hipsters in late 2014—although I suspect hers were purchased the first time those glasses were fashionable. Every day at around four, Ga-Liang would bring a stack of song books with her, and sit in the same spot on the sofa near the landing area of her floor. The sofa was only steps away from the nurse’s station, and while it was not part of any of that floor’s lounges, the sofa was placed in such a key location that basically everyone would walk past it on their way in or out.

Ga-Liang liked the sofa more than the other lounges because its L-shaped arrangement made it easy for her friends to sit in a semi-circle, and since there was no television around, no other residents could claim the space on the pretence of wanting to watch TV. Besides, even though the lounges were for everyone to share, some elders with longer residency histories had unofficially staked their claim in certain spaces. The sofa, on the other hand, was open.

I often hung out with Ga-Liang and her friends during her daily singing hour, especially if I wasn’t asked for help by the Activities Department. Many of the Cantopop songs that Ga- Liang sang were unfamiliar to me, so she told me to sit next to her and follow along. She pointed to each word in the lyrics as she sang. The real-time lyrical cue was not unlike the karaoke DVDs. It was also how nurses, visitors, staff, and administrators would teach Ga-Liang new songs whenever they found a moment to sit with her.

Ga-Liang’s song books were made from the same batch of Staples presentation books I described earlier. Ga-Liang owned three such song books, and brought out all three every day. There were minor discrepancies between song books—different songs, different fonts, different organizing principles, suggesting to me perhaps they were not made all at once.

To her right, one or two of her friends from the same floor joined her at four every day, simply to sit and listen. Sometimes they hummed along, although more frequently they waved their hands like a choir conductor, or they clapped along. To her left, Ga-Liang’s best friend Mrs. Leung parked her wheelchair and sternly scolded anyone getting too disruptive nearby. Always dressed in one of her many purple sweaters, Ga-Liang flipped through one of the song books from the very beginning, and begin singing as soon as she saw something she liked.

Ga-Liang sang with no accompaniment, no set lists, no pitch pipes, or any other equipment beyond the song books. She held the song book high and right in front of her face, and a deep breath was the only sign that she was about to sing. She sang every song from beginning to end, although if the lyrics to the chorus were printed only once she sometimes skipped a chorus. Ga-Liang finished every song with deliberation and care. She always slowed down at the end, and always ended on a solemn final note. As soon as she finished a song she immediately continued flipping through a song book, and started the next song. She made her way through all three song books in this manner, and started from the top again, this time being a bit more selective in each book, so that each cycle through the song books were a little shorter. This is to say that even though her daily singing sessions were structured by going through the three song books repeatedly, from day to day there was a bit of flexibility through her picking and choosing—songs she skipped today might be sung twice tomorrow.

Although Ga-Liang’s singing sessions never appeared on any official schedules, staff and volunteers all knew about her daily singing. On two occasions in the year I was there, during

Karaoke Wednesdays, the volunteer performer handed Ga-Liang one of the microphones, and invite her to sing along. Ga-Liang shyly accepted the invitation both times; but she refused all the compliments paid to her singing with a terse “Nope!” Sometimes an administrator or a visitor started friendly small talk with Ga-Liang between songs: “Singing today, popo?” This is a kinship term for “grandma,” but often used loosely as an honorific for elderly women. Or “What songs do you have for us today?” Often, Ga-Liang laughed joyously and chatted with people. But in those times when she did not want to converse, she simply began a song with no response. Her refusal to answer, through song, happened to me a great deal when I started asking questions about how she chose songs and what these songs meant to her. Ga-Liang never really gave me a straight answer.76

Part of this was out of modesty. But Ga-Liang’s rejection of any accolades to her musical abilities also had to do with her reluctance to identify as a singer or a musician of any sort. Ga- Liang was born and raised in Shanghai, and moved to Hong Kong in 1949 when the Chinese Communist Party took over mainland. She was in her early twenties at the time. She came from a large family that “filled two round tables at every meal,” and was well educated as a woman who had gone to high school. Ga-Liang told me that she had loved listening to the radio, and she loved songs and operas. But this love of music was something that she kept to herself because, she told me, “What is there to tell? I just listen. That’s more fun.”

Ga-Liang never sang in public—and did not even know she could sing— until she started living in the nursing home about ten years ago.77 I once asked if her adult children enjoyed her

76 Residents at the nursing home were considered a vulnerable population for the purpose of research ethics. There were many stipulations in terms of what I could and could not do, research-wise. The biggest concerns, after privacy and confidentiality, was that a typical “interview” would exhaust(or bore) the elders, so I was told to cap all such conversations at fifteen minutes. Another concern was the lack of a proper space for in-depth conversations: in general the nursing home kept the private bedrooms and the shared common area separate. Most non-nursing staff and volunteers stayed out of the private rooms, unless absolutely necessary. Such measures protect the residents’ privacy as much as they do the non-medical personnel from contagious diseases, and I complied with those rules. What that meant, though, was that one-on-one conversations were difficult to arrange, and that “interviews” were short, casual conversations that took place in the lounge, while waiting for the elevators or meals, and on occasion while accompanying the elders on their walk in the courtyard. 77 The staff, volunteers, and residents all had widely different accounts of exactly how long she’s been singing, as obviously Ga-Liang would have started some time after her first arrival in the

96 singing. She laughed heartily, and said that they still didn’t know she could sing. Ga-Liang had moved to Toronto thirty years ago to be closer to her children. She had spent so many years thinking of herself as a consumer of music rather than a performer, and having been modest and unwilling to falsely represent herself as a trained singer, that Ga-Liang refused to be described as a musician or a singer. Friendly visitors, nurses, or rogue ethnographers who went too far in complimenting her or asking too many questions received her irritated side eyes and the beginning of another song in protest.

For Ga-Liang, singing was a form of bodily cultivation that she sustained through daily practice. The important thing for her in each daily session was the continuity from one day to another.78 She did not sing to become better through practice; rather she sang as maintenance of a routine.79

When I asked Ga-Liang why she sang, she said, “I like to listen to songs.” I asked if she meant she sang for herself to listen, or if she saw her singing as a way to process all the songs she had heard—to make the songs her own through her vocalization. Ga-Liang looked at me with an annoyed frown as if the answer was stupidly self-evident, and sang me a song in lieu of a spoken answer. When she finished that song, Ga-Liang said that singing allowed her to “keep her pipes clean,” “keep the phlegm out,” and that singing is “kind of like exercise.” Ga-Liang’s voice was low in pitch register, comfortably reaching an octave below the middle C on the piano. She sang with strong breath support in her speaking range. Her voice was often throaty. She was more

nursing home. Ga-Liang herself had always stuck to “a couple, not that many years” when I asked. I think this is interesting here because in some ways, Ga-Liang’s singing exemplifies exactly how many routines and habits form: at first under the radar and without that much thought, and we only realize that the routine or habit is there when it is already fully formed. In any case, my estimate is somewhere around three to four years, but I have no real way of verifying. 78 See also Tia DeNora’s Music in Everyday Life (2000), particular chapter 3, “Music as a technology of self,” in which DeNora outlines her interviewees effort to produce themselves as socialized subjects (49) and to cohere that subjectivity with society at large. 79 Stuart Elden (2004) notes that for Lefebvre, the French word quotidienne (everyday) simultaneously means the ordinary and the daily repetitions. This idea is especially relevant to Ga-Liang’s daily routine.

97 inclined to experiment with the lower end of her vocal range, singing with vocal fry, than to venture into high-pitched “head voice,” as that felt less physically taxing to her. But the accumulation of daily practice showed in her singing. Everyday for an hour, she sang resonantly and confidently, and rarely needed a break.80

Ga-Liang never sang anything that was not in the song books, and there were many in the song books that she skipped every time. She skipped these songs with deliberation, always taking a moment to read the first couple lines of lyrics before moving on to the next one. In general the songs that she sang were also the ones that could be heard during Karaoke Wednesdays, at one of the lobby events that featured volunteer performers rather than a Jiangnan Sizhu instrumental ensemble, or played in the background in one of the lounges around the nursing home (see the song chart in the Appendix).81 As one Activities staff remarked, observing the continuity between Ga-Liang’s songs and the recent Wednesday karaoke session, “The more she listens, the more she sings.” In other words, Ga-Liang’s listening was implicated in her singing, and vice versa: indeed she herself had been explicit about the connections between her singing and her listening. Choosing and singing the songs in this way, then, Ga-Liang ensured her singing contributed to and was a part of the song-scape that articulated the routines taking place in different spaces and times in the nursing home—weekly in the cafeteria, major holidays in the lobby, and leisure time in the lounges. Through singing these specific songs, Ga- Liang also cohered the world of songs she created and voiced with Activities’ songs—one in which she was expected to take a far more passive role. In so doing, she asserted her agency in maintaining that phatic contact of the routinization of songs.

In her ethnography of nursing homes, anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff (1980) contends that the elders become older versions of themselves through the practice of expressive cultures. For Ga-Liang, vocalizing these prescribed songs—construed as appropriately old and Chinese— was a way to make sense not just of growing old, but of growing old in the context of the Chinese diaspora.

80 I plan to engage with anthropology Judith Farquhar’s work on Chinese yangsheng (life-force cultivation) here. I just realized the connection in preparing this current draft. 81 The song chart included in the appendix includes a list of all the songs that were included in Ga-Liang’s three song books. Each book contained about twenty songs, but there were many overlaps.

10.2 Covers and Repetitions as Routines and Cultivations

The formal, structured weekly programs, and the spontaneously emerged patterns like Ga-Liang’s daily singing meant that certain songs had been repeated innumerable times in the nursing home, while others were heard less often. This kind of repetition of Chinese popular music classics can often be observed within broader Sinophone Toronto beyond the nursing home as well—songs were played on repeat in other ethnicized spaces: the Pacific Mall and stores in Chinatown, 82 Toronto’s own Chinese channels Fairchild TV, even Markham’s mayor Frank Scarpitti had famously been singing some of the same songs in highly publicized events. Many of these songs had also been covered numerous times, or are themselves covers of covers. The repetition may also take the form of re-releases or releasing new compilations by record companies, not to mention pirated copies and (re)iterations in commercial karaoke bars or at home.

Here, I follow anthropologist Christine Yano in her analysis of covering and repetition in Japanese enka (2005) to think about repetitions in the world of Cantopop listening in Sinophone Toronto.83 Yano observes that enka audience “have an appetite for repetition” (195) that manifests in enthusiastic covering, re-recording, re-packaging, re-releasing, and repeated karaoke singing— a pattern very similar to that of Cantopop’s. According to Yano, the repetitions in enka are neither ironic nor just mindless participations in the machine of social reproduction; rather

82 See chapter 4. 83 My referencing Yano here is not without hesitation. Yano is very explicit about the scope of her argument and that she is talking very specifically about a Japanese context. Her argument rests on the cultural logic of kata, which appears frequently in literature on Japanese performing arts (Hahn 2007, Robertson 1998, for example), and I have not yet seen any explicit articulations of a parallel concept in the Chinese contexts. Despite this lack of explicit parallel, though, there are many Chinese cultural forms that operate on the same logic as kata: Chinese instrumental music and operatic arias are often based on a model form of qupai (Thrasher 2016); Chinese martial art training emphasize the imitation of form (McGuire 2015) in much the same way that kata is invoked in karate— which, incidentally, is the par excellence example of kata— and finally, learning to write Chinese characters involves the same imitation and copying of form as in the Japanese kanji.

99 they follow the cultural logic of kata, “the isolable elements by which an art form may be taught through observation, imitation, and repetition” (195). Yano argues that in enka, as in other arts, the repetitious practicing of kata is not merely copying but rather a source of authenticity and cultural meaning: a part of a cultivation process through which one approximates a cultural ideal.84

I draw the parallel here between Yano’s enka audience and my nursing home interlocutors in part because Yano’s argument is applicable— the patterns are similar and the ethos of repetition that I have observed are akin to that of kata. But Yano’s argument is also useful here because it shifts the emphasis away from the referentiality of the content of the songs toward the routines and forms. In other words, rather than suggesting that Ga-Liang sang a song to reminisce or to refer to a first version, thereby implying “a wholesale consumption of the past” (Yano 195) while privileging a single instance in a continuous stream of covers and repetitions, I contend that these songs are meaningful as forms. Akin to kata for Yano’s enka audience, these are forms that Ga-Liang practice daily, that Activities rehearses weekly, and that are only maintained through constant repetition. Practicing these forms in the diaspora, in the nursing home, or on sofa with Ga-Liang should be understood not only as management through routine, but also as enacting a cultural logic of patterning.

10.3 Ga-Liang’s Sung Tactics

Ga-Liang’s daily singing was not just about repetitions, either. She also demonstrated her creativity through what Michel de Certeau calls “re-using”—the adaptation of mass circulated cultural objects to suit one’s own purposes as a subtle form of resisting social reproduction.

At one point during fieldwork, informed by research on the benefits of music therapy in nursing homes, the director of Activities had asked me to bring some musical instruments to accompany Ga-Liang. This plan quickly failed, because Ga-Liang was intensely irritated by the addition of sounds that disrupted her normal routine, and it took me weeks to patch things up

84 Such as tea ceremony, martial arts, dance, and flower arranging.

100 with her after. But that failure revealed the many subtle improvisatory moments peppered in Ga- Liang’s daily singing. These improvisatory moments were easy to miss, subsumed by aural recognitions of songs or assumed to be Ga-Liang’s errors.

Ga-Liang had many good reasons to reject accompaniment. She wanted to maintain the texture of her daily routine, and she wanted to be in charge. Ga-Liang had a low voice and a tendency to be assertive in the low range. This meant that in terms of pitch and range, she mostly sang in the octave below middle C. It was difficult for Ga-Liang to sing the songs frequently performed during Karaoke Wednesday in the keys that she heard them, and she needed the freedom to transpose as she saw fit. In general most of her songs started a fourth to a fifth lower than the recorded versions heard at Karaoke Wednesdays. Ga-Liang also altered large melodic leaps that exceed her range, at times changing key in the middle of a song or a middle of a phrase.

Ga-Liang adopted songs for her purpose in other ways, too, and many of these improvised, on-the-fly adaptations also needed to be unencumbered by accompaniments. Occasionally when Ga-Liang had forgotten the melody to one or two lines of a song, but remembered the overall melody, she made up a musical phrase on the spot until she recalled the melody again. Sometimes, when she had lost track on the lyrics page, she’d sing random lines from the same page to fill in the gap.

Her assertion that singing was a form of bodily cultivation and self-reliant health maintenance was especially poignant because her daily singing hour coincided with the pre- dinner medication routine, during which a nurse goes around the floor with a squeaky medication cart, measures out the pills for each resident, and feeds them hand to mouth. This ritual was a constant reminder of how their physical bodies—aged and weakened to the point of needing medication—naturalized the erosion of their social autonomy.

Ga-Liang often found creative ways to maintain her routine of singing, which harkened to the routines of songs imposed by the staff, during the routine of medication. As the nurse, the cart, and the squeaky noise approached, Ga-Liang, still singing, attentively watched the nurse prepare her pills. If she was close to the end of a song, she would rush, and finish the song right before the nurse was ready. If she was in the middle of a verse, though, Ga-Liang would change

101 the melodic contour to sound cadential, effectively making up an ending in the middle of the song that way.

In a particularly inventive instance, Ga-Liang had been singing the song “Gin wa ceon meng” (“Splendid Capital in a Dream of Spring”). Each line of the lyrics consisted of seven syllables across eight beats, with the seventh syllable lasting twice as long as the rest. The most intense moment of song is the two final lines of the first verse, which only have five syllables each. The penultimate line, in particular, dramatizes the first two syllables—enduring love—by prolongation and melodic ornamentation (Fig. 1).85

Fig.1 The version Ga-Liang usually sang, which is also the version heard during Karaoke Wednesdays.

Ga-Liang had gotten to the line before this one when the nurse parked the cart in front of her. She shortened the syllables ‘qing’ and ‘yi,’ and removed the ornamental notes, to compress the line. During the two extra beats that she left empty, she gestured for the nurse to pour the pills in her mouth, swallowed the pills, and giggled in delight before picking up the final line in time.

85 Those lines were: “情義盡化煙/煙消天外去 (This enduring love vanishes into smoke, and smoke dissipates into the ether).” Translation mine. Romanized in accordance with Ga-Liang’s pronunciation as: “qinyi jin fa yin, yinsiu tinwaihui.”

102

Fig.2 Improvised version

By organizing the medication time according to musical time and through the physicality of singing, she made sense of her ailing health, but also reclaimed a sense of bodily sovereignty that she maintained through her daily sessions.

Another time, nursing staff member Amy joined Ga-Liang in a famous aria duet from Cantonese opera, “Hiang yiu (Fragrant Death).”86 The volunteer performers of Karaoke

86 “Fragrant Death” is a canonic Cantonese opera aria from The Flower Princess, which became wildly popular after the opera was adopted into a movie in Hong Kong in the 1950s, the soundtrack for which was sold as an album (more on this tune later). “Fragrant Death” had subsequently been re-recorded and re-released in many different versions, often by Cantopop singers, and has been adapted to reflect Cantopop instrumentations and aesthetics. As I have mentioned above, genres leak and repetitions are a norm. For clarity, here I discuss “Fragrant Death” as one of the Cantopop songs, but I acknowledge that some may consider it an opera aria. Set in the turn between the Han Chinese Ming (ca. 1368-1644) and the non-Han Qing (ca. 1644-1912) Dynasties, “Fragrant Death” represents the dramatic climax of the 1957 opera The Flower Princess— composed by Tong Dik Sang in 1957 and translated in full into English by Bell Yung in 2010—in which the last princess of Ming weds her long lost fiancé before they make good on a promise to take their own lives in exchange for a proper burial of the princess’s father, the last Ming emperor. In other words, “Fragrant Death” is a story about dying voluntarily to preserve the borders of a ethno-nationalistic collectivity. For its allegorical plot, “Fragrant Death” has been theorized as the underground anthem of Hong Kong (Ng 2015), and by extension, Hong Kong’s diaspora in Toronto. On several occasions where I have attended fundraising concerts organized by the Foundation, after an hour of instrumental music performed by the Toronto Chinese Orchestra, the Master of Ceremonies came on stage and lead an audience of three hundred in singing “Fragrant Death,” where everyone sang both parts. Lines about savouring the cyanide to die slowly were always sung joyfully; hands clapping and waving in air. That being said, “Fragrant Death” is relatively unknown among people who only speak Mandarin, and is effectively a boundary marker between the earlier Cantonese-speaking immigrants in Toronto and the recent waves of Mandarin speakers. The popularity of “Fragrant Death” that I have observed is corroborated by Nancy Rao’s works (2000, 2016) that

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Wednesdays frequently performed the song—sometimes with one person covering both roles, and other times a duo may each claim a part. “Fragrant Death” is one of Ga-Liang’s daily staples. She sang both parts by herself at least once a day.

On this day, a machine in the nurses’ station near Ga-Liang’s sofa was broken and had been sounding a long, shrill alarm tone intermittently all afternoon. This kind of machine- generated alarm tones and beeps filled the nursing home almost all the time. Ga-Liang and her friends were typically good at tuning out these sounds during her daily singing, much as they did during Karaoke Wednesdays and at other times.

But on that day, the prolonged alarm tone proved difficult to ignore. Ga-Liang was noticeably irritated and on edge. Nurse Amy, unaware of the group’s simmering annoyance, had walked to the sofa and asked to join Ga-Liang in whichever song Ga-Liang picked out. Ga-Liang flipped through the song book quickly, and stopped organically at the “Fragrant Death” page. Amy began immediately, taking the very first line of the dialogue, which was the princess’s part in the manner of Cantonese opera recitative—each syllable was intoned and organized according to a standard rhythmic scheme. Ga-Liang followed in the same manner in perfect time, reading lines for the princess’s lover. Both she and nurse Amy also employed the hand gestures commonly seen on the music video for “Fragrant Death.” Ga-Liang reached the final line of the introductory recitative just when the broken machine in the nurse’s station suddenly started sounding again, insistently and with no sign of stopping anytime soon.

As Ga-Liang was finishing the final line, Amy took a deep breath to start the first line of the song, which was meant to be sung by the princess. But Ga-Liang jumped in and sang the princess line, beginning the melody on the same note as the broken machine’s alarm tone. Ga- Liang’s daily rendition of “Fragrant Death” usually started a fourth below the popular recorded versions (typically starting on a C#; Ga-Liang would usually start on G#). But on this day, she strained to match the alarm tone close to a D#, significantly higher than her usual. Amy

demonstrate how Cantonese opera is a historically contingent part of the Chinese Canadian musical life.

104 followed, now taking the part of the princess’s lover, but Ga-Liang continued singing, so the two of them sang every line together to the end of the song. About twenty seconds into their singing, the broken machine was finally unplugged, and the alarm tone stopped. Ga-Liang and Amy continued singing, but Ga-Liang’s intonation started drifting lower and lower, until she was singing in her usual range again.

In this moment, as with her trick of singing and taking medicine at the same time, song and singing became a way for Ga-Liang to engage with her awareness that she lived in a medical institution— something that was foregrounded by the alarm tones of the broken machine. Taking over the lead part in “Fragrant Death” and using the alarm tone as a tonal centre also pointed to Ga-Liang’s listening, and perhaps to an aural defense that she could no longer hold up: sounds of medical equipment were nearly ubiquitous in the nursing home but these sounds were almost always intentionally ignored when there was music within earshot. I suggested earlier that the non-response to mechanical sounds was part of a routine of listening—tune in to the music, and tune out the mechanical sounds. And in that moment, singing to the mechanical sounds, Ga-Liang short-circuited the established routines of sounds and listening by incorporating the mechanical sounds into her songs. In so doing, she sang the acoustic and symbolic audibility of the medical equipment.

In her ethnography on a group of nursing home residents’ songwriting practices in a California nursing home, ethnomusicologist Theresa Allison has suggested that musical creativity was an important aspect for her interlocutors to continue “negotiating for a place in the world,” in spite of the popular conception that once people become recognized as “old,” they suddenly shed such social needs (2010, 2). Allison’s interlocutors participated in musical activities that looked quite different from that of Ga-Liang’s at first; but I contend that Ga-Liang’s daily singing could still be understood as a creative engagement with her sonic world through songs. Her improvised strategies for taking the medicine while singing, the various melodic shifts to suit her vocal range were creative and effective, and these fleeting moments of creativity were important to Ga-Liang. Her endeavours were mediated by the routine of songs from Karaoke Wednesdays, but for Ga-Liang, during her daily sessions, this routine was hers and her way to negotiate with her surroundings. In the daily singing, she marched to her own rhythm, which superseded all the other social and temporal structures of her daily life.

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10.4 Ga-Liang’s voice as a node in the diasporic social network

Visitors, staff on their scheduled breaks, or volunteers often joined Ga-Liang spontaneously and briefly, in much the same way nurse Amy did in the previous example. The twenty-five Nostalgic Oldies were well-known beyond the nursing home, so even a new volunteer could hum along. People who had stopped by Ga-Liang’s sofa brought their own preferences and propensities. Ga-Liang was modest about her singing, and was often willing to follow others’ in song, or to ask her temporary duo partner to refresh her memory of a specific melody. Overtime, some of her songs became a sonic archive of many such intimate moments she had shared with people passing by her sofa; a collection of micro-stylistic markers encoded in her voice.

On one such occasion, Ga-Liang had been flipping through her song books when a middle-aged woman stopped by. The woman went by Leung Tai (Mrs. Leung), and I had often seen her passing through to visit her father on the other side of the floor. Leung Tai was from Hong Kong, but beyond that, as she rarely stopped to chat, I knew little about her. On that day, Leung Tai joined Ga-Liang, noting that it had been a long time since she last sang with Ga- Liang.

The two women flipped through the song book together and settled on “Seungsik yasi yeunfan” (A brief destined encounter).87 This song is a well-known romantic slow ballad recorded by Zhang De-Lan (Teresa Cheung) first in 1978, and then again in 1981. The lyrics depict the sentiment of treasuring even the most ephemeral, short-lived paths crossing, appropriate for Leung Tai and Ga-Liang. But Ga-Liang further explained why she had wanted to sing this song with anyone who stops by—she had heard it performed a few times during Karaoke Wednesdays, and there were a few melodic spots that always eluded her memory. Ga-Liang asked if Leung Tai could teach her, and Leung Tai gleefully agreed, reminiscing that the song reminded her of a happy youth spent in Hong Kong.

Ga-Liang carefully followed Leung Tai in song, an octave below Leung Tai’s lilting head voice, as if following a karaoke DVD. She was often just a hair behind, and once or twice she

87 相識也是緣分; Romanized in Mandarin as Xiangshi Yeshi Yuanfen.

106 confidently but incorrectly anticipated a melodic turn, then quickly returned to following Leung Tai. A few times Leung Tai stopped mid-song to show Ga-Liang a melodic turn or to lengthen a particular note, and watched Ga-Liang practiced a few times, before continuing on.

At one point about half way through the song, Leung Tai stopped Ga-Liang, and remarked that she herself had forgotten how the second verse went. She asked Ga-Liang to wait. “There is something special here,” Leung Tai noted, and quietly sang through the verses before remembering. She explained that this particular stylistic marker was from the 1978 version, which to her was far superior than the 1981 recording, displaying her own musical connoisseurship.

Leung Tai pointed to the beginning of the second verse in Ga-Liang’s song book, and said, “Okay, let’s go from here, I got it now.” Then she alone demonstrated an upward leap by a major third on the syllable “gei” in the line “yaogei feun” (“how much——?” in the context of a lyrical line “how much hatred could we allow to trail behind our dreams?”).

Ga-Liang sang the line, but she couldn’t quite reach the high note on “gei.” Leung Tai stopped and coached Ga-Liang: “no, no, here you have to go high enough, like this”—and she sang again in demonstration, moving on after Ga-Liang had mastered the leap.

Leung Tai stayed with Ga-Liang through the end of the song—totalling about ten minutes—and then went on to visit her father. Staying behind on the sofa, Ga-Liang sang “A Brief Destined Encounter” three more times that day, and then several more the next day. Each time she slowed down in anticipation of the second verse, making a deliberate effort to hit the high note on “gei.” She wasn’t always successful, and without Leung Tai around she rarely stopped to only practice the leap. But eventually Ga-Liang learned the leap, and “A Brief Destined Encounter,” sung with Leung Tai’s leap became just another song in her rotation.

There had been many other similar instances. At times the person joining temporarily sang a song with Ga-Liang that had been recorded and covered numerous times. In such instances, each person might insist on a stylistic marker particular to a version to which they had accorded special meanings. Ga-Liang was quick and willing to learn these stylistic markers, some with more ease than others. She forgot them, too, some with more ease than others. Over time,

107 all of her own “brief encounters” of song accumulated in her own renditions, recited as she rotated through the song books.

In her daily session, through these well-known songs, Ga-Liang made contact with people and their memories from across Sinophone Toronto, mediated by the routines of song already established in the nursing home. Listening to these songs and participating in the maintenance of the song-scape within the nursing home was not only Ga-Liang’s way of making home inside the Centre, but also her conduit beyond. Moments like this also invited questions about the nostalgic longings prescribed for Ga-Liang and the other nursing home residents and the staff’s assumptions about what it meant to be old, and to grow old in a transnational Chinese context. Her singing was an archive of her listening—to the staff’s routine of songs, to the sonic markers of a medical institution, and to the nostalgic singers from the broader diaspora. Through her singing and listening, she grew into an old person and an old, Chinese person, in the context of the nursing home.

10.5 On the other side of the Great Wall

I now turn to the only time I heard Ga-Liang break out of her usual routine of songs, tuning in, perhaps, to another routine that had sedimented and had been buried. She had told me several times that she had always enjoyed listening to songs, 88 and had briefly talked about listening to the radio in her younger days. But beyond that, accounts of her former musical life had been rather sparse.89 Whenever I had tried to piece together an impression of her prior sonic lives, Ga-Liang grew irritated with me, often refusing to answer in any way other than another song from the song book. Once, after I had pushed too hard, Ga-Liang gave me side-eyes and banished me from her daily sessions for about two weeks.

It took a long time for me to realize that even if the Centre’s research ethics protocols had not effectively prevented me from conducting a typical in-depth interview—during which time

88 Her exact words were “一直(continuously; had always; will always)鍾意(like)聽(listening)歌 (songs).“ Song-listening in this context could also mean general music-listening, though. 89Everyone on Ga-Liang’s floor was lucid—indeed I was expressly prohibited to write about anything relating to people with dementia.

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Ga-Liang may have verbally rendered her pasts and memories into a linear narrative for my audio recorder—Ga-Liang may have refused to answer my questions about her past music consumptions and her musical habitus anyway. In her songs, hearty laughter, and giggly chitchats with friends, Ga-Liang was often audible in the nursing home. She wasn’t stingy with her acoustic and metaphorical voice, so perhaps her refusal to answer should not have been taken as an absence of a response, an opinion, or a functional memory. To me, Ga-Liang had expressed plenty in her repeated refusals to narrativize her pasts, and even more in her insistence to stay singing in the present.

One afternoon, Ga-Liang had already made her way through all the songs in the song books once, and was slowly flipping through the books for a second round. She went through the yellow book, but nothing struck her fancy. The same happened with the pink book, and eventually, as she was turning the pages in the orange book, Ga-Liang turned to me and asked me to pick. I pointed to one of the songs that she sang often, but Ga-Liang was not in the mood that day, so she kept flipping. When she got to the page for “Changcheng Yao” (Ode to the Great Wall), I twitched as I was caught off guard by my own memories of singing this song in Taiwanese elementary school. I was surprised; I had also never heard Ga-Liang or anyone in the nursing home sing this song and had never noticed it in Ga-Liang’s song books. “Ode to the Great Wall” was popularized in Shanghai in the 1930s through a movie that portrayed Chinese youth’s resistance against Japanese military prowess on the brink of World War II, and the song in general is associated with anti-Japanese sentiments in early 20th century.90 It seemed out of place in Ga-Liang’s books full of Cantopop songs mostly about unrequited love.91

90 “Ode to the Great Wall” was later re-recorded by many famous singers in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and Teresa Teng famously performed a version of it in 1994 with Taiwan’s National Guards. It is certainly very widely known, but nowadays it isn’t really something people would sing at a karaoke bar or would listen to on a day-to-day basis, perhaps because song’s patriotic overtones and military associations are quite obvious. 91 I suspect this song was included in the song book by accident: in 1983 Cantopop singer Roman Tam released an album collection of songs he had recorded for the Cantonese TV show, Legends of the Candor, which included a completely different song with an identical name. Many other songs from the same album are included in the song books. When I asked an Activities staff about the inclusion of “Ode,” she told me she didn’t remember what happened, but, “If the elders like it, then that’s fine.”

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Noticing my movements, Ga-Liang asked excitedly, “This one? Okay, this one!” and immediately launched into song. She spoke a little Mandarin and understood Shanghai dialect. She occasionally sang Mandarin songs, but always the ones that were in circulation around the nursing home, and this was the first and only time I had heard her singing outside of that repertoire.

The Mandarin lyrics of “Ode” is structured in parallel couplets—pairs of lines. In the first half of the song, each couplet is sung in clearly paired musical phrases.92

Ga-Liang sang,

Wanli changcheng wanli chang A Great Wall of ten thousand miles,

Changcheng waimian shi guxiang On the other side of the wall is my homeland

Gaoliang fei, dadou xiang The sorghum was rich and the soy was fragrant,

Biandi huangjin shaozaiyang Our land was covered in gold, disasters were rare

In the third of four couplets, the lyrics depicted a sudden turn of events for the idyllic homeland on the other side of the Great Wall.

Zicong danan pingdi qi Ever since this calamity swept the earth,

92 Each pair contains an antecedent ending on scale degree 5 and harmonic dominant, and a consequent phrase on 1 on tonic. I used these musical terms as a short hand here; Ga-Liang did not describe the musical structure this way.

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Jianying lulue kunandang Rape and robbery caused unbearable hardship.93

Musically, the thematic shift is reflected in a fast, ascending run replacing the expected melodic pattern and harmonic resolution in the second half of the couplet (“rape and robbery”). The run ends on the highest note of the song, creating a moment of musical tension on the words “unbearable hardship,” before a return to the opening melody.

After singing the first line of the couplet (“Ever since”), Ga-Liang hesitated for a moment, and skipped the second lyrical line (“rape and robbery”). She sang the ascending run adroitly, but used the next line of lyrics,

Kunandang ben tafang Unbearable hardship caused us to flee elsewhere

In so doing she effectively shifted the moment of tension to the words “flee elsewhere.” She then sang through the reminder lyrical lines in sequence, which meant that the musical and lyrical couplets were mismatched all the way to the end of the song.

The rest of the song portrays wartime horrors and a determination to fight for the homeland. As the narrative was fairly straightforward in this song and nearly all the lines rhymed, the lyrical mismatch did not impede the narrative or the rhyme scheme. But because the lyrics had shifted, many of the tonal syllables did not sit well with the melodic contour or were awkward to sing. But Ga-Liang persisted, improvising her way through those misfit spots. At the very end of the song she repeated the final line once to make up for the skipped line:

Changcheng waimian shi guxiang On the other side of the wall, my homeland

93 Here, the first line is sung in subdominant, and the second line of the couplet in dominant, rather than resolving to tonic.

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Changcheng waimian shi guxiang On the other side of the wall, my homeland

When I asked why she skipped the line on “rape and robbery,” Ga-Liang looked at me incredulously, giggled, and said, “I don’t know.” She was clearly unfazed by the musical dexterity required in that line, and when I pointed at the complex characters for the line, she read them out loud with ease: “Jian-ying lu-lue (rape and robbery), right? Did I get them right? I got them right.”

I asked if she had wanted to shift the musical emphasis toward the line about fleeing, dispersal, and forced migration, which I suspected may have been part of Ga-Liang’s experience. She laughed, and said, “Yes, yes, okay, sure,” leaving just a hair of doubt for me as to whether she was taking ownership of the express intent, or if she just wanted the questions to stop.

Then Ga-Liang asked how I knew the song, but before I answered she began telling me about her own stories surrounding “Ode to the Great Wall.” “I listened to this song a lot as a schoolgirl!” Ga-Liang said, excitedly.94 “I was eighteen. I was a schoolgirl. This song was everywhere back then. Everyone knew the song.” I asked if she listened on the radio, and if she sang along. Ga-Liang suggested that the song was in the air. Perhaps some of her school friends sang, but she listened. Emphasizing that she was eighteen—that is an age of remarkable memory, but also such a long time ago—she told me she hadn’t thought of, heard of, or sung the song in a long time, and was surprised by the durability of an earlier memory. “I didn’t think I remembered how it goes. But I just sang anyway, and I know the song!” She said, once again, “I heard this song when I was a schoolgirl. I was eighteen.”

She turned to me and asked again, “How come you know the song? You are too young.” I told her that I had learned the song in elementary school. She squinted her eyes, and then suggested, “Ah, yes, someone taught you when you were young. Someone in your family?

94 If my math is right, this would probably have been in Shanghai when the Ode to Great Wall first popularized through the film— more likely popular and “heard everywhere” by way of popular mass media dissemination, than through school textbooks as would have been the case for post-1949 Taiwan.

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Probably the same age as me? From Shanghai? Because, you know, I heard the song when I was eighteen.”

Ga-Liang was likely unaware that “The Ode to the Great Wall” was later coopted in by the exilic nationalist government in post-1949 Taiwan, and the lyrical themes on “fighting back” and the reclamation of homelands were recontextualized to refer to the Chinese civil war— the very event that catalyzed her own first migration from Shanghai to Hong Kong. The song had proliferated, but for Ga-Liang, it was associated with only her youthful days in Shanghai in the 1940s. In talking about the “Ode to the Great Wall,” she also revealed a glimpse of her history of aural attention, and how this history manifest in her ability to sing through the song. Her version on that afternoon in 2015 bore echoes and patterns of listening from a schoolyard in 1940s Shanghai.95

It was the only time I had heard her explicitly relating a song to a specific time and place, and anything resembling a longing for the past. As the exception that proves the rule, her excitement and the stories that came back to her as she sang “Ode to the Great Wall” sharply juxtaposed her routinized, cultivation-oriented approach to the prescribed nostalgia in Cantopop Nostalgic Oldies. She could sing to reminisce, but she mostly chose to engage with the here and now through the Nostalgic Oldies, and indeed the medium of song, for her, was part and parcel of daily life in the nursing home. Ga-Liang laughed and giggled a lot that afternoon. We talked about the song for a while, and then she sighed with satisfaction, and returned to her routine with the next page in the song book. “Next one,” she said, “let’s sing.” And in this way she resumed, once again, her routine and her everyday life.

11 Silk and Bamboo in the lobby

In the first section of this chapter I described how the Centre was preoccupied with performing a self-essentialist construction of Chineseness. This performance was for the benefit of

95 In an earlier draft I used Lefebvre’s concept of “polyrhythm” to think about these many different temporalities at work. But later I am not sure if that’s the best framework, as Lefebvre emphasizes that there are many registers or cycles of time simultaneously at work, and I don’t fully think that's the case here.

113 government funding agencies informed by multiculturalist representational politics, potential donors and clients within the Chinese diaspora,, and the residents. I now turn to one of the larger events that took place in the Centre during my fieldwork, which encapsulates the conflicting, multiple constructions of Chineseness and everyday life in the nursing home.

The nursing home marked each major holiday with a celebratory event in the main lobby of the Centre. The lobby connected two hallways leading to the nursing home and the daycare, and a mobile partition transforms the lobby into a large room to host choir rehearsals or dance practices for the community outreach programs. The holidays celebrated were not necessarily “Chinese”— Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Summer Solstice are as likely an excuse for putting on an event as the Mid-Autumn Festival or the lunar New Year. These lobby events were often a more elaborate and longer version of Karaoke Wednesdays, with the same songs interspersed between games, raffles, and announcements.

In February 2015, for the Chinese New Year, the administrators of the nursing home organized a celebratory event in the lobby. This was the most elaborate of such events I had observed. Staff and volunteers spent a whole week transforming the lobby into a makeshift performance space. On the day of the event, a troupe of jiangnan sizhu—Silk and Bamboo— musicians had arrived early. The musicians were dressed in uniform silk robes with Mandarin collars, and the sound of musicians tuning and warming up on on their erhu (Chinese spike fiddle), yangqin (dulcimer), and guzhen (zither) filled the typically serene hallways. With the musicians were dancers in brightly coloured costumes waving long strips of silk ribbons. Their preparation for a staged performance was visible and audible as the volunteers brought over one hundred elders down to the lobby.

The celebration proper started with a long speech given by the Centre’s Chief Executive Officer in Cantonese. He wished everyone well, reiterated that the elders were our cultural treasures, and recited several four-character phrases appropriate for the New Year. Then he introduced a local member of Parliament, who gave a slow-paced speech in English of similar content. Following the MP’s appearance, the musicians filed on stage wearing stern, performance-ready expressions on their faces. They adjusted their music stands and their robes, checked their tuning, and begin playing.

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Jiangnan sizhu is a style of instrumental music from Southern China. Historically a genre associated with literati’s self-cultivation and urban amateurs’ teahouse entertainment, it became the most widely known regional music of China, and its repertoire and practices have been absorbed into the kind of Chinese instrumental orchestras and conservatories so wrapped up with Chinese nationalism.96 Today’s Jiangnan sizhu players are trained professionals, often hired to adorn weddings and such events with an appropriate dose of symbolic Chineseness, and to elevate the events from the ordinary. Jiangnan sizhu has a noticeable presence in the diaspora as a quintessential Chinese music. Toronto is home to several famous Jiangnan sizhu players (Chow-Morris 2004, 287-295), and the style can be heard at Toronto Chinese Orchestra’s concerts, and in nearby ethnic malls during the New Years, and in diverse other locations, such as the lobby of the Centre.97

One of the other volunteers came to stand next to me in the back of the lobby. She crossed her arms and squinted at the musicians, and asked if I knew what they were playing. I suggested that it was Jiangnan sizhu, but she didn’t care about the name of the genre, noting that it was plainly obvious that this was “traditional music,” which was all she needed to know. “I was hoping they would do that thing they sometimes do,” the volunteer said, “where they use these instruments but play karaoke songs. Oh well, I guess they are playing traditional Chinese music.”

I looked up from this conversation, and noticed that by the stage, staff member Martha was waving at us in exasperation. In the front row, Ga-Liang stood up. She turned around to look at the packed lobby for a moment, and then marched down the center aisle toward the exit. Ga-Liang’s sudden walk-out catalyzed a wave of unrest among the residents, many of whom had fallen asleep during the speeches. A few of them gestured to get up with her, triggering their wheelchair alarms, and all of a sudden differently pitched mechanical beeps began chirping from different corners of the lobby, interspersed with the elder’s groans of frustration and the staff’s panicked chattering. The musicians on stage soldiered on, while Ga-Liang headed toward the

96As a genre of music, Silk and Bamboo has also been coopted into the PRC’s processes of nationalization, and has accrued an additional layer of significance. For a much more in-depth study of Jiangnan Sizhu and its sociocultural role, see Witzleben 1995, Thrasher 2008, and Chow-Morris 2004. 97 The Toronto Chinese Orchestra is also supported by the municipal and provincial governments, like many other Chinese cultural institutions and cultural centres in Toronto.

115 elevator. The situation was chaotic, and embarrassing for the Centre. K.P., the director with whom I met earlier, and a board of administrators came over to help the volunteers and the staff prevent the elders exodus, leaving the MP standing awkwardly by the door.

Knowing that she needed one of the volunteers’ elevator keys, when she walked passed me, Ga-Liang asked if I would take her back to use her own private washroom—a tactical request she knew I was not allowed to refuse. In the elevator, Ga-Liang complained, “That show was boring, and that music was boring, and I don’t know what they were on about, so I am going.” We got to her floor, and I went to sign her back in in a log that kept track of each resident’s whereabouts. Turning around to go back downstairs, I realized that Ga-Liang had never returned to her room, but had instead planted herself in her favorite sofa. Catching my inquiring look, Ga-Liang explained, “That show was really boring, and I don’t understand that music.”

A winsome smile spread across her wrinkled face as she explained her refusal of the prescriptive Chineseness at the Silk and Bamboo concert, “Plus, it’s almost four o’clock, so I came back for my daily singing.”

Refusals are generative, as anthropologist Carole McGranahan notes (2016), in that in refusing, we move away from one thing toward another. Ga-Liang’s refusal was curatorial: it was a deliberate prioritization of her own self-cultivation through daily singing and a reclamation of her stewardship of the soundscape of the nursing home and her musical life. This cultivation was mediated by the institutionalized routines of songs, sounds, listenings, and medicine, and these mediations situated Ga-Liang in this particular diasporic “home.” But for Ga-Liang, the act of cultivation was ultimately hers. In the administered life of the nursing home that reduced her to a passive recipient of care, Ga-Liang sang her continual becoming and re-becoming as a diasporic Chinese elder, every single day.

12 Coda

In the spring of 2015, while browsing the shelves of a CD and DVD shop in Pacific Mall as part of my research toward chapter 4, I heard the familiar opening lines to “Fragrant Death.” I looked up to the source of the sound. The middle-aged storekeeper had been streaming

116 a YouTube video. On screen, a massive stadium was filled to the brim with a crowd singing “Fragrant Death” together. A row of Cantopop stars led the singalong from a stage, and behind them was another screen, onto which the 1959 film adaptation of “Fragrant Death” was projected. The store keeper told me that the video documented a 2012 event organized by the non-profit organization Po Leung Kuk in the landmark Hong Kong Coliseum. The event was called “Ten Thousand People Singing ‘Fragrant Death.’” He asked if I wanted to buy a copy.

From the mall, I went to the nursing home for my shift that day, where I found Ga-Liang sitting quietly on her favourite sofa. It was not four o’clock yet, and Ga-Liang didn’t have her song books with her. We chatted briefly, and I told her about hearing “Fragrant Death” at the mall, and about the Hong Kong Coliseum event.

Ga-Liang was confused at first, and I realized I had never heard her refer to “Fragrant Death” by its title. I hummed the opening line to her without lyrics. Ga-Liang’s eyes lit up in excitement, and identified the song by the first line. “Oh! Lokfa mantim biyuguang (the falling pedals eclipsed the moon)!” She asked, “On a real TV? (As opposed to the screen used for Karaoke Wednesdays?) In the Mall?”

She sang again, this time with her usual deliberation,

“Lok—fa— mantim biyuguang— (the falling flower pedals covered the entire moon)”

Then she asked me again, “In the Mall? In Hong Kong?” We chatted briefly. She was bewildered but delighted to learn that the song of her daily life that structured so many of her hours had such an expansive reach stretching across a transnational diasporic media public. She knew “Fragrant Death” was popular and had shared the song with many, but she was keen to hear about people in the Mall listening to the same song as she does in the nursing home, or that at one point a mass had sung “Fragrant Death” together.

Much later that day, after most residents had gone to bed, I was leaving the nursing home for the day. I walked by the lounge on Ga-Liang’s floor. The door was ajar, and Ga-Liang was watching a cooking show by herself. She saw me wearing my coat and carrying my backpack,

117 and asked, “Are you going now?” I said yes. She muted the TV with a remote, pointed to the screen, and sang once again,

“Lok—fa— hehehehe— mantim biyuguang (falling pedals—hehehehe—eclipsed the moon)”

And then she said, “Okay, you go now,” as if she, too, was in a singalong. Her gesture was a reminder—perhaps both for me and for herself— that beyond the walls of the nursing home and the Centre, the routinized sounds of these songs cohered a much larger community. That community was on her mind that night.

In this chapter I have traced several different constructions and contestations of what it means to be Chinese, and to be old and Chinese. The institution’s and administrators’ negotiated politics of representation between government funding agencies and prospective clientele manifested the most clearly in the lobby performance of Silk and Bamboo. The overworked Activities staff, partly informed by a network of visitors and volunteers, partly limited by infrastructure and circulation of media in the diaspora, formulated a soundscape of Nostalgic Oldies within the nursing home that trafficked in ideologies of age and ethnic identities. Finally, there was Ga-Liang— who was only one of the many elderly resident listeners in this rich sound world—who sang her own way to her own sense of self as an elderly Chinese woman living in diaspora. Through these different constructions of the state of being old and of Chineseness in sounding and listening, I hope to have demonstrated both the diachronic and synchronic complexities of living in Sinophone Toronto—in this particular iteration of Chinese diaspora, with its breadth and history—and the processes through which an individual person like Ga-Liang became herself.

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Chapter 3 The Politics and Poetics of Sound in Queer Sinophone Toronto

In the last chapter I explored how an individual like Ga-Liang might make themselves at home in Sinophone Toronto, forming her diasporic, Chinese, and elderly subjectivity through her own everyday practices with a routine of songs administered by the institution of the nursing home. In this chapter I explore a different dimension of questions of “homes” and diasporic subjectivity through sound and music. Specifically, I examine everyday sonic practices among a group of queer diasporic Taiwanese who live in Toronto. These practices included discourses of sound, stylized singing and speaking, and ways of listening that emerged from everyday life within this group. Through these practices, the group cohered—both because of the intimacy they developed and because of the boundaries demarcated through these sonic practices. I argue that these practices allowed members of the group to forge an alternative “home” that made possible for the emergence of their intersectional queer diasporic subjectivities.

Issues of “home” among this group of interlocutors present particular theoretical interests. Many aspects of the multi-scalar diasporic “homes” I track in this dissertation are destabilized at the intersection between the queer and diasporic identities of my interlocutors in this chapter: many of them have complicated relationships with their families of origin, and the very first “closet” to come out of were often located in their childhood homes.98 Many of them experienced social marginalization in Taiwan—their homeland—before migration, and in the diaspora after. While Toronto in general is considered friendly toward LGBT+ people, this queer liberalism often implicitly assumes whiteness and further marginalizes racialized queers such as my interlocutors. In short, this is a case study that foregrounds moments where “homes” fail, falter, and fracture—rather than providing the comfort and stability promised by the very definition of home. These failing homes, I believe, are pressure points that hold promise for significant insights toward “more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world” (Halberstam 2011, 2-3), and I will demonstrate, being at “home.”

98 This is in part because they threatened what Lee Edelman calls “reproductive futurism,” (2004), the belief that fighting for a better future for the children is unquestionably valuable, which is entrenched in both stories of immigrant lives and discourses of Chinese filial piety. I do not discuss this aspect in any detail but will pursue in future projects.

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In the following sections I will first describe and contextualize the social formation of this group. I will then situate the ethnographic material within the literature on the queer diaspora and on expressions of queerness in Chinese performing arts. I use Helen Hok-Sze Leung’s concept of queer “undercurrents,” that is, “an undertow of unease that refuses to allow the surface calm to settle” to think through how we might conceive of an iteration of queerness that attends to, reflects, and is nuanced by its sociohistorical particularities.99 Details and analyses of the practices are divided into three sections: one focusing on the discursive realm, one on various stylized vocal performances including singing and speaking, and a final one in which I theorize the performativity of queer listening. As is often the case with how these practices manifest in life, there are overlaps and cross-references between sections. But ultimately, I argue that through sounding and listening, my interlocutors enact a queer sensibility encapsulated by Leung’s “undercurrents” which served as the basis for the congelation of the social group.

13 A Queer diasporic social formation

On Chinese New Year in early 2014, before I began fieldwork for this project, I received a phone call from Da-Ming, a long time friend and interlocutor from Taiwan who had moved to Toronto two years before I did. I had spent the New Year with Da-Ming and his younger brother the year before, and I had asked him earlier that week if he wanted to do the same this year. On the phone, Da-Ming sounded ambivalent: he was hosting a gathering for a group of friends and I was welcomed to join, but, he warned me, these friends were a group of “yaomo guiguai” (imps, ghouls, demons and goblins of every description)—a metaphor that Da-Ming had told me that his mother used to describe her startling chance encounter with Taipei’s Pride Parade. I was invited, Da-Ming stressed, but I should brace myself.

I attended the gathering and was introduced to a tightly-knit clique of friends. No one explicitly “came out,” so to speak, but hints about group members’ queer identifications became increasingly unsubtle as the night wore on: people asked if I was tuned in to the debates over Taiwan’s legalization of same-sex marriage; if I followed queer icons in popular culture from Taiwan and North America; what my relationship status was like and whether I used any dating

99 Helen Hok-Sze Leung, Undercurrents: Queer Culture and Postcolonial Hong Kong (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2008), 6.

121 apps. It occurred to me that I was being auditioned. The friends and I danced around queer culture performatives, trying to see if we could be legible to each other as queer.100 By the end of that evening I had heard and shared intensely personal stories about family, relationships, and identities, and it became clear to me that group members’ queer identifications were at the center of this social formation.

The initial invitation to the New Year’s gathering, I later found out, was Da-Ming’s own meaningful gesture. Da-Ming had deliberated for a long time before deciding that it was “safe” to let me in. He had consulted members of the group who I had gotten to know through other Taiwanese/Chinese circles in Toronto and had only extended the invitation when he thought there was a good chance that I would “fit right in.” My entry into this field site was a mutual coming out between Da-Ming and I, and between the group and I.

Over the next two years, I participated as a member of the group. I took part in spontaneous social gatherings, holidays, celebrations of major life events, and group chats on social media.101 During this time I observed and adopted many mannerisms and behavior patterns simply to fit in, and only months later realized that I had learned the group’s sonic practices of queer homemaking. I also conducted informal, in-depth interviews that often turned into or emerged from late night heart-to-heart sessions in the kitchen, long afternoons spent over coffee, and lengthy phone calls. These interviews opened the doors for numerous subsequent impromptu long conversations that informed my understanding of this group’s everyday life.

13.1 “Yaomo guiguai (imps, ghouls, demons, and goblins)” at home

The friends have loving and poignantly adopted the pejorative phrase Da-Ming’s mother used to describe the LGBT+ people she encountered, and referred to the collectivity as yaomo guiguai (henceforth “imps and ghouls””). Friendship among the eight to ten men and women in this group built on the members’ shared experiences of identifying as queer, coming from Taiwanese middle-class families, immigrating to Canada alone, and struggling, in their late 20s to early 30s, with underpaid knowledge-work careers. Everyone spoke Mandarin and English (as

100 101 Including Facebook chat, Instagram, and Line, the texting app popular in Taiwan and Japan and their diasporas.

122 a second language for everyone, myself included). As all members of the group had lived in urban centers in Taiwan at least through the 1990s, they also shared the same repertoire of Taiwanese popular culture references, which included Western music and media imported to Taiwan.

I highlight these demographic categories because for the group such commonalities translated to shared experiences of fine-grained textures of migration. In interviews and in conversations, many group members have told strikingly similar stories of the Eva Airline planes that brought them to Canada for the first time, and the send-offs in the same airport in Taiwan.

It also meant that they shared the on-the-ground experience of Taiwan’s quest for a national identity and had in common an understanding of the complexities of ethnic identifications in Toronto.102 Their common experiences of immigrating by themselves in their late teens or as young adults also translated to relatable struggles with loneliness, with settling in, and a sense of uncertainty about the future. Everyone in the group also shared a penchant for fast-paced repartee full of sexually-explicit double entendre as well as a genuine love for family style hot pot dinners.

There were, of course, noticeable differences between each person’s experiences, and there were internal power dynamics at play during every gathering. Group members had a range of different ideas about what it meant for each of them to be queer, to be Chinese or Taiwanese, and to be an immigrant in Toronto. While the majority of the group experienced same-sex desires, each presented themselves and explained their sexuality in differently gendered ways. For instance, Jin-tai, a cisgender woman who is attracted to men, described herself as queer in that she felt she was “a very effeminate gay man trapped in a straight woman’s body.” Power asymmetry along gender lines was also noticeable: cisgendered queer men dominate both in number and in audibility. The majority of the sex talk and performances of overdetermined sexuality, which were an important aspect of this group’s sociality, were phallocentric.

Depending on where they stood on Taiwan’s cross-strait geopolitical tension, group members had also gotten into heated debates about different ideologies of Chineseness in Taiwan

102 For a detailed explanation and discussion, see Melissa Brown’s Is Taiwan Chinese (2004).

123 and Toronto.103 Varying degrees of command over Taiwanese dialect within the group reflected local Taiwanese/mainlander-Taiwanese sub-ethnic divisions as well as regional allegiances for Southern/Northern Taiwan: group members from the Southern cities spoke the dialect fluently, especially when gently poking fun at the Northerners’ linguistic inadequacy.104

Each of the group members had other social circles outside of the group, but there was a general consensus that this was a “chosen family” of sorts, and important holidays were usually reserved to spend with together. New friends were occasionally invited, much like how I joined the group, though not too many stayed. At any given social gathering there were six to eight friends, and for those who couldn’t make the gatherings, photos and short video clips from the event were often sent through group threads in texting apps.

13.2 The physical “home” and practices of queer kinship

The group had been hanging out in the apartment that Da-Ming owned more so than any restaurants or bars in Toronto, and this apartment had become such a space of safety and comfort—a “home base” for the group, really—that several people started leaving their half- finished bottles of alcohol and snacks there; and jokingly threatened to also leave a toothbrush and a clean shirt.There were many reasons for the group to settle into a routine in Da-Ming’s apartment. He did not have a roommate and the apartment was spacious. He hosted frequently and kept the kitchen well-stocked, shouldering the role and the honorific address of a big brother—many in the group address him as big brother Da-Ming. A filial son with close ties to his family in Taiwan, Da-Ming allowed his mother to decorate and furnish his living room and dining room in a somewhat middle-aged aesthetic, which reminded many group members of their parents’ houses.

103 Much can be said on this, but I am bracketing this dimension of the group’s social interactions so as to focus on how they explore ways of expressing queer identities through sound. I am also bracketing interrogations of group member’s religious affiliations and socioeconomic class here. 104 See Introduction for explanations of bensheng ren (Taiwanese; descendants of 16th-18th century Chinese immigrants from today’s mainland) and waisheng ren (Mainlanders; those who moved to Taiwan in 1949 as a result of the Chinese civil war).

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In the fall of 2014 Da-Ming was transferred to a city on the East Coast of the United States for work. Instead of selling, Da-Ming lent the keys and everything in the apartment to group member A-Ren, who had been bouncing between sublets. Their agreement was that A- Ren would kanjia (“watch over the home”) for Da-Ming, and to compensate for his labor, paid an extremely low rent. Along with the apartment, A-Ren also took over hosting duties for the group’s gatherings. Da-Ming visited frequently, staying in the apartment along with any group members who needed a place to crash between jobs or apartments.

For the group, the transition between Da-Ming living in the apartment and A-Ren’s residence was nearly imperceptible— the same pair of red strips of calligraphy continued to hang by the main door; 105 the same furniture that Da-Ming’s mother allegedly had found through a Chinese antique importer up in Markham; and the same feng shui plants that wilted in both Da- Ming’s and A-Ren’s chronic neglect. A-Ren traveled a great deal, so another group member, Frank, also got a set of keys so that he could bring in Da-Ming’s mail and, at least in theory, water the plants. When Jin-Tai’s living arrangements fell through she moved into the second bedroom in the apartment for a few months. At one point, four of the group’s members were staying in the apartment, and after a night of hanging out I was one of only two people actually leaving.

The group was tightly knit. Members participate in what migration studies scholar Dai Kojima describes as “practices of queer kinship”—cooking and eating family-style meals, providing emotional and financial support in difficult times, revealing vulnerabilities to each other, as well as in-fighting, gossiping, and maintaining the group’s internal hierarchy.106 As such, even though new friends were sometimes invited to group events, there is a fairly clear sense of who is (or is not) “in the family,” so to speak.

Frank was the central figure of this group. Quite often the photos taken by different group members circulating within the group’s texting threads captured Frank exaggeratedly performing

105 These are long strips of red paper hung to right and left of the front door of the house for good luck, and are replaced every year on New Year’s Day to welcome a new beginning. The red strips always come in pairs, featuring a poetic couplet written in calligraphy. Among diasporic Taiwanese and Chinese people in their 30s, the red strips are considered old-fashioned. 106 Dai Kojima, “No Arrivals: The Cultural Politics of Mobilities in Queer Asian Diasporas in Canada,” (PhD diss., University of British Columbia, 2015).

125 the “impish and ghoulish” ethos of the groups at home: pretending to pole-dance around a table’s leg, playfully cross-dressing, inhaling hydrogen from balloons in a suggestive manner. He was quite infectious—group members cherished him and often joined in with him.

In our interviews and casual conversations, Frank weaved many stories about passing, covering, and about coming out and leaving home into his personal migratory history. Though everyone had lived a different transnational life and had a different migration story to tell, Frank’s stories, presented as integral parts of his transnational experience, resonated with many in the group and with scholarly works on queer diaspora.

Growing up in 1980s Taiwan, Frank was mercilessly bullied by classmates and disciplined by schoolteachers for his non-normative physique and feminine-of-center gender expressions. When he was sixteen, Frank’s mother exhausted the family’s savings in order to send him to Canada so that her eldest son could catch a glimpse of happiness at the tail end of childhood. The family had no prior connections in any of the Chinese diasporic networks, nor the reservoir of cultural and economic capital of many post-1980s Chinese immigrants to Canada.107 Through an expensive study-abroad broker, Frank was placed with a white host family while finishing high school in suburban Vancouver. There, he found himself frequently hiding in terror from his host brothers’ mockery and physical abuse. Eventually he moved out to stay with the family of a Chinese Canadian classmate. After college, Frank moved out east to Toronto, where he came to terms with his sexuality and cultivated lasting friendships in various queer Asian Canadian circles—one of which provided the context for my ethnographic research in this chapter.

Fearing that coming out would be the ultimate failure of his filial duties as the heir and eldest son of the Su family, Frank kept much of his social life a secret from his family in Taiwan and from his professional contacts. As many of the “imps and ghouls” shared similar concerns, the challenges and intricacies of “staying in” and “coming out” to various publics and private realms in one’s life was one conversational staple of the group.

107 Canada’s immigration policy went through major revisions between 1967 and 1976, when race-based immigration quotas were abolished in favor of points calculated based on skills and education. The 1970s and ‘80s saw a wave of affluent, highly-educated new immigrants from Taiwan and Hong Kong. See Introduction for further detail.

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14 Theorizing Queer Diaspora in Sound 14.1 The problematics of “home” in queer diaspora

Before I launch into descriptions and analyses of everyday sonic practices, I will first investigate what identifying with queerness might mean, and how such queer identifications manifested for my interlocutors. In the introduction I problematized the concept of “home” in the context of diaspora studies. The problematics of home comes into sharper focus when considering the queer diasporic “imps and ghouls” who have experienced and continues to experience displacements from home on multiple fronts. For them, homes were what sociologist Anne-Marie Fortier calls the “traumatizing originary site”108—the reason for departure in the first place and for endlessly deferring return. And yet they couldn’t help to look for home: however painful, home remained an important point of orientation for being in the world.

Scholarship focusing on intersectional queer diasporic subjectivities has largely been devoted to either queering the diaspora, or diasporizing the queers.109 In scholarship which takes the first approach, scholars have attended to the various ways in which queer spaces are carved out within ethnic minority communities, and have drawn on queer theory as a critical intervention to reexamine “diaspora” as either the abject of the home nation (Eng 2010; Gopinath 2005; Kojima 2015; Manalansan 2003), or an extension of the nation which further marginalizes the queer diasporic subjects (Chiang 2013, Eng and Hom 1998).110 Another approach, “diasporizing the queer,” considers how queer spaces are constructed in the mainstream in the same way ethnic minorities build enclaves, and theorizes “cultural homelands” for the queers (Schimel 1997). This latter approach has generally been critiqued as problematic as it flattened several different forms of social marginalization.

108 Anne-Marie Fortier, “‘Coming Home’: Queer migrations and multiple evocations of home,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 4, no.4 (2001): 405–424, 409. 109 Fortier (2001), Eng (2010), and Kojima (2015) have all noted similar observations. 110 I have also just became aware of Richard Fung’s Dirty Laundry (1996), which interweaves documentary film footages and fictional vignettes, and “investigates the representation of ‘outlaw sexuality’ in early Chinese Canada and the deletion of homosexuality from historical accounts.“ I will try to incorporate Fung in future iterations of this project.

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Fortier critiques both of these approaches as they ultimately reproduce that traumatizing originary site, “home,” as something to be desired, to travel toward. Dissatisfied with frameworks that privilege various types of recuperations or returns, Fortier notes that queers in diaspora constituted a distinct subjectivity (409-10), and as such, she asked if there is a possible alternative reading in which the diasporic space is always already queer(ed) (418). Following Fortier’s question, “Is it possible to conceive of ‘being at home’ in a way that already encounters/engenders queerness?” (416), in Feelings of Kinship (2010) David Eng leverages the concept of “queer diaspora” to rethink and restore queerness and racial minority. Eng argues that race and queerness has been discursively construed as mutually exclusive in U.S. liberalism, and tolerating one seems to always provide the moral alibi for oppressing the other.

In summation, Fortier and Eng both move towards a conceptualization of “queer diaspora” that privileges neither—queer is not just a qualifier for some of the diaspora; and vice versa. Rather, they are mutually constitutive: queerness emerges from diasporic conditions, and living in diaspora is part and parcel of a queer identity. This understanding better reflects the queer diasporic experience. In Queer Sinophone Cultures (2014), Howard Chiang and Ari Heinrich put forth a somewhat similar argument, but engage with Shu-mei Shih’s notion of Sinophone directly.111 Emphasizing Sinophone’s potential to disrupt the various binaries that the term diaspora inevitably brings to mind—diaspora and nation; China and the West; home and host— Chiang and Heinrich argue that Sinophone is inherently queer. They also argue that despite the dire lack in the literature, any version of “Chineseness” cannot be complete without incorporating queerness into its purview.

14.2 Queer undercurrents

Fortier, Eng, and the concept of queer Sinophone are all compelling, but these discussions seem to all be predicated on a particular kind of queerness well-rehearsed in English scholarship – queering as a performative that destabilizes. Queers embody political potentials to deconstruct. Despite the extent to which I find the emancipatory promise of this kind of queerness empowering, it seems flat when adopted as a framework to understand the expressive lives of my interlocutors. Fran Martin’s reflections in Situating Sexualities: Queer Representation in

111 See Introduction for discussion on Shih’s Sinophone.

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Taiwanese Fiction, Film, and Public Culture (2003) articulate my discomfort the most closely. Seeking a “strategic decentering—a queering—of a part of queer theory itself” (121), Martin observes that in Taiwan, the English word “queer” and its transliteration kuer have become synonymous with queer theory itself. As a Euroamerican academic enterprise, this Queer Theory can become a “conditioning context” (120) that actually displaces, rather than liberates, queers.

So instead of queerness as understood in Fortier and Eng, I turn to Helen Hok-Sze Leung’s concept of queerness as “undercurrents” (2008). Leung developed her theory based on her readings of Hong Kong cinema. Contextualized in a postcolonial Hong Kong that faced “a struggle for intelligibility in a discursive regime that gives credence to its difference only on condition that such difference does not disrupt [the PRC’s] national ‘harmony,” Leung theorized Hong Kong’s nebulous self-narrative articulated on screen as an undercurrent, which she describes as “an undertow of unease that refuses to allow the surface calm to settle” (6).

Refusing to impose Queer Theory wholesale, with its implied teleology of queer progress—that queers in Hong Kong will eventually become like those in San Francisco, as Leung was told (2008, 1)112 — Leung argues for queer readings that attend more sensitively to local conditions. She contends that the opaque, hinted-but-never-spoken same sex desires in Hong Kong cinema must be understood as a socio-politically situated form of queer expressivity.

In this chapter I draw on Leung’s formulation of queer “undercurrents” as an analytic for the many expressive sonic practices through which my interlocutors became queer diasporic subjects, and I argue that this “undercurrent” expressive sensibility is what allowed my interlocutors to express themselves in situations where such expression feels almost impossibly difficult, and to harmonize their own voices with their own histories of repression. Adopted for my ethnographic setting, the notion of expressive queer undercurrents also elucidates the multiple registers of expressivity that have always already been embedded in everyday practices: any one of my interlocutors may sing or speak with an opaque hidden message—an

112 Hans Tao-Ming Huang’s Queer Politics and Sexual Modernity in Taiwan (2011) I think holds this kind of teleological assumption. Huang writes as if once legal and social conditions move towards “open acceptance,” queers in Taiwan can and will surface— that is certainly one way of thinking about the issue, and it is representative to some extent, but I find Leung’s formulation of queer undercurrents far more compelling.

129 undercurrent— that straddles the threshold between legibility and illegibility. The idea of undercurrents underscores these generative and rich moments.

In a feedback interview with A-Ren, one of the “imps and ghouls,” I shared some preliminary ideas about the expressivity of queer diaspora. I asked him what he thought. A-Ren contemplated my question, and then described queerness as an aesthetic of deliberate playfulness in response to various manifestations of the normative in his daily life. I asked him to elaborate, and he said,

Well, okay. You’ll notice that when we talk in this group, and we talk in this queer verbal style that you analyze, we are always talking about the most trivial shenanigans, content-wise. Things that are not important. I think that’s intentional—the little things we talk about in this queer way won’t hurt anyone, and there’s no danger of getting in real trouble, and we still get to invoke this queer thing together.113

I asked if he felt that there is a totalizing regime of heteronormativity that only permits this queer verbal style when the content of the conversation is inconsequential.

A-Ren said,

I guess you could say that. But I think the more important thing is that your polarization of the queer and the normative doesn’t actually mean much to me. It’s not about dismantling the structure. I know that’s how a lot of queer politics and queer theory work, but for me, a version of queer[ness] that makes more sense would be: I know the game, I know how to play the game, I know how to mess up the game under the table, and I also know how far I can mess it up and still win the game. I—me—choose when I play along and when I push back. I choose. […] I have to survive at the end of the day. That’s the simple way to put all of this. I have a life to live, I want the same things everyone wants, but that doesn’t mean I can’t loosen a few screws on the machine when no one is watching, and get a kick out of doing so.

113 My translation. A-Ren spoke Mandarin throughout the interview. Words that A-Ren had uttered in English are marked in bold, and words he had emphasized in speech are italicized.

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In this artful, discursive expression, A-Ren demonstrated his awareness of the structuring forces that sediment as habitus in conditioning his queer diasporic subjectivity.114 Toggling between the assumed whiteness of Canada’s homonationalist discourse, the homophobia in his diasporic communities, and his complicated traumatic relationship with Taiwan as homeland, A- Ren survived as queer by both complicit participation in “the game” and finding the metaphorical table to shield his subtle disruptions.115

Both in sentiment and in style of expression, A-Ren’s description echoes Leung’s words that “the story that cannot quite get told is also a queer story—a tale of ‘difference’ that is palpable only as an undercurrent” (2008, 7). In itself a nuanced framework, this iteration of queerness reconfigures queer politics by relocating its emancipatory potentials to the possibility of disruption—something that isn’t fully surfaced or materialized, that is not an explicit disavowal or a refusal, but nonetheless simmers in the present, running parallel to dominant discourses.116 This queerness can be a way of being in the world and a way to form relationships and communities—sometimes because that’s all that people can manage without being obliterated.

15 Poetic discourses of noise, harmony, and sexuality

This section documents and analyzes the poetics of the group’s everyday discursive practices. Specifically, I focus on how, by talking, group members construct and sustain the boundaries of the social space and the home they have made with each other. The group talked

114 Bourdieu, Outline. 115 For discussions on homonationalism in Canada, see Disrupting Queer Inclusion: Canadian Homonationalisms and the Politics of Belonging, ed. OmiSoore Dryden and Suzanne Lenon (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2015). Observations of homophobia in diasporic communities can be found in the introduction to Q&A: Notes on a Queer Asian America, eds. David Eng and Alice Hom (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998). 116 My thinking here is indebted to and inspired by José Muñoz’s intersectional formulation on the generative potential of disidentification in the introduction to Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999) and the related Cruising Utopia: the Then and There of Queer Futuirity (New York: New York University Press, 2009). An important distinction to note is that A-Ren’s own thinking emphasizes the contemporaneity of queerness as the path not taken, so to speak, but that has always been there. As much as possible, I also want to foreground A-Ren’s and the group’s own theory-in-practice.

131 extensively about sex. Sex talk here was a communicative register that had more to do with performing the sexuality that underscored the basis of their sociality, and less with information exchange. I introduce sex talk in this section, but for the group, sex talk extended beyond speaking—they also sang and vocalized sex noises, which I detail in the next section.

The group also talked about noise as a category of sound and as an expression of how they perceive their own marginal position in relation to the Chinese diaspora at large. As both unwanted sound and disruptive sound, noise talk for the group was at once a self-reflexive commentary, and an acknowledgement of the group’s potential to queer. In addition to these activities, the group also discursively produced, demarcated, and maintained their social and physical spaces through talking about melodies and harmonies: people they disliked were metaphorized as discordant people, possessing a tune that didn’t work within the group.

Each of these kinds of talk were on the discursive end of the spectrum of sonic expressions, but the group also engaged in sounding practices beyond speaking toward the same performative goals in talk. I discuss the discursive realm as a separate section only for clarity; in everyday life, talking often moved fluidly into and out of singing and other forms of sounding and listening.

15.1 Sex talk

Whether at home over hot pot dinners in Da-Ming’s apartment, or out in the grocery stores and on the streets of Toronto, the group discursively constructed an inverted social space by talking and joking about sex almost all the time, in ways that were noticeably different from how they conduct their lives outside of this social space. It is important to note that to the extent that the group talked about sex all the time, members were careful to maintain the socially sanctioned boundaries of platonic friends.

In Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club (1994), anthropologist Anne Allison theorizes that in Japanese hostess clubs the tabooed “talking about sex,” rather than actual sex, is a discursive strategy through which things that typically do not fit in strict institutional cultures are contested and “worked out” within demarcated spaces. Sex here

132 is a discursive tactic that makes room for talking about other unspeakable topics because it is already a taboo subject.

Though contexts differ, talking about sex served a similar social function for the group. In every single interview I have conducted, members of the group have all said that whenever the group convenes, they have felt compelled to perform heightened sexuality through discursive representations of sexuality activities. These representations include puns and improvised jokes, but also often include stories and very direct discussions. Sex talk in this group may also be understood as a form of disrupting the heteronormative family founded on reproductive possibilities.

Sex talk provided a veneer for the group’s social space, pointing to centrality of desiring (queer or otherwise) as the basis of the group’s social formation. Deborah Cameron and Don Kulick suggest in Language and Sexuality (2003) that talking about sexual activities shifts the emphasis of sexuality from the stasis of identity labels to directional desires that imply trajectories. Within the group’s sex talk, this desire is expressed through discussions about other users on Grindr or “checking out” random strangers on the street. The desire is also often expressed through jokes swiftly incorporated into various everyday life actions: putting on a sweater and remarking that “this won’t stay on for long,” or picking out a piece of food from the hot pot and commenting on its phallic shape and texture before consuming it. Jin-tai described the group’s sex talk once when explaining to me that she was “a person of social graces and good manners” who would otherwise never broach the topic of sex, but “everything turns dirty with the ‘imps and ghouls!’” What she called dirty—that is, referring to sex and sexuality—is the sex talk that sustained the group.

Sex talk through food-related jokes were especially common, although this might in part be because so many of the group’s gatherings occur at the dining table. Anthropologist Judith Farquhar suggests that desires for food and sex are both naturalized through the Chinese idiom shise xingye (“Eating and having sex are only nature”). Farquhar pushes back against this naturalization in Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-socialist China (2004). By reading appetites in the asceticism of Maoist China as a form of political resistance, Farquhar argues that while desire (for both food and sex) is lived and felt in individual bodies, it is engendered and shaped historically.

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Appetites are embodied politics. For the “imps and ghouls,” though the particulars differ, sexual appetites expressed through sex talk can perhaps also be read as a form of resistance against the various social and historical conditions that sought to contain their sexualities.

Sex talk was an important part of the construction and maintenance of the group’s social space. This social space is a foil that complemented the numerous other social situations in which group members participated. The boundary of this space, and the importance of this particular space to group members, were made clear to me one evening when I ran into A-Ren at a party hosted by another Taiwanese friend. A-Ren and I made some small talk about the weather and subway delays, and he leaned over to fetch the soda but inadvertently stained his shirt with ranch dressing. I raised my eyebrows at him, gesturing to repeat the joke I have heard the group told about all foods of that color and texture. A-Ren laughed immediately and loudly, but then held out his hand and said, “okay, okay, now. We are not at home,” demonstrating how sex talk demarcated social spaces for him.

15.2 Noise talk

Sex talk was also construed as noisy in this group. The qualifier most often used by any one member of the group to describe the collectivity was “noisy” (chao 吵). Conversations were indeed almost always lively and polyphonic, and there were certainly no shortage of giggles and chuckles in response to the numerous puns and jokes. But often the comment about us being noisy was not as much an assessment of the actual loudness of an utterance or a fit of laughter, but rather an observation on the transgressive potential of what was uttered, whether the group was gathering over hot pot in Da-Ming’s apartment, walking down Dundas Avenue in downtown Toronto, sitting in a restaurant, or singing in a karaoke suite.

A typical gathering would start with the group heading to the Lucky Moose supermarket in Chinatown, and bringing back to Da-Ming’s apartment bag upon bag of groceries, often on foot. The group then collaborated in washing, cutting, and blanching the vegetables to prepare for hanging out over hot pot for the rest of the night. The food fed endless sexually explicit jokes. During one of the grocery-shopping trips, Frank, A-Ren, Jin-Tai, and myself crowded in the narrow vegetable aisle inside Lucky Moose. Surrounding us were other grocery-shoppers

134 speaking Mandarin, Cantonese, and English. A-Ren asked Frank to pick out a daikon turnip large enough for everyone, and to make sure that the turnip was fresh. Frank said he did not know how to tell a good daikon from a bad one. Feigning irritation, A-Ren raised his voice and shouted, “Just squeeze to see if it’s firm!” Frank laughed loudly without saying anything, which catalyzed laughter and eye rolling from the rest of the group. Self-conscious about the other shoppers—who were likely able to understanding our conversation—A-Ren sighed and said, “Oh my god, we are so noisy! We are going to scare off all these people.” Following the earlier interaction, A-Ren’s self-reflexive comment about noise suggests that “noise” here is both a literal referent to loudness and a metaphor of sound that described the disruptive and transgressive nature of Frank’s joke.

The same scenario with different jokes of the same ilk has happened numerous times during casual strolls on Bloor Street, while dining in Mississauga, in a rental car to Markham, and so forth. The place where the group was most intensely conscious of this “noise,” however, was in Da-Ming’s apartment. Quite often if one group member had arrived late, upon entering the apartment he or she would announce, “I could hear you guys all the way from downstairs.” Occasionally this late-comer would also re-tell made-up stories about how they had forgotten Da- Ming’s apartment number, but was able to locate the group by aurally tracking the noise. Da- Ming or A-Ren sometimes chimed in with hyperboles about how the neighbors were shocked to death by our impossible noise, or that the superintendent was probably keeping tabs on “a bunch of imps and ghouls being disruptively noisy all night.”

But noise talk was not just about acoustic and social disruptions. Within the apartment and within the group noise and the idea of noise were also an important way to both discursively and sonically construct the social space constituted by the collectivity—as something that exceeded the sum of all of its parts. The apartment’s layout was somewhat unusual in that there was no real wall between the master bedroom and the den. To ensure privacy, Da-Ming placed several large bookcases behind a thick fabric curtain that he had nailed to the ceiling and floor. The resulting fake wall effectively created a sort of “heard but not seen” effect, as the group was aware that secrets could not be uttered in the bedroom, as they were plenty audible from the living room, and vice versa.

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This unique acoustic setup in Da-Ming’s apartment also meant that the group’s rowdy talking and laughing permeated the entire apartment, and was impossible to contain the sound of this lively social scene in the living room. In that sense, the group’s discourse of noise and their practices of making noise not only demarcated the boundaries of the collectivity, but was also one of the main ways through which this social life created resonances within the physical walls of Da-Ming’s apartment. The very real concern that the neighbors could overhear the group also held exciting potentials for bursting out the sonic-social bubble that the group has constructed and maintained for itself.

Following Lefebvre’s call in The Production of Space to understanding space not only as material, physical, “absolute” spaces, but more importantly as a complex network of intertwining social relations and practices that allows geography to “stretch-out” (Massey 1993), anthropologists of sound and ethnomusicologists have studied processes and practices of sounding to variously theorize the ways in which sound and space are co-constitutive (Abe 2018, Born 2013, Sakakeeny 2013). As well, geographers of residential “homes” have attended to the ways in which Lefebvre’s production of space rests on a dialogic process between sensing and sensed, in other words, on the sensorium (Pink 2004). Sensing and the sensed—including especially hearing and sound—are embodied ways of producing a space, and habituating into the space.

In each of the group’s self-conscious comments about being “noisy,” the speaker was simultaneously reflecting on both the epistemological stance of the sounds produced by group members (“our sound is out of place”) and on the audibility and the potential aural surveillance of that sound (“and others can tell”). Literature in sound studies theorizes extensively the political stakes of “making noise” in both senses of the phrase— sounding in ways that are deemed noisy, and deeming a sound and its source noisy. Concerning the latter, Hillel Schwartz’s Making Noise (2011) and others explain that to call a sound noise is to actively other the sound source. Geographer Paul Beere’s work on the sounds of the abject in domiciles relies heavily on this idea. This type of understanding about noise is certainly applicable to how the group called itself “noisy,” perhaps in moments where internalized regimes that have oppressed them paradoxically reared their heads (in a “colonization of the mind” sort of way). These self- reflexive moments of “we are so noisy” can also be understood as a moral alibi that enables the

136 group to safely carry out these stylized verbal performances and acknowledge the various social codes transgressed through their stylized speech acts.

15.3 Social harmony as a boundary-making discourse

The Mandarin term for any particular verbal style or characteristic is composed of two characters: qiang (accents and oral cavity)117 and diao (tones, tunes, melodies). In contemporary vernacular Mandarin this term is often used simply to mean speech accent or inflections—as in “Chinese Canadians speak [Mandarin] with an English qiangdiao”—but it could also refer to a verbal style or some other intangible extra-linguistic characters conveyed through speech. For instance, one might describe an odd acquaintance as possessing a weird qiangdiao. A pejorative description of a feminine-of-center man is niangniang (girly girl) qiang (accent); a phrase Frank had encountered too many times in his childhood.

The latter character of the word, diao, somewhat nebulous as to whether referring to accents or tune/melody, is sometimes used as a metaphor for intangible compatibility: poor fits between friends, between a person and an institution, and between organizations are often described as a matter of “their diaodiao (tunes) not harmonizing.”

The “imps and ghouls” deployed this metaphor quite frequently. The friends invited new friends to the social gatherings from time to time, and like anyone, found themselves getting along better with some than others. Those who couldn’t keep up with the banter and the puns, couldn’t participate in the other sonic practices I will discuss in the next section, or those who didn’t understand the sex talk were understandably not invited again. In such cases, members of the group may have described the situation as “our tunes don’t harmonize.”

“Our tunes don’t harmonize” is an expression people use from time to time in Taiwan and the Taiwanese diaspora. What is particular to the “imps and ghouls” is the extension of the

117 As in koqiang (oral cavity). Qiang could also be pointing to xiongqiang (chest cavity) or any other bodily cavities. Perhaps it is too far-fetched to draw this connection, but I find it fortuitous that so much of the homemaking in different physical spaces occur in the open spaces—qiang—of our own bodies. See Brandon LaBelle’s Lexicon of the Mouth (2014) for a rumination on how the oral cavity is an important site of self-making.

137 diao metaphor beyond the realm of melody. Often, in conjunction with the comment of discordant tunes, group members would comment on excluded friends’ “tempo” (in English). Preferring quickness in speaking in general and particularly in bantering, those whose “tempo” was not in sync (i.e. too slow) with the group were not only mismatched in terms of personality or energy level, but also in terms of their everyday verbal styles. In other words, the group’s invocation of diao—as a word/concept that bridges between speech accents and musical tunes was not strictly metaphorical. The incompatibility of social “tunes” is also an incompatibility of sound.

Each time the group called itself noisy, various real and imagined listeners were invoked, and the group enacted a self-conscious audition through which they articulated in sonic terms how they saw themselves socially, and what it meant for them to be queer. These real and imagined listeners each represented different publics: each other at home, neighbours, Toronto at large, the Chinese diaspora. Listening and being heard were imagined as an interface between the group’s intimate everyday practices and multiple different publics that threatened to encroach on the safety of home, but were also at risk of being challenged by the group’s social and acoustical noise.

These imagined listeners were extended further to a media public in Taiwan through one of the group’s recurrent jokes. At the peak of these lively moments, amidst cacophonous laughing and talking, any of the group members would playfully speculate possible headlines in Taiwanese newspapers if we had been in Taiwan and busted for noise complaints. A favourite was “homosexuals gather to drink, smoke, commit the sin of gluttony, and disrupt social order.”

The real-imagined listener also included family (jia ren) back in Taiwan. During one of the hot pot gatherings on a Friday night, Jing-Tai received a call from her mother in Taiwan. She asked the group to quiet down, and took the call at the table. The group waited for Jing-Tai to politely greet her mother, but could not resist the urge to giggle loudly when Jing-Tai said that she was having a relaxing, peaceful night in with some close friends—who were all upstanding pillars of the society.118 The giggles became loud, uncontrollable laughter, and Jing-Tai said to the phone, “No, Mom, I am not lying…I really am with friends!” She turned the phone to the

138 group in desperation, quietly mumbled, “you are all jerks,” and gestured for everyone to say hi. Amidst a chorus of “Hi Auntie!” greetings, Frank’s voice cut through the group in a high-pitched, ornamental manner:

Jiejie------hao! (Big sister, hey!)

Between the repeating syllable of jie (sister), an obviously irreverent address,

Frank waved his hand as the second jie lept upward intonation-wise by nearly an octave. The incongruity between Frank’s response and the socially appropriate script (and sound) of greeting made everyone laugh loudly and hysterically. As Jin-Tai nervously covered the phone with her hand, A-Ren pulled on Frank and reminded, “auntie could hear us. Keep that noise down!”

In that moment, Frank’s greeting crossed the fragile boundaries between the group’s social space and Jin-Tai’s other home among family in Taiwan. A-Ren’s response made clear to everyone the incompatibilities between the group’s various homemaking endeavours and the heteronormative “home” on the other side of the phone. In trying but failing to contain the excess of sound, sex talk, and the queerness these things stand for, Frank and the group simultaneously articulated, revealed, and foregrounded all the various spaces for which the “imps and ghouls” were both in- and out-of-place.

16 Poetics of Sound in the Queer Diaspora

In this section I turn to a wide range of performative vocal sounds that group members did to enact the “undercurrent” sensibility outlined in section two. These vocal sounds included singing and imitating the vocal sounds construed in Taiwanese and North American popular culture as “sex noise.” I also include a range of vocal manipulations that I argue were Mandarin adaptations of camp talk, the speech style signifying queer identities. These sounding practices were part and parcel of the discursive practices I discussed above.

Often, the sounding practices I include in this section provide a plausible deniability for group members’ expressive intents, thereby allowing them to enact a shared queer sensibility that ran as an undercurrent. This is most obviously exemplified in the sung and spoken puns that constitute the core of group members’ Mandarin camp talk, but all the subtly expressive vocal gestures that resounded within the group demanded ears attuned to the group’s particular

139 sensibility, and at such they operated as queer undercurrents as well. Culled together from the sounds of daily life and popular culture in Taiwan and in Toronto, these sounding practices also evoked several “homes” for clued-in listeners, and perhaps chart another undercurrent that brought together homelands, family homes, and the queer kinship among the “imps and ghouls.”

16.1 Everyday noisy sing-alongs

During the numerous hot pot gatherings in Da-Ming’s apartment the group members almost always sang along with music in the background. The music typically streamed from Frank’s phone. Sometimes he played YouTube playlists he found and liked, and sometimes they were playlists he curated in iTunes. Frank broadcasted the music through the sound system on the TV in the living room, and made sure to turn the music loud enough to be audible in the dining room. On his own, Frank favored Mandopop and was a fan of Medici.tv, the website that streamed live Western art music concerts. For the group, though, he played Mandopop singers who had accrued underground followings in Taiwanese gay clubs: A-Mei (Zhang Huimei) and Jeannie Hsieh (Xie Jinyan) were his standbys.

The one song that always inspired the group to sing along in the middle of a lively conversation was “Tinghai” (Ocean Listening). “Ocean Listening” was released in 1997 as part of A-Mei’s second album Bad Boy. The album was titled in English even though all the songs were in Mandarin. “Ocean Listening” was wildly popular in Taiwan in the late 1990s, and nearly everyone in the group has told me stories about listening to Bad Boy on chunky CD players in middle school. Compounding the association of “Ocean Listening” with Taiwan in the late 90s is the fact that, as a celebrity, A-Mei had been openly supportive of gay rights in Taiwan’s same-sex marriage debates in recent years, and had dubbed herself a “rainbow ambassador” at Taipei’s Pride Parade. A-Mei’s iconic single “Jiemei” (Sisters) had also been appropriated as a gay club anthem and was be heard regularly in underground gay pubs to this day. Ethnomusicologist Todd Rosendahl (2012) has observed that in popular music, female lead singers with low voices were particularly popular in North American commercial gay spaces and queer nightclubs because these voices suggested the queering of gender binaries. A-Mei’s low voice held a similar allure in the Taiwanese context.

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Beyond the obvious connection between A-Mei’s music and the various queer public spaces invoked, for Frank, A-Mei’s voice had another layer of meaning. The release of Bad Boys in 1997 coincided with Frank’s semi-involuntary move to Vancouver—fortuitously so, Frank told me, as he saw himself as a “bad boy”—and Frank had recounted many times to the group how the jewel cased CD Bad Boys was meaningful to him. Frank told this story to illustrate his longtime loyalty to A-Mei. He also told the story to explain why the repetitive refrain of “Ocean Listening” was so comforting to him.

To the extent that I am hesitant to relegate Frank’s, and subsequently the group’s, preference for “Ocean Listening” to a diasporic melancholia and longing for home, or to Tia DeNora’s theory that people listen to music for emotional regulation (2000), “Ocean Listening” had accrued particular significances for Frank in its repetitions. As the group has established its own routines and patterns, playing A-Mei’s “Ocean Listening” also became a reference to the numerous times the groups had gathered.

Over steaming hot pot, whenever the refrain of “Ocean Listening” came on, conversations stopped in favor of a heartfelt group sing-along. The refrain of “Ocean Listening” was particularly conducive for sing-alongs, because the very first syllable is prolonged for an entire 9/8 measure, leaving time for people to “hop on” if they did not catch the beginning of the refrain, which happened often:

Recording: ti ------ng (listen) hai (ocean) | ku de sheng (crying s-) yin (-ound) -- ---

Frank: ti ------ng hai | ku de sheng yin --

A-Ren: ------ng hai | ku de sheng yin ---

By the time the second instance of the lyrics “tinghai” arrived in the recording, everyone in the group was belting to their heart’s content. As soon as A-Mei on the recording moved on to the next verse, though, conversations resumed immediately. Occasionally, if something in the lyrics of the verse was fitting for the conversation at hand, then a group member might also sing

141 along. This would often catalyze another spontaneous bout of group sing-along, although not always.

For instance, one evening Frank told the group of how his good intentions inadvertently humiliated his recent crush, and as a result the crush would not return any of Frank’s phone calls. The group gave him various good and bad advice. Some suggested that Frank deserved better; others said he would never know unless he tried again, and dialed the crush’s number on Frank’s phone. Everyone quieted down, only to hear that the call had gone to voicemail. Meanwhile, “Ocean Listening” continued in the background. On the recording, when A-Mei hits a high note singing the line “This ocean (that cries) loves too much and cares too much,” Frank transitioned from speaking to singing along and then back, “See, he won’t take my calls anymore, it’s ruined and (speed up) I just (sing) care too much – (speak) okay you guys, enough, hang up the phone.” This kind of transitioning in and out of singing happened spontaneously and organically, more often at home but sometimes on the street as well. The sing-alongs were rarely discussed explicitly, and it seemed as if the group took them for granted as part of everyday life.

New friends were often confused by the group’s heartfelt sing-alongs. They were participatory practices that cohered the group. They allowed group members to sound, feel, and become a part of the collectivity (Turino 2008) as group members listened to each other and to themselves in the amalgamation of voices. The sing-alongs were also about creating loudness, and sustain the group’s acoustic and metaphorical noises through the sheer volume and the sonic materiality of the sing-alongs. The familiarity and musical structure of “Ocean Listening” provided the medium for the group’s sung sociality. Singing and listening along the group was also able to imagine themselves into the cultural space of a Mandopop-consuming public. Framing the here-and-now within the narratives depicted in the background songs, group members were also able to “put a song on top of it” (Samuels 2004) and draw on their habitus of musical consumption as resources to navigate mundane aspects of daily life.

16.2 Stylized speech as Mandarin camp talk

While talking about sex, the group in general, and Frank in particular, often did so in stylized verbal performances that sociolinguist Keith Harvey has termed “camp talk” (1998,

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2000a and b, 2002). For Harvey, camp talk is a combination of phonological features (how something is pronounced and sounded) and pragmatic moves (how an understanding is produced in the other parties in communication) that results in rhetorical effects of jarring mismatches that destabilize the assumed relationship between sign and meaning, between voices and speakers, and between sound and script. This mismatch is the means by which camp talk indexes the speaker’s queerness. The classic example in English is how gay men stereotypically speak with features that are mapped onto femininity, including a higher voice and greater prosodic variations, the pitch contours of an utterance.

Instances of the idea that the speaking voice can somehow give away a queer subjectivity abound in both sociolinguistics of sexuality and in North American mass media. Linguistic anthropologists Deborah Cameron and Don Kulick note in Language and Sexuality (2003) that as early as 1920s there had been scholarly attempts to pin down, codify, and explain linguistic markers that can be reliably mapped onto homosexuality (74-6). Following Judith Butler’s call to shift understandings of subjectivity from stable social categories to in-flux processes, Cameron and Kulick described social practices like “camp talk” as consisting of culturally specific sets of rhetorical strategies available to any speaker who wishes to take on and signify a particular social prototype (102). In other words, camp talk can be understood as an expressive model—a “character,” if you will—that anyone can take on. Rather than in the character itself, it is actually in the “taking on” of the character through camp talk that people can become queer. The on-the-ground manifestations of these rhetorical strategies can be heard in popular North American situational comedies such as Will and Grace (1998-2006) or Modern Family (2009-)119 and many others, which many in the group watched regularly.

My point here is two-fold: first, to the extent that camp talk—which queers—rests on instability and deconstruction, it is also paradoxically a somewhat durable and intelligible “gay man” character that one can step into through the rhetorical strategies of camp talk. This character is accessible to my interlocutors, as they live in Toronto and consume a lot of this North American popular culture—sometimes as cultural exports to Taiwan that are then

119 Which many members of the group have watched on their own (i.e. not as a group) and I have heard these shows referenced a couple of times. Frank keeps a DVD box set of Will and Grace on the bottom shelf of his bookcase.

143 downloaded in Toronto. It would not be unreasonable to conjecture that both the symbolic significance and the concrete practices of camp talk techniques were well within the imps and ghouls’ consciousness. Second, Cameron and Kulick note that queerness performed through camp talk, like any other linguistically constructed “characters,” can be “taken on” by practicing the rhetorical strategies.

But the phonological techniques of Harvey’s camp talk do not transfer easily to Mandarin. Indeed, literature on camp talk is overwhelmingly English-centric. This may in part be attributed to the fact that Mandarin-speaking queerness might operate as undercurrents and are not as ostentatiously audible. There are also far fewer publicly “out” figures who can articulate, (re)produce, and homogenize a set of linguistic conventions toward a Mandarin camp talk.120 In Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora (2010), linguistic anthropologist Jing Tsu argues that linguistic nativity provides access to a feeling of belonging at the site of speaking. Tsu notes that when a speaker cannot access linguistic nativity, “all the experiences attached to knowing a language intimately—reading, speaking, listening, and writing—appear equally imperiled” (2).121

For the group members, speech was therefore an arena in which the queer diaspora’s double displacement was most sharply and intimately felt: to “take on” the queer identity through English camp talk necessitated the embodied discomfort of speaking a non-native language.122 What is queered is perhaps not only the relationship between sign and meaning, or

120 As of April 2016, there is still only one publicly “out” gay celebrity in Taiwan’s entertainment/popular culture industry, although there are several Mandopop singers who were known allies, and there are several singers and actors who are rumored to be gay. This singular “out” gay figure, Cai Kangyong, hosted the group’s favorite variety talk-show Kangxi Laile (Here comes emperor Kangxi) for over a decade. The group often watch streamed episodes of the show together. 121 Tsu’s argument is ultimately about how the Chinese literary ideograph privileges certain dialects (mainly Mandarin) and their speakers, while marginalizing others. In the introduction to On Not Speaking Chinese: Living Between Asia and the West (2001), Ien Ang described her disorienting experience of travelling to Taipei to give a talk. Looking Chinese but speaking nary a word, Ang found her Chineseness confronted every time someone assumes that she speaks Chinese, which was basically all the time. To me, Ang’s anecdote attest to the centrality of speaking in the formation of subjectivity. 122 Anyone who has ever had to learn a second language knows about training your lips, teeth, tongue, and cheeks to form unfamiliar sounds, and any ethnographer knows about the subtle but

144 between sound and script—but also between the queer diaspora and their various linguistic homes.

In the following section I document and analyze some of the ways in which members of the group had creatively and resourceful devised what I considered to be a Mandarin adaptation of camp talk. At the time I observed these speech patterns and conducted interviews, group members’ consensus was that there hadn’t been a standard way to verbally perform one’s queer identifications in Taiwan and the Mandarin-speaking parts of Toronto. The style I document here circulated within a small social circle that spanned from Toronto to Taipei, and the group in Toronto deployed many of these camp talk techniques to demarcate social boundaries.

I argue that this Mandarin camp talk drew its performative elements from a variety of everyday life resources. Most significantly, I see relationships between the imps and ghouls’ camp talk and what literary scholar Joseph Allen calls the circulation of poetics in Taiwan’s public popular culture. This circulation of poetics made its way into Mandopop, which is also a type of resource for my interlocutors. Finally, by attributing the verbal style to another queer diasporic Taiwanese figure active in Toronto, in speaking Mandarin camp talk, group members also created a sense of historical continuity with earlier queer Sinophone diasporas, whose lives and stories became an undercurrent in the sonic materiality of Mandarin camp talk.

The group’s camp talk culled its stylistic features from many different resources. Taiwanese mass mediated popular were readily available on the Internet and were often audible in ethnicized spaces of Toronto—such as ethnic malls and supermarkets. Within the diaspora, casual references to Taiwanese popular culture pepper everyday life, not to mention what people

certain ways in which mispronunciation or speaking with an accent marks one a distinctive outsider.

145 see and hear when they call or visit home. One of the features that circulated in this way is what Joseph Allen calls the “circulation of poetics” (2014).123

For Allen, the circulation of poetics refers to how literary conventions of Chinese poetry trickled from elite to popular cultural realms in Taiwan. These included the dissemination of canonical classical poetry through textbooks in public school curricula and children’s books. The majority of these poems were either in the Tang dynasty style of shi, or the Song dynasty style of ci. Tang poetry, in particular, features couplets—pairs of sentences featuring the same number of syllables, usually five or seven, which are structurally parallel. The red calligraphy strips hung by the door to Da-Ming’s apartment are an instance of how pervasive this poetic convention is. Allen also notes that the four-syllable conversational adages in Chinese (chengyu) preserve many of the same poetic devices utilized in classical poetry: standardized word count, archaic grammar and terms, structural parallelism, and rhyming (73). These adages are used regularly and casually in everyday speech, as are public service announcements that utilize the same metric structure as Tang poetry. Parodies of particularly widespread poems also facilitated the circulation of poetics in everyday speech.124

Allen does not discuss the sonic aspect of how the Chinese poetics circulated, but it is also worth noting that these poetic conventions make their way into the lyrics of Chinese popular music.125 The poems he discusses were taught through group recitation throughout public elementary schools in Taiwan, and a crucial aspect of knowing the poems was to master the

123 The poetics Allen discusses refers to literary conventions. The poetics I have teased out are social poetics, by which I mean how sounding and listening to certain sounds enact the affective and social dimensions of life.

124 There can be a discussion on how these literary conventions may stand in for a version of Chineseness legitimized by literary culture, and the complexities of invoking such conventions in Taiwan and Taiwanese diaspora, but such a discussion is far beyond the scope and purpose of this project, so I will bracket that for now. 125 Mandopop legend Teresa Teng’s “Mingyue jishiyou (When will there be bright moons again)” is an example of Tang poetry set to popular music ballads. The Cantopop songs I described in chapter two similarly featured couplets and Chinese poetic conventions. See Witzeleben 1999 and Moskowitz 2010 for detailed discussions; and Yano 2002 for a similar phenomenon in Japanese enka.

146 cadence of recitation, where certain syllables were prolonged to show the structure of each line. Take one of the most widely known poems, which Allen also used as his example:

Chuang qian –prolongation— Ming yue guang

By my bed bright moon shines

Yi sh i –prolongation— Di shang shuang

I suspect frosting soil

Ju tou –prolongation— Wang ming yue

Raising my head to see the moon

Di tou–prolongation— Si gu xiang

Lowering my head to ponder home

In this sonic pattern, when reciting long verses composed in five-syllable couplets, a rhythmic regularity emerges. Group members were adept at this kind of poetic recitation, and the lilting prolongation of the second syllable became one of the main expressive techniques of Mandarin camp talk.

With the poetics, the trope of qiangdiao was also circulated. In literary Chinese, qiangdiao had been a specialized term referring either to meter and rhyme schemes in poetry, or to established musical tunes that serve as the basis for Song dynasty lyric poetry (ci).126 Qiangdiao

126 See Joseph Lam’s “Ci Songs from the Song Dynasty: A Ménage a Trois of Lyrics, Music, and Performance” (2015) for a detailed discussion on the relationship between poetry and music, and the ways in which certain Song ci go back and forth between song lyrics and poetry. Poetry in music is of course not unique to Mandopop and is a rich area that “complicates the idea of a fundamental divide between verbal and musical communications” (Hemmasi 2013, 59), but I will have to bracket that line of inquiry for another day.

147 connotes musicality in speech. Though the linguistic nuances and specialized usage of the term qiangdiao may not always be at the forefront of my interlocutors’ minds, the trope of qiangdiao was invoked regularly when they metaphorize social harmony as having a suitable qiangdiao.127

All of this is to say that the group’s qiangdiao—their musicalized verbal style, which I discuss in detail below—was also an expressive realm richly imbued with social significances, but that was also rooted in everyday cultural practices.

The group attributed the Mandarin camp talk verbal style to Frank and his past. Several group members, including Frank himself, told me the same tale that accounted for the origins of the camp talk verbal style. When Frank first moved to Toronto about fifteen years ago he had a mentor figure who was also diasporic Taiwanese and identified as queer. Frank’s mentor was proudly out, and spoke every sentence with flair. Frank told me that his qiangdiao was infectious, and Frank quickly took on the style and made it his own.

Frank was the oldest and one of the most exuberant and audible members of the group, and had at times taken on the role of an official mentor. He called to check in when the snow blizzards hit, collated digital photo albums of the group’s activities, and made sure everybody got the same number of shrimp on hot pot nights. Frank was the life of every party and the lynchpin of the collectivity. From the center of the group, Frank’s own particular verbal style also spread. Circulating within the group, the tale of origins contextualized Frank’s camp talk both as a verbal style and a meaningful indicator of the group’s sociality. Through this circulated tale the group also shared an imaginary of a queer diasporic space that had historical continuity.

Below I sketch out some of the features or techniques in Frank’s camp talk. Bear in mind that this somewhat crude typology represents only one possibility in the various (queer) verbal styles across the entire Sinophone world. I draw on the linguistic (both phonological and

127 Philip Brett noted in the introduction to Queering the Pitch (2006) that in 19th century continental Europe, “musicality” is a euphemism for male homosexuality. I do not think my interlocutors are aware or are operating with explicit awareness of that connection between musicality and queerness, but I want to acknowledge the connection Brett articulated. I would say in general the mapping of (non)musicality to genders occur in different ways in East Asian performing arts than in the West. That being said, as mentioned, my interlocutors are well versed in a lot of North American popular culture (Glee, for instance), so I don’t feel comfortable completely writing off that idea, either.

148 rhetorical) features from English camp talk as comparatives only to foreground areas in which my interlocutors may have been especially creative, and to foreground the various constraints and possibilities available to them.

16.3 Rhythm and intonation

In his work, Harvey notes that the phonological features and pragmatic moves of camp talk ultimately result in four rhetorical strategies: paradox, inversion, ludicrism, and parody. Harvey argues that through these four effects, speaker destabilize the heteronormativity inherent in language; to challenge the assumed stability of how signs mean; to foreground speech itself as a performative medium. Harvey’s theorization of linguistic “moves” implied a calculated intentionality that Cameron and Kulick detested, but they generally agreed with Harvey’s characterization of camp talk features. Phonological features in camp talk, such as heightened speaking register, greater prosodic variations (that is, more contours to the background “melody” of speech), and imprecise enunciation of consonants (i.e. lisps) are linguistic features most often mapped onto women, thereby serving the rhetorical purpose of inversion, challenging the man- woman and gay-straight binaries.

Mandarin is a tonal language, which is to say that altering the relative pitch and inflection of any giving syllable could drastically change the meaning of an utterance. This is exploited all the time for punning purposes, of course, but such manipulation of pitch is always deliberate, and the range of pitch manipulation is limited. On the other hand, Mandarin is mostly monosyllabic. The pronunciation of each character consists of one consonant and one vowel,128 and the background rhythm—both in terms of time intervals and where stresses and accents are placed— of the syllables is comparatively more regular than in English.129 Because of this relative stability of rhythm in speech, dragging out or shortening a syllable tend to create emphasis like pitch inflections do in English. Doing so also does not alter meaning or jeopardize communications.

128 This is a bit of a simplification but for the most part this description holds. 129 Indeed, the regularity of syllables has caused several of my interlocutors to speak English but (self-report) to sound like they are speaking Mandarin.

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Duration, rather than intonation, thus represents the primary expressive possibility for the group in Mandarin camp talk.

This is not to say that pitch is not still an important expressive resource, though. Prolongation of syllables actually paradoxically makes it more possible for Fran and friends to manipulate pitch. In a prolonged syllable, after Frank had already “hit” the right tone and before the next syllable was pronounced, Frank often subtly ornamented the syllable with a slight vibrato. Syllables that were at the end of the phrases were especially likely to be prolonged and performed in this way, essentially with a tiny melisma.130 This micro-ornamentation of drawn- out syllables can also be heard in many Chinese performing arts such as Beijing opera and Mandopop where longer syllables are often sung with melisma. The group members are avid Mandopop listeners (and I discuss this further in the next section), and are familiar with popular tropes about Bejing opera. The same kind of prolongation and ornamentation can also be heard in Mandarin recitations of poetry discussed above.

An example of Frank’s camp talk is his signature phrase, tao yan. Tao is in the third tone, which dips and rises, while yan in the fourth tone sounds like a quick descend. Literally translating to “[you are] annoying,” the phrase could be used as a cry of contempt when pronounced properly. When the syllables are drawn out, on the other hand, the utterance is stylistically associated with young women performing and propagating a “cute” voice.131

Incorporated such speech into Mandarin camp talk, when both syllables were drawn out, Frank stylistically achieved Harvey’s rhetorical inversion. In particular, Frank almost always spoke with an improvised melisma at roughly a quarter tone: “taoyaaaaaaaaaaaa------n.” Performing this stock phrase in his male body with exaggeratedly flair and hand gestures, when Frank utters this phrase it is simultaneously a queering gesture and a reference to the subversive potential of the “cute” ethos.

131 Anthropologist Marc Moskowitz has discussed this particular element of stylized speech as part of the “cute” (ke ai in Mandarin, or kawaii in Japanese) ethos in Taiwan. Moskowitz discussed the stylized speech as part of a range of girlish behaviors “ranging from giggling to exaggeratedly high-pitch childlike speech to one’s clothing choices.” Moskowitz further noted that this ethos is a form of turning the male gaze on its head.

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16.4 Sung and Spoken Puns

Puns in general are a very big part of camp talk in both Harvey’s configuration and among the group. For Harvey, puns are part of the rhetorical effect that he termed “ludicrism,” which includes various forms of linguistic play.132 In speech, puns lend themselves easily to queer expressions. They are inherently disruptive as they “undermine the ideology of language as a rational system of reference,” and force us to confront the instability of sonic significations.133

Puns can operate in several different ways, but of all the puns, homophonic puns are of particular interests to me for two reasons: first, relying on words that sound identical but might be written differently, homophonic puns privilege the sonic aspect of an utterance. This emphasis on the sonic makes homophonic puns especially suitable for punning across different languages and dialects, and across music and speech. Second, Chinese language has a particularly high density of homonyms (words that sound the same but mean differently), and as such homophonic puns are very common in Chinese literary conventions and in traditional customs. The reason to always have fish served on the Chinese New Year’s eve dinner, for instance, is because fish and surplus are both sounded as yu. So to utter “we have yu every year” is both a realistic observation and a wish to make a lot of money in the coming year.

Frank and the group members harnessed the disruptive potential of puns by constantly excavating possible puns from an utterance that was already resounding in the air. Following something seemingly innocuous in quotidian chit-chat, any member of the group might suddenly have interjected with a homophonic pun retrofitting the sound with an alternative script. If Frank wished someone a year of chāngshèng [prosperous prosperity], for instance, A-Ren might have asked in jest if Frank meant a different, homonymous chāng—prostitution—which changes the meaning of the well-wish to “a year of prosperous prostitution.” This type of homophonic puns cannot happen by accident and was intentional, creative, and expressive: the pronunciation of chang could have been rendered as 昌(prosperity), 娼 (prostitution), 猖 (wild in an animalistic way), or 鯧 (butterfish) in writing, and the pun could have gone in any of these directions, but

132 The political potential of ludicrism has been theorized (though not necessarily in these terms) by Mary Douglas and numerous other ethnographers of the verbal arts (Bauman 1977, Scherzer 2002, for example). 133 Samuels, Putting a Song, 9.

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Frank performatively foregrounded the sexually explicit option as part of the sex talk discourse I discussed earlier. Punning in this way, then, is not only a demonstration of creativity, but also a performative act that unearths the alternative possibilities—indeed the undercurrents— within the sonic materiality of every utterance, that queers and destabilizes everyday verbal communications.

Every word spoken in the group was already inherently unstable and rich with punning potentials. The group’s established pattern of constant punning foregrounded that instability, but until someone actually turned an utterance into a pun, this instability remains a potential that was only palpable to those who were accustomed to the group’s punning practice. The awareness of the potential puns on the horizon created a great deal of intimacy among group members.

Privileging sound over script, the homophonic puns of Mandarin camp talk were also a useful expressive tool to pivot across speech and song. As I have mentioned, during the group’s regular gatherings in Da-Ming’s apartment, Mandopop was almost always playing in the background, and many of the group’s mealtime conversations were punctuated with bursts of sing-alongs, during which everyone belted out in full voices, together, to the background music.

This practice of collective sing-along transitioned easily to and from the privacy of Da- Ming’s apartment to commercial karaoke bars. One night, Frank suggested that it had been a long time since we last hit the karaoke bar in downtown Chinatown. Most members of the group had fond memories of going to karaoke in Taiwan when they were teenagers. In Toronto, as adults, economic pressure and busy work schedules meant that trips to commercial karaoke bars were a treat saved for special occasions. As Da-Ming and Cai-Hua were both visiting after they have moved away, the group headed to Chinatown for a night of karaoke.

Whereas karaoke nights in many North American bars and restaurants feature staged areas, and karaoke singers typically perform for other restaurant patrons, East Asian and Chinatown commercial karaoke bars typically consist of private suites of varying sizes. The group usually reserves a larger suite at the end of the hallway. Frank and A-Ren explained to me that this was a tactic to “minimize the [sonic] horror that we will try but also fail to contain in the suites, so that we could be ourselves.” In other words, sounds of the group’s karaoke singing were

152 also part of the acoustic and social noises that emblematized the ways in which their queerness related to the Chinese diaspora at large.

The friends typically shared the cost of private suite rental fees, alcohol, and snacks. For those with performance anxieties about singing, it was not uncommon to have picked out a few signature songs and practiced extensively at home in preparation for an intimate karaoke night with friends. Inside the karaoke suite, the group collaboratively came up with an initial song list. This list included songs that most of the group enjoyed, including songs on Frank’s playlist during hot pot nights. “Ocean Listening” was a must. As the night wore on, and depending on the ebb and flow of the group’s energy level, Frank, Da-Ming, and A-Ren then fielded opinions for second and third rounds of songs. Through this song-ordering process, the group collectively curated its own soundscape.134

On that night, Frank insisted on straying from the usual process, and ordered

Mandopop singer Elva Hsiao’s relatively new “Super Girl Aìwuúweì” (Super Girl Fearless Love). Some of the friends expressed concern, but Frank assured everyone that we would all know what was going soon enough.

The introduction to the song filled the group’s private karaoke suite at the end of the hallway, and the song title in bright yellow and magenta projected onto a wall-sized white screen. Frank stood facing the screen, Elva’s winking face superimposed onto his sweat-soaked back.135 A-Ren, Da-Ming, and other group members cheered as Frank half-sung, half-spoke the verse with Elva, in his falsetto voice:

134 For the most part the group favored well-known Mandopop songs that were hits in the mid- 1990s through the mid-2000s. Mandopop or English songs that became associated with gay culture and are therefore frequently heard in contemporary gay clubs in Taiwan are also popular: Village People’s Y.M.C.A., Mandopop star Jeannie Hsieh’s “Jiejie (Big Sister)”; and the Yellow Submarine have all made frequent appearances on the group’s song list. Recent English popular songs with gay culture associations were also popular. These songs, incidentally, have often also been audible in Toronto’s public spaces such as TTC stations, stores like Metro, Loblaws, and Dollarama, to name just a few. Some examples in this category include Carly Rae Jensen’s “Call Me Maybe” and Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance.”

135 Mandopop refers to the commercially produced, mass distributed popular music primarily sung in Mandarin.

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[Verse: English words marked in bold]

Qinai de lady Dear lady friends

Lai peiwo jianding Come check it out for me

Yanqian de nansheng rangwo youyidiandian dongxin The boy in front of me--

I have a bit of a crush on him

My lipstick today Jintian de kouhong Will do all the talking for me Tiwo shuo sheme If you want to stand out from the crowd, Xiang yuzhongbutong yonggandian bie weiweisuosuo you’ve got to be brave and not show your fear

I’m not scared! Love is so cool,

I’m lost in thoughts about you Wobupa aihenku I’m not scared! Not of his arrogance xiangni xiangdao chuleshen In fact I especially love that ‘tude Wobupa tadezhuai Girls are special, and loving is what we do Jiuai jiaoaodeyanshen

Nühaimen duodute lianai shi womende benneng Nanana, nananana

Nanana, nananana (non-lexical vocables)

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The song was sung from the perspective of a newly infatuated young woman urging her sisters to be fearless in the pursuit of love. The visual narrative of the music video, on the other hand, told a rather different story: on screen, four “Super Girls” possessing different super powers find that their romantic pursuits of a Ken-like plastic doll fail repeatedly, in catastrophic ways, until they are taught to contain and discipline their powers—to become less “super,” after all. In the karaoke suite, through an interpretive frame borrowed from the song, Frank “put a song on top of it” (Samuels 2004) and sang both his own desires to love fearlessly, and the sense of impossibility he saw in such love, having experienced its consequent fallouts from various homes.

As the song progressed to the break, the friends in the suite cheered with increasingly enthusiasm. They gathered around Frank and screamed several gender-crossing nicknames that play on Frank’s family name, Su: the alliterative Su Shěn [Auntie Su] and its near homonyms, Susan and Suzanne.136 They emphatically elongated the second syllable of each cheer and ornamented with what sounded like a melisma.

Within the group and in everyday life, Frank often went by one of these Su nicknames. Similar gender-crossing nicknames are quite common in English camp talk, but the “auntie” nickname carries a particular poignancy as it implies a disruption of the Su family structure: rather than being the eldest son and heir of the Su family, Frank displaced himself through that nickname, taking up the stance of a distant female kin, shěn, the wife of the father’s younger brother. Frank had been pressured by his family to move back to Taiwan to take over the family- owned eatery, marry a woman, and fulfill his obligations in the patrilineal Su family. Frank’s ambivalence toward the family’s expectations is complicated by his frustrations with a seemingly dead-end career and numerous heartbreaks in his love life in Toronto.

In the karaoke suite, Frank held up the microphone to capture everyone’s voices. He bopped his head rhythmically and gestured for everyone to get ready to sing. The beat dropped, and everyone in the group sang the song’s refrain together:

136 With the exception of Frank’s family name, Su, all the names used in this dissertation are pseudonyms.

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[Bridge; English-inspired text in bold] [Translation by Emily] biedang nüshen tonghua gushi Don’t try to be a goddess in the fairy tales They are all just for show zhishi ouxiang juqing

I am a woman, and I’ll love when I want to woshi nüren yaoai jiuai This is girl power This is girl power

[refrain] 137 You can be a su-su-su

Su-su-su-supergirl You can be a su-su-su Su-su-su Su-su-su-supergirl Su-su-supergirl Su-su-su Love fearlessly I’m a supergirl Su-su-supergirl Together we can rule the world Aiwowei I’m a supergirl

Together we can rule the world

137 This refrain can be heard on YouTube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3IrlF6NpGU&list=RDo3IrlF6NpGU (beginning at 1:20) [Last accessed 27 February 2017]. The refrain is sung in English—or what Marc Moskowitz calls “English-inspired words”— but the rest of the song is sung in Mandarin. For a discussion on the politics of English lexicon in Chinese popular music, see Moskowitz, Cries of Joy, Songs of Sorrow: Chinese Pop Music and Its Cultural Connotations (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2010), 45–46.

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With each sung utterance of the syllable “su,” the friends repeated a gesture of pointing in Frank’s direction, and verbally interjected the musical phrases by shouting Frank’s nicknames again. In that moment, Frank Su—Auntie Su, Susan, and Suzanne—was also a su-su-super girl.

The group loved this song so much that they sang it two more times that night, which meant the refrain was sung nine times. Each time, through the pun that pivots on the syllable of “su,” Frank naturalized his superimposition of the Super Girls’ narrative onto the complexities and subtexts of “Su shěn.” Importantly, this coalescence between Frank’s “su” and the Super Girls was not lost on the friends. In singing, cheering, shouting, and pointing in Frank’s direction, the friends forged a shared queer space within the walls of the karaoke suite. This fleeting space was undergirded with a collective sentiment akin to Leung’s queer undercurrents, that simultaneously embraces the possibilities of “su” to dismantle and destabilize, and recognizes the necessity to remain contained and under cover.

16.5 Sung sex noise

In this section I have described a range of expressive vocal practices that crossed the thresholds between speech and song. I argue these practices were the sonic dimensions poetically enacted of discourses on sex, noise, and social harmony. Through these sounds and discourses, the group collectively formulated a queer identity that emerged in relation to the Chinese diaspora at large. I conclude this section with another ethnographic story, where the performative vocalization exceeded the conceptual categories of speech or song, but was nevertheless a part of the “imps and ghouls’” expressive repertoire. I hope to illustrate with this story the breadth and resourcefulness of my interlocutors, and to demonstrate that their creativity was not confined to adaptations of mass culture.

On one of the hot pot dinner nights in Da-Ming’s apartment, after plenty of food and alcohol, the group relocated from the dining room to the living room, and gathered around the speakers by the TV. Frank told stories, and the friends listened, as he mindlessly scrolled down a newly discovered playlist of Mandopop romantic ballads on YouTube. Frank came upon Mandopop singer Rene Liu’s “Xingfu bushi qingge” (Happiness is Not a Love Song), and even though this was not in the group’s regular repertoire, at group member Phoebe’s suggestion,

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Frank put it on. As Rene Liu’s raspy low voice played from the TV speakers, Frank asked if anyone else had heard rumors about Rene Liu’s latent lesbianism. Group members chimed in, reporting tabloid articles they had read, tossing up stereotypes about queer men and women, and turned to the women in the group for expert “gaydar” readings. A-Ren noted that “Happiness is Not a Love Song” had been the theme song for the controversial, short-lived Taiwanese satellite TV show Two Fathers (2013) that depicted the everyday life of two gay men and their adopted daughter. Most of the group had not seen the show. The conversation morphed into a debate about whether Rene Liu’s sexual orientation should have mattered for the TV show, whether her career would survive if she were to come out, and how to feel about Two Fathers.

When the refrain of the song began, against a backdrop of chattering about sexualities,

Frank caught on to the melody and started singing along:

Xingfu bushi qing ge (Happiness is not a love song)

Bushi changwan jiu suan le (where you are done when the song is over)

Then he stumbled and found himself without lyrics.138 He hummed along for a while, then turned to the group and said, “well, I don’t know the words. Fuck it!” He returned to humming without words, and a few seconds passed before his melodious humming transitioned fluidly into rhythmic glottal grunts—a vocal gesture referencing sonic representations of sexual activities in popular media in Taiwan and North America. As Frank performed this vocal gesture, he held out one hand to Phoebe, and the two improvised an accompanying choreography for Frank’s vocalizations. The group laughed hysterically and sonorously at this unexpected turn.

Frank’s sung sex noises were a continuation of many other aspects of the group’s everyday expressivity I have already discussed. They were part of the sex talk and discourses on noise. It also grew out of the group’s pattern of singing along song refrains. But more poignantly, in

138 The song overall is about how one has to fight and labor for happiness.

158 moving from singing along to sounding along “Happiness,” and in his and Phoebe’s caricature of sex, Frank demonstrated his understanding of the song’s subtext as ultimately operating under a heteronormative logic. His words, “fuck it,” were therefore as much a renunciation of the lyrical and musical structures of the sing-alongs as it was a critique.

17 Transnational queer listening

So far in this chapter I have outlined several ways in which people sound –mostly through their vocal faculties—to cohere, to queer, and to make something of the world in which they live. But listening was also a necessary part of each of these processes: to pun in the way the “imps and ghouls” did required a creative listening that reached beyond conventions of sonic signification. To participate in the sing-alongs, whether at home or in the karaoke bar, demanded attunements toward the group’s affective dynamic and its sonic surroundings. Sounding was therefore only one part of a cyclical process in which representations are reproduced.

17.1 Did the children hear us?

Listening became a central part of the group’s sonic practices in two instances. The first was an ethnographic encounter that demonstrates the interplay between the construction and maintenance of social space, the overhearing public(s), the literal noise of laughing and talking, the metaphorical noise of queerness in sex talk and camp talk, and the various complex feelings and displacements to and from homes that were undercurrents to our seemingly perpetual good times full of laughter.

I had joined the group about half an hour late for dinner one evening at Asian Legend, a Chinese restaurant located in Toronto’s downtown Chinatown.139 This was a gathering in which two new friends were joining for the first time, so there were more participants than usual. Da-

139 Centered around the intersection between Spadina Avenue and Dundas Avenue

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Ming had texted me to say that they were all “underground,” so I knew to go down the stairs, even though I had never been to Asian Legend before and had no idea what to expect. As I walked down the stairs, I realized the restaurant was divided into two sections. The street-level upper half featured round tables in an open space. The basement half had three private dining rooms in one row, with loosely attached dividers between each. Each dining room also had its own sliding doors facing the hallway that ran parallel to the row of rooms. Private dining rooms were fairly common in Chinese restaurants, and were often available to company functions or family events at a little extra cost.

When I got to the narrow, dimly lit basement hallway I realized all three private rooms were occupied, and I couldn’t tell which room the group was in. I hesitated for how to proceed: it felt too obtrusive to just open any of the three doors and check. I didn’t want to just shout out Da-Ming’s name. My phone had lost reception in the basement. So I listened in, and found the room by recognizing Frank’s laughter. When I slid open the door, the group was startled, and the bustling conversation stopped short. Then, when they realized it was me, all the talking and laughing resumed. Frank asked if this time I really did follow the noise, alluding to our usual shtick while revealing his self-consciousness about the noise. The group laughed, and before I could answer Frank’s question I was asked another sexually explicit question. This second question I also did not have time to answer—the group launched right back into the conversation I interrupted, immediately after asking the question.

I did not fully comprehend the significance of these questions until a little while later, when the sliding door opened again. At that point, conversations were in full swing—Frank was giving A-Ren a hard time about unfriending him on Facebook when they quarrelled earlier that month, and several other members were exchanging detailed stories of their respective sexual escapades— but when the door opened all the talking stopped immediately, as if a soundtrack had suddenly been turned off. All ten of us sat without speaking, and watched the restaurant staff bringing in dishes. Frank and A-Ren smirked at each other, and Da-Ming stared at the members who had been talking about sex, gesturing for them to keep quiet. For the first time that evening, I was able to hear the sound spilling in from the neighbouring private room—it must have been a family gathering, with babies cooing, a woman addressing yeye (“grandpa”), and random Mandarin and Cantonese phrases making their way across the partition. The group had always

160 been self-conscious of its own “noise,” but I had never seen them self-censor for the restaurant staff like that.

As soon as the restaurant staff left and the door was closed, conversations, noisy in decibel and in content, flowed again. I slowly came to the realization that even though the sliding doors were far from soundproof, they symbolically contained the group in many ways: the doors seemed to keep the sounds in, but just as importantly it kept out potentially uncharitable listeners. Conversations stopped during the two times this containment was compromised. The difference was that I was considered part of the group, and the restaurant staff wasn’t. Those two unanswered questions, in retrospect, were really gestures to include me, and to mend the metaphorical boundary.

After all the dishes were brought out, the group relaxed. People ate, traded stories, made jokes, and laughed. About an hour into dinner, I found out that Da-Ming had told everyone to “stop scaring people” that day, hence the awkward silence and all the strained efforts to keep from laughing in front of the restaurant staff. Da-Ming turned to me in exasperation, “I didn’t know we apparently can’t steer clear of that stuff for just five minutes!” Jin-tai rolled her eyes in contempt and suggested to Da-Ming that attempting to was clearly an exercise in futility. To punctuate her comment, Jin-tai invoked a popular but vulgar expression from Taiwan, “yong piyan xiang dou zhidou (even your anus can think that through)!” Everyone cracked-up hysterically, and Da-Ming shouted, “See what I mean?! See what I mean?!”

When everyone calmed down from this intensely energetic fit of laughter, there was a moment of quietude. During that moment, Jin-Tai remarked that something seemed amiss, and got up to open the partition leading to the private dining room next to us. “Cleared out!” Jin-Tai exclaimed—the neighbouring room was empty, and the leftover dishes on the table suggested that the family had left not very long ago. Jin-Tai walked across that room, and opened up the partition to the next room, revealing that it was also empty (although the table was set) and we were the only customers left on the bottom level. “We literally scared everyone away!” Jin-Tai said in her usual joking demeanor, but this time with a hint of nervousness in her voice. The group laughed a little. The laughter was awkward, strained, and uncertain—it seemed like the family next door left because they were done and not because they could not stand us any more, but we couldn’t be sure. They obviously could hear us, but were they listening? Or were they

161 protected by their own bubble of sounds? Were the children listening? We were quite loud, and we laughed a lot and quite boisterously, but could they hear what we were laughing about? The concern was not just that we were in the heart of Chinatown and presumably there would be a higher chance of people understanding (and reacting to) our conversation in Mandarin. Rather, it was the possibility that we had made dinner unpleasant for the multi-generational family gathering next to us. It was one thing to speculate that our queer home and queer kinship could be overheard; it was another to actually ruin someone else’s family event.

Sentiments akin to guilt and regret crept into the room. As I described earlier, the group is constantly wary of being overheard. The sometimes real, sometimes imagined listener is always looming, and indeed has become an integral part of the group’s soundscape. But in all of those self-deprecating remarks on how noisy they were, I have always also perceived an ironic distance. This was the first time I had seen the group genuinely feeling bad. We eventually started talking again, and made some jokes about how perhaps the upper level of the restaurant was also cleared out by our noise and the restaurant owner was about to come after us for business lost. But it was a little bit harder to laugh. The meal was finished quickly, and then the group went to the nearby apartment of one of the new friends to resume our usual chatter.

I have noted many occasions in which group members laugh, and laugh a lot. As a category of sound, laughter permeated the group’s social space, and was a key ingredient to the group’s noise. Most of the time in the group, the sound of laughter acknowledged all the disruptions revealed through camp talk and sex talk, and created social intimacy on that basis. Observing that laughter mediates social ruptures and indicates underlying transgression, anthropologists John Carty and Yasmine Musharbash note that “laughter is universal and what people laugh about is not,” and “laughter is a boundary thrown around those laughing” (Carty and Musharbash 2008, 214). Laughter, with its sometimes opaque referentiality and “intense physicality” that reverberates through both “the personal and social body,” (215) simultaneously sounds out intimacy for some and the lack thereof for others.

Contrasting with typical homemaking through laughter, the rare moment when the group could not laugh— or that we laughed, but it wasn’t funny, and the laughter was at best a nervous chuckle— seemed like a crack in the door that revealed what I was hiding inside. I am reminded of how “the family” is conceived of as the central object of happiness in Sara Ahmed’s

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The Promise of Happiness (2010), in which happiness is an affective regime for normativity. “We align ourselves with others by investing in the same objects as the cause of happiness,” Ahmed notes (38), and those turning away from the happy objects are troublemaking, disruptive “affective aliens.” For all the various intentional disrupting, unsettling, and queering of other oppressive regimes that the group engaged in, family turned out to be too close to home. The possibility that the family next door turned away from the group—that we were left behind by the happy object— was the group’s bottom line, so to speak.140 Recalling Leung’s notion of queer “undercurrents” (2008) that I discussed earlier as a framework for understanding how the group conceived, practiced, and experienced queerness, this was a moment when the undercurrent boiled over.

17.2 Performative (mis)hearing

On another night, the friends gathered over a family-style hot pot dinner in A-Ren’s apartment to celebrate group-member Jin-Tai’s return. Jin-Tai had travel back to Taiwan for three months to care for family and had stories to share. The stories concerned accidentally joking with her parents about sex the way she does with these friends; or being asked by her grandma about the dating-app notifications on her phone. Jin-Tai told them in a comical manner, framing these events as no more than embarrassing mishaps, and welcomed the friends’ well-intentioned teasing.

In one of these stories, Jin-Tai had inadvertently fallen deeply asleep on the subway in Taipei and had woken up not knowing where she was.141 Still drowsy, Jin-Tai listened carefully to her sonic environment, and slowly noticed that Taipei’s well-known quadri-lingual subway announcement had been playing. The subway announcements feature a pre-recorded female voice reading the full names of each upcoming station and then instructing passengers to disembark. It typically repeats in four languages: Mandarin, Hoklo, and Hakka—two Chinese

140 Note that it was very possible and quite likely that they just finished eating. But perhaps that likelihood made the group’s collective bad feeling all the more revealing—i.e. we were not even completely sure of what happened, but felt bad anyway. 141 The subway system is commonly known as the Taipei Mass Rapid Transit (MRT).

163 dialects commonly spoken in Taiwan—and then in English. The announcements can be so lengthy that the entirety of a shorter journey is accompanied by them.

The disoriented Jin-Tai couldn’t tell for how long the announcement had been playing. Listening attentively to the instructive pre-recorded voice, she was startled to

hear a somewhat ungrammatical Mandarin sentence: “Jīang kāishùe [open the orifice…] mōmōnǐde hòu. [… and let me caress your behind].”142 In shock, she looked to her surroundings as the train pulled into a subway station adorned with flags. Jin-Tai then realized that she had actually misheard the English announcement for Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall. Located at the heart of Taipei, this architectural commemoration of the controversial military dictator was a reminder of his authoritarian rule in Taiwan from 1949 to the late 1980s; many of the atrocities committed by that regime are only now resurfacing and entering public consciousness.143

In telling this to the friends, Jin-Tai imitated the deliberate speech cadence of the subway announcement familiar to everyone in the group, which highlighted the sonic similarities between what she thought she heard in Mandarin, and Chiang Kai-Shek’s name uttered in English. Jin-Tai waited for the laughter to die down, and with a knowing smirk remarked, “I knew you guys would like this story.”

Jin-Tai’s story of mishearing can, of course, be taken as the kind of humor one only shares with close friends. But I posit additionally that the misheard sentence should be understood as a trans-Pacifically circulating, trans-linguistic pun, which she creatively generated but delayed the sounding-out of until she was within the safe space of this group of friends. Through this pun she foregrounded an alternative possibility always already embedded in the resonance of an utterance. Telling the pun as an incidental “mishearing” also allowed her the creative agency to pun while maintaining the necessary deniability (“I didn’t say that”).

142 This would normally be transliterated as zhāngkāi xuùe in standard Pinyin system. Here I use an alternative spelling so that English-speaking readers can better see the sonic parallel. 143 Denny Roy’s Taiwan: A Political History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003) provides a comprehensive overview of Chiang Kai-Shek’s rule on Taiwan. Roy’s critical account of Chiang is close to how my interlocutors characterize the dictator and the era.

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Moreover, unlike the other puns I have examined so far, here, the impetus of punning lies in the act of listening—as a “set of interpretive practices,” situated in local particulars, that wring sense out of sound.144 Ruminating on the creative potentials of misheard song lyrics, Steven Connor theorizes a mode of listening that perceives everything as “potentially full of import,” and that “actively give[s] to the sounds we hear a kind of structure and expressive intent that they might otherwise not possess.” Connor remarks that such listening “may activate a minor form of [auditory] hallucination,” emphasizing the active creation involved when one mishears.145

In many ways Jin-tai’s mishearing engaged in precisely Connor’s generative mode of listening, but the poignancy of her pun is also in what she had misheard. The ungrammatical Mandarin sentence called forth an intimate sexual act that jarringly contrasted with the public space of mass transit and subverted the instructional voice of the announcement that disciplines modern, national, rule-abiding subjects.146 Quietly listening and punning on the architectural emblem of Chiang Kai-Shek’s regime—which silenced political dissidence for forty years during the White Terror Era—what Jin-Tai misheard alluded to the rape metaphor sometimes used to describes colonial violence,147 but circumvented the explicit penetrative intercourse typically implied in such gendered metaphors. Recontextualized in her storytelling in the diaspora, Jin- tai’s pun reaches beyond the creativity Connor attributed to mishearing, and instead queers and critiques the home nation in multiple registers. Her mishearing, then, gestures toward an

144 Tom Rice, “Listening” in Keywords in Sound, eds. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeney (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 101. Rice provids an overview of sound studies’ general approach to listening practices as malleably shaped by their contexts. I follow this line of thinking as well. 145 Steven Connor, Earslips: of Mishearing and Mondegreens.” Lecture given at Columbia University, 14 February 2009. Http://www. Stevenconnor.com/earslips/earslips.pdf [Last Accessed 27 February 2017]. 146 In “Subway as a Space of Cultural Intimacy: the Mass Rapid Transit System in Taipei, Taiwan,” The China Journal 58 (2007), Anru Lee provided an overview of literature that criticized the numerous rules micro-managing subway passengers’ behaviors as paternalistic and authoritarian (e.g. always stand to the right when riding the escalators) Lee discussed Taipei’s these regulations as a disciplining regime. 147 When I talked to Jin-Tai about this “misheard” pun later, she laughed and suggested it was apropos for “how KMT practically raped Taiwan,” referencing a popular if not insensitive colloquialism that described KMT’s regime under Chiang Kai-shek. For another example, see Joshua D. Pilzer’s “Music and Dance in the Japanese Military ‘Comfort Women’ System,” Women and Music 18 (2014): 1–23.

165 intentional queer listening practice that emerges from the queer diasporic sensibilities cultivated among this group of friends.

Jin-tai’s story of mishearing later took on a life of its own, told and retold at every group gathering. About six months later, during an interview with another group member, Tsai-hua, I asked what her diasporic home sounded like. Tsai-hua grinned, and took out her phone to play a recording of the subway announcement as her response. She waited for me to smile knowingly before explaining that she had gone out of her way to capture the subway announcement the last time she travelled back to Taiwan, and concluded confidently, “You remember. I know you do.” Having only played the subway announcement and left the pun unspoken, Tsai-hua articulated the ways in which the group’s sense of collectivity congealed around Jin-tai’s pun, even when it existed merely as a possibility perceptible only to those in the know.

Recalling the earlier discussions on the problematics of “home,” I posit that in addition to serving as a kind of queer engagement with the home nation, this pun and its circulation can also be understood as a form of queer diasporic “home-making,” which shifts the emphasis away from home as a stable referent and a mirror image of the nation, and toward “-making” as an orientation.148 This orientation of “home-making” points to the active construction of spaces of intimacy, privacy, and belonging, but just like a pun, it also encapsulates an adaptive habituation—to make yourself “at home,” and to make life work between a rock and a hard place. Home-making this sense relinquishes the insistence to reproduce the imaginary of a “homeland” in diaspora and instead opens new possibilities for being in the world. By circulating and reiterating Jin-tai’s “misheard” pun, my interlocutors make their home in both ways, building group solidarity while negotiating the difficulties of occupying queer Asian bodies in the context of Canadian multiculturalism and homonationalism.

148 See Sara Ahmed’s reflections on the concept of “orientations” and the politics of becoming oriented in Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).

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18 Reverberations

On May 24th, 2017, the top Constitutional Court in Taiwan announced its ruling that the current law limiting marriage as only between a man and a woman was in violation of the constitution, and issued a two-year deadline for the legislature to revise all relevant policies and legalize same-sex marriage.149 The ruling was met with valorizing media coverage as well as escalating anti-gay protests. As both sides of the debate grappled with the ruling’s implication on what Taiwan could, might, will potentially (and have the possibility to) become, the “imps and ghouls” of Toronto seemed unperturbed.

When I asked how they felt on the group’s text thread, Da-Ming quipped that he had just lost his favorite excuse to refuse a marriage proposal. The others chimed in, poignantly expressing concerns that the celebrations around the ruling might mask other forms of social injustice—an insight reverberant with their experiences in Canada. The overall tone of that conversation was a hopeful one, but the discussion soon gave way to the usual puns and banter, as if to illustrate and champion their own queer possibilities.

In this chapter I have demonstrated some of the ways in which, among the rubble of other homes and on the margins of the diaspora, this group of queer diasporic friends created an alternative home of their own; a different mode of being in the world. This home took shape and was sustained in part through the range of discursive, sounding, and listening practices in the group’s everyday life. So crucial to the formation of the queer diasporic subjectivities of group members, these practices were nonetheless situated in Toronto, in the transnational conditions of Taiwan and its diaspora, and the global network of Chinese diaspora. These practices allowed the friends to assert their existence while they navigated between complicated family dynamics and the home nation, the diasporic communities in Toronto, and their racialized queer identities, which resided in the productive ambiguity of queer undercurrents. Reconfigured as possibilities,

149 Interpretation No. 748, issued by the Justices of the Constitutional Court under the Judicial Yuan. An English translation of the Interpretation is not yet available at the time of writing, but the press release from the Office of the President can be found at: http://english.president.gov.tw/NEWS/5147 [Last accessed 10 July 2017].

167 as potential, as the implicit meaning that takes shape through queer listening, these iterations of queerness allows them expressive agency, gives credence to their own histories of repression, and most importantly, allows them to be at home in queer kinship.

Chapter 4 Shopping and Chopping: Sounding, Listening, and Moving toward Diasporic Intimacy

In this chapter I continue the project of the two previous chapters in exploring the various ways in which a person might take on, push back, or repurpose the ideological and material framings that one might expect to condition them into certain kinds of a Chinese and Chinese Canadian person. Although I devote quite a bit of space to describing and problematizing some of the things that mediate the processes of becoming diasporic and Chinese in Toronto, my project is ultimately centered on people as agentive, creative actors.

In chapter 2 I explored how one iteration of Chineseness was articulated through the production of oldness as an identity, through which Ga-Liang became not just a Chinese person, but also an old Chinese person. In chapter 3 I analyzed how people navigated the challenges of articulating the queer possibilities intricately tied to their self-imposed exilic transnational experience in the first place. In both of these chapters I wrestled with the tension between: 1) the ways in which certain identity categories are constructed and mediated by the circulation of mass culture in a relatively defined social circle, and 2) what the individual does with those identity categories. The underlying premise of this approach is that identities—whether on the basis of ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, or age— are fluid processes of becoming, but this becoming does not happen in a vacuum. Rather, they occur through interactions with hardened social categories, signs, symbols, and signifiers. My interest here, then, is neither to dismantle nor to reproduce these categories, but to examine the ephemeral interactions through which people might come to feel like they have agency and control in those processes of becoming, and that their interactions might contribute in transforming these structuring structures. Keeping in mind the as yet unsettled debates in practice theroy (Bourdieu 1977; de Certeau 1984; Giddens 1984; Ortner 2006) about the individual’s agency in the structure, here, I am more interested in things that people do to feel like they have agency. My suspicion is that sometimes just the feeling of agency can go a very long way.

My argument for the feeling of agency here is vulnerable to a particular kind of critique that deconstructs and reveals how this feeling of agency may be an illusion engineered by the very structure that exploits, marginalizes, and subjugates the subject. A person’s feeling that their

168 169 actions can and do affect the world, in other words, is predicated on their ignorance and incomprehension of the larger and presumably more sophisticated structures at work. This idea rings close to Marxists’ notion of “false consciousness,” or can be thought of as a version of the “colonization of the mind.” A contemporary iteration that does not presume the subjects’ lack of awareness (and the theorist’s omniscience), which I find significantly more compelling, is Lauren Berlant’s formulation of “cruel optimism” (2011). Berlant explains that cruel optimism as “the condition of maintaining an attachment to a significantly problematic object.” She expands that people maintain such a attachments—“to compromised conditions of possibility whose realization is discovered either to be impossible, sheer fantasy, or too possible, and toxic” (24; original emphasis)—not because they don’t know better, but because being (cruelly) optimistic “provides something of the continuity of the subject’s sense of what it means to keep on living on and to look forward to being in the world” (ibid.; emphasis mine). Here, Berlant points to something important that I hope to excavate through what I called a feeling of agency: cruel optimism is ultimately a way to experience life as worthwhile, purposive—even if the pursuit of the good life ends up feeding the system that prevents the good life in the first place. Or, to put it plainly: whether social theorists deem people agentive or not, feeling as though one is can shape subjective experience.

To this end, in this final and third case study my overall theoretical goals remain the same, but I shift away from the identity-formation concerns that undergird the first two. I foreground how some constructions of Chinese ethnicity, widely circulating in public culture across (Sinophone) Toronto and interwoven into daily life, may be useful resources as people try to foster what Svetlana Boym calls “diasporic intimacy” across embodied differences that are historically contingent.150

150 This idea here is indebted to literature on public intimacy, which Lauren Berlant aptly encapsulates as the processes through which public, instrumentalized “pedagogies” that instruct people to “identify having a life with having an intimate…[and] processes by which intimate lives absorb and repel the rhetorics, laws, ethics, and ideologies of the hegemonic public sphere” (1998, 282).

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Writing about the temporary, partial connections that produce diasporic subjects, Boym uses the conception of “diasporic intimacy” to juxtapose “the utopic image of intimacy…rooted in the suspicion of a single home.” For Boym, diasporic intimacy is “not limited to the private sphere but reflects collective frameworks of memory that encapsulate even the most personal of dreams” (1998, 500).151 Diasporic intimacy can only be intimated: it “does not promise an unmediated emotional fusion but only a precarious affection” (ibid.). In her later work, “Nostalgia and Its Discontents” (2007), Boym further develops the concept of diasporic intimacy and suggests that “immigrants understand the limitations of nostalgia and the tenderness of diasporic intimacy…which cherishes non-native, elective affinities” (16). For Boym, diasporic intimacy is the fleeting mutual understanding and appreciation paradoxically predicated on the faltering of normalized forms of diasporic longings. It critiques the kinds of affective life a diasporic subject is supposed— by the mediation of public culture; around homelands and origins—to lead, and at the same time opens new possibilities of relating to one another.

Boym’s diasporic intimacy aptly characterizes what is at stake in the specific ethnographic moments I include in this chapter. I explore the ways in which Zhou Xiaoyan, a 24-year-old woman from Wuhan city in the People’s Republic of China, formed and sustained social relations important to her as she walked, strolled, sauntered, and ambled in what anthropologist Kimberly Kinder calls “translocal” ethnic retailing spaces (2016), where material reminders of an elsewhere (namely, an imaginary of China) abound. I aim to show both the instability of the nostalgic longings structured by these translocal spaces, and how, through them, Xiaoyan reached for an experience of fleeting diasporic intimacy.

At the outset of my dissertation research I had intended for this chapter to analyze the translocality of these ethnic retailing spaces. In the process of conducting research, making observations, and talking to interlocutors, however, I was continually surprised by what people said they did with their experiences in the mall, what they did with their purchases, and most importantly, with whom they went shopping. It seemed to me that to the extent these translocal

151 Anne-Marie Fortier (2006) has theorized “ethnic intimacy” in immigrant communities, and Martin Manalansan (2003) wrote about “transnational intimacy.” I read each of these scholars as grappling with a similar phenomenon, and these concepts overlap a great deal. But here I draw from Boym’s formulation, as its emphasis on the ephemerality of such connections is especially well-suited for thinking about everyday practices.

171 ethnic retails spaces could be read as an emergent diasporic public, they were also a constitutive part of people’s everyday life and of their social relations. Indeed, it may actually be through these minute interactions—with the sounds, objects, and other people—within the malls and supermarkets that this diasporic public takes shape. The chapter has therefore been rewritten to reflect a re-orientation toward people and the diasporic intimacies mediated by these spaces. My re-orientation also echoes geographer Jacob Miller’s contestation that we can actually gain more insights about how retail spaces function socially if we actually engage with the people who use these spaces (2015).

Xiaoyan serves as a representative example. In this chapter I include Xiaoyan’s trips to the Chinese-themed retail centre Pacific Mall and a Chinese supermarket near Pacific Mall. Tracing the route formed by her footsteps— both in literal ways and as a trope for social processes— that lead from the mall and the supermarket to her place of residence, I also explore how these social relations are solidified and nuanced when Xiaoyan collaborated with her grandmotherly landlord in turning the groceries they bought into sustenance for the week. Xiaoyan and the landlord’s collaborative cooking is reminiscent of a mother and daughter’s (or daughter-in-law’s) gendered domestic labour to sustain a family. The image of women cooking in the kitchen is the epitome of the bourgeois private life construed to be free of the politics of the public, but Xiaoyan traversed beyond the foyer of the private, and indeed walked through inflections of multiple different publics: by collaborating and co-participating in the repetitive movements of chopping, these two Chinese women mended the generational gaps in their differently historically conditioned sensibilities. Following anthropologist Tim Ingold, who argues that movements like chopping have a “processional” and walk-like quality (2011, 51), I also consider Xiaoyan’s walking and her chopping together. Both types of movements are prosaic, repetitive, and purposive, which suit them well to playful improvisations. More importantly, walking and chopping both require a constant monitoring of one’s sensory surroundings—and my interests here lie mainly in the sonic—and real-time adjustments of bodily movements based on this monitoring. Both chopping and walking, in short, are embodied ways for Xiaoyan to closely and intimately engage with her sonic environments. In the ethnic retail spaces, these sounds were often the acoustic consequences of multiple, simultaneous contestations of what it means to be Chinese, to be a Chinese woman, and to be a Chinese woman in Toronto. Walking and chopping are therefore not only how Xiaoyan moved through life, but were also the practices

172 that mediated between her sense of self and the many conflicting, heterogeneous manifestations of Chineseness in sound.

The chapter includes two interwoven threads that ultimately support one argument. The first is a portrayal of the ethnic retail spaces as a kind of a diasporic public. I pay particular attention to the acoustic ecology of the Pacific Mall as an ethnicized space, but I will also describe the sounds of one Chinese supermarket in Toronto in some detail. My primary purpose here is to provide a comprehensive framing for Xiaoyan’s experience of these spaces, although I also wish to document these hitherto glossed-over sonic dimensions of these parts of Sinophone Toronto.152

I document the soundscapes of the Pacific Mall also because the mechanisms through which its soundscape came into being is meaningfully different from what is often described in literature on background music (Lanza 1994; Sterne 1997), typically in unmarked, white middle- class American commercial spaces. This literature often contends that background music is an instrument of capitalistic social reproduction that shape listeners into ideal consumers. In these conceptions of background music—or what Anahid Kassabian calls ubiquitous music (2013)— the listeners are implied to be homogeneous, manipulable, and lacking in individual agency. My observations of the Pacific Mall, where the soundscape emerged in a relatively ground-up manner, problematize the assumptions made in this literature.

The second line of inquiry is intensely personal, where I follow how sound structures and organizes Xiaoyao’s movements as she moved through and around the aisles and corridors of these ethnic retail spaces. Many of her thoughts, feelings, and opinions are supplemented later during lengthy follow-up and feedback interviews, or as an afterthought shared sporadically over tea. Here, my investment lies in what the individual does, has the potential to do, and perceives as possible. My main focus is on Xiaoyan, including both the personal history that she was willing to share with me, and my observations of how she listened and moved through and with the

152 The majority of the scholarly works I have found on ethnic retail spaces are at best inattentive to the vibrant sonic life of these ethnicized spaces. In the single instance I could find (Lucia Lo 2006), the variegated soundscape is reduced to the words “Chinese music” in passing, as part of the overall characterization of the mall as “Chinese-themed.” This simplification signals a non- attentiveness to the rich and complex negotiations that take place in the sonic-aural realm.

173 world. I also discuss her landlord Auntie Chen as a historically situated and socially meaningful figure to Xiaoyan.

In the following sections, I will first introduce Xiaoyan and briefly explain my research methodology for this chapter, which is experimental and somewhat unusual for a project in ethnomusicology. I then describe and give a sense of the soundscape of Toronto’s Pacific Mall, and propose a theoretical framework to think about how the act of walking through and listening to its sounds can feel like a creative and agentive form of expression. Following this framing, I offer three ethnographic stories to demonstrate how walking and listening serve pivotal roles as Xiaoyan negotiates tenuous but important social relations in diaspora: in the first, she ironed out her uneasy friendship with me. In the second, the different sensibilities she and her grandmotherly landlord embodied became apparent as they bargained with each other about when and where to walk toward in the supermarket. In the third, their disagreements were patched over as they collaborated in chopping the pork they bought.

With the exception of age, Xiaoyan and her landlord Auntie Chen checked all of the same boxes on the Canadian census form: they were both PRC citizens, women, and middle- class. They both self-identified as culturally Chinese, spoke Mandarin at work and school and regional dialects at home. But their commonalities did not translate easily to relatability or connections. They have both had to work through the historically conditioned differences in how they approached their surroundings. Walking through the retail spaces—that is, shopping—and then chopping together in the kitchen were important aspects of how they forged intimacy across their different historically conditioned habitus in everyday life in Sinophone Toronto.

19 Zhou Xiaoyan at home in Scarborough

I first met Zhou Xiaoyan in an upscale massage therapy parlour, in its bleakly minimalistic kitchen that was used as a staff’s lounge. The parlour featured an Asian-fusion decor, with feng shui planters and miniature water fountains near the entrances. The therapists’ certificates from the Toronto College of Chinese Medicine, framed, hung on the wall.

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Xiaoyan was 24 years old at the time, and had just been hired as a receptionist the week prior. She was bright-eyed, full of pluck, and spoke fast Mandarin in a high-pitched, child-like drawl to the exhausted middle-aged women massage therapists huddling around a worn out plastic table sipping tea from personal thermoses. Xiaoyan couldn’t have known any of the older women for more than a few days, but she was already interacting with them easily. She shared the content of her lunch box generously—“Here, auntie, try this braised beef I made over the weekend! And here, I brought way more dumplings than I can eat!”— and in turn, she received matronly advice. Uttered in gentle voices and accompanied by small snacks in reciprocation, the women urged Xiaoyan to either go back to school and get educated, or to “Find a nice Chinese boy and get married.”

When we met, I was in the very early stages of fieldwork and had been looking for a way into a Chinese commercial space. I ended up at the parlour through another interlocutor’s introduction, and provided uncompensated clerical support there for three months. Xiaoyan and I frequently worked together, and we became friends. We continued to hang out long after I had finished my commitment and decided to drop the parlour as a potential field site.

For the next year I regularly visited Xiaoyan on her days off at the house in Scarborough where she had been renting a room. Xiaoyan was close to her landlords, a couple from Shanghai in their early 70s, who had immigrated to Canada to help taking care of their grandchildren. I also spent quite some time with the landlords, although always explicitly as Xiaoyan’s guest. On most visits I tagged along as Xiaoyan ran errands, shopped for groceries, and rewarded herself with a meal at a restaurant or a leisurely stroll in the mall. Later that year, as I had also rented a room in a nearby family house in Scarborough, I sometimes stopped by to lend a helping hand when she batch-cooked for the week, or when a light bulb needed changing, or when a fourth player was needed for mahjong.

Xiaoyan held a Bachelor’s degree in Commerce and Business from a Canadian university about two hours south of Toronto by car. She moved to Canada in 2009 on a student visa from just outside of Wuhan city, an emerging metropolis of 10 million residents that is the capital of Hebei province in the People’s Republic of China. Unlike many other international students from China at that Canadian university, Xiaoyan had already scored high enough in China’s nation-wide standardized exam for university entrance—an incredible feat attesting to both her

175 mettle and her wit—and had completed four semesters at a university in Wuhan before she decided to study abroad.

In her second year at the university in Wuhan, Xiaoyan felt she would not be able to pursue “the good life” if all she had was a Chinese bachelor’s degree. To give herself a leg up in the intensely competitive entry-level job market of China, she felt she must “walk out of the nation’s front door.” Her parents were more than happy to support this decision morally and financially, even if Xiaoyan’s tuition and living expenses abroad represented a significant burden for a family of moderate means.153

Surrounded by ultra-wealthy heirs to the Chinese nouveau rich at the university, Xiaoyan was sensitive to the financial strains she had placed on her parents. She helped support herself by earning at least some income working in Chinese restaurants while keeping her expenses low by learning to cook her own meals. After graduation, Xiaoyan moved to Toronto to find employment so that she would be eligible to apply for Canadian permanent residency. She had desperately wanted to stay in Canada. Despite having completed a degree taught in English, Xiaoyan felt that she was still more likely to thrive in a Chinese-speaking environment, and Toronto became an attractive option because Chinese communities, employment, and resources are abundant here.

For the first six months in Toronto she worked as an inventory manager for a Chinese furniture store, but then the store went under, and she was back on the job market. She responded to every job posting she could find on yorkbbs.ca and 51.ca, the online classified sites catering to Chinese Canadians. This mode of job searching brought her to the parlour, despite having neither experience nor interest in the industry. She was willing to take any job that came her way.

Born in 1991, Xiaoyan was among the oldest cohort of China’s “Post-90s” (jiulinghou) generation, commonly dubbed China’s own “millennials.” The Post-90s are caricatured in

153 For a more comprehensive description and theorization of PRC students studying abroad in English-speaking developed countries, see Vanessa Fong, Paradise Redefined (2011).

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Chinese media in much the same way as their U.S. and Canadian counterparts: the Post-90s are said to prioritize individuality (with a requisite flair of cosmopolitanism) and commodified experiences over traditionally valued conformity, hard work, and capitalist accumulations. They are politically engaged and can refute criticisms by members of older generations (for laziness, impracticality, and flightiness) with the sophistication commensurate with the abundance of information and accessibility of education that characterize them.

These “millennial” traits of the Post-90s are typically attributed to PRC’s socio-historical conditions in the late 20th century. By the time the Post-90s were born, China’s post-reformation rapid economic growth was in full effect, and their parents had had some time to accumulate capital and to cultivate the lifestyle sensibilities of what can be described as the Chinese middle- class. As the result of the One Child Policy introduced in 1979, a typical Post-90s would be the sole bearer of their parents’ and grandparents’ hopes and dreams, but also the prioritized contender for all of the family’s resources.

While they tend to have been pampered in material life, the Post-90s also have faced extremely intense competition from an early age since every single one of their peers has been, like them, shouldering high expectations and rarely has time to spend on chores or extracurricular activities.154 Compounding the pessimism bred from such intense pressure, Post- 90s were also born on the heels of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown and had spent their childhood in widespread disillusion about the future of China’s reformation. They are considered to be nothing like the preceding generation, the Post-80s, who had grown up around a hopefulness sustained by realized dreams and economic expansion.

My friendship with Xiaoyan, especially in the early days, was laborious at best. Too often, we presumed to be able to understand each other’s tone in communications, gestures, and popular culture references, which made the inevitable misunderstandings that much more jarring. It wasn’t until she described to me her experience growing up in the 1990s in middle- class PRC that I had realized the extent to which our subjectivities had been shaped differently. Xiaoyan and I also frequently second guessed the friendship: she wondered if she should attribute

154 See Vanessa Fong’s Only Hope: Coming of Age under China’s One Child Policy (2004) for a more detailed examination.

177 every odd thing she observed about me to the fact that I came from Taiwan. And I, similarly, felt compelled to reduce Xiaoyan to a specimen of PRC peculiarities when I couldn’t understand her actions. Since I hadn’t planned to write about Xiaoyan, I wasn’t particularly rushed or pressured to know her in a way conducive to analysis. This accidental nonchalance fortuitously provided the time, space, and air for Xiaoyan and I to develop a friendship richer than the labels and assumptions we each bore for the other. This, paradoxically, was what allowed me to eventually see Xiaoyan’s artful approaches in her daily life.155

In Scarborough, an east Toronto suburb, Xiaoyan rented a second-floor bedroom in a beige-coloured single-family house from a married couple. She called them Chen shifu (“Master” ) and Chen ayi (“Auntie”). In PRC colloquial Mandarin, shifu is an honorific used for older men—effectively “Uncle”—though with a connotation that the addressee is a skilled labour.

Ayi is a kinship term frequently borrowed to address any older woman.

The Chens were in their early 70s, and had moved to Toronto from Shanghai just five years earlier when their only daughter gave birth to a second grandchild. Like Xiaoyan’s own grandparents, they had been children during China’s Great Leap Forward and the resulting widespread famine (1958–1961), and had been teenage Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). After the Cultural Revolution they both worked for China’s state-run factories. Uncle Chen eventually became a certified driver of eighteen-wheel trucks, and Auntie Chen remained a factory worker until her retirement. The Chens never talked about their experiences of famine or the unrest of Cultural Revolution, but they reminisced almost all the time about the “good days for the working masses, thanks to chairman Mao,” before the reformation. They also told numerous stories about the bounty and the profound pleasures of food in the years immediately following the Cultural Revolution.156

The Chen’s daughter purchased and owned the house for them, but she lived elsewhere. The Chens rented out the two spare bedrooms on the second floor to young, unmarried Chinese

156 Talking about food—rather than hunger—seems to be a common way of talking about the famine. Other examples abound in historian Frank Dikötter’s account of the Great Leap Forward famine(2010), and Xiaoyan has also reported similar observations in her experience of PRC elderly people from that generation.

178 women for a fairly low sum. The rent money was welcome income, but the Chens also enjoyed the renters’ company. They said that the renters filled their house with the desirable renqi, “a feeling that this space is populated, that we are among people.” Once, when Xiaoyan brought the Chens dim sum takeouts after a restaurant excursion, Auntie Chen gleefully remarked that, “It’s so nice to have a few young, active people around.” She pointed to a stack of mail that Xianyan had brought inside the house, adding “and it’s not just for the dim sum,” suggesting her appreciation of these small gestures and minor acts of care from the renters.

The housing arrangement was a perfect metaphor for the social dynamics between the house’s inhabitants: the Chens were parentally authoritative, and the renters filled the role of filial daughters. Xiaoyan’s was the smallest of the three bedrooms on the second floor, sandwiched between the Chen’s master bedroom and a third room for another renter. The other renter, with whom Xiaoyan shared a bathroom, worked night shifts and was rarely heard or seen during my visits. Xiaoyan called her dajie—Elder Sister. Though the Chens were quite explicit that they only rent to single women with “good moral characters” and a clear background, Xiaoyan told me that she often heard Elder Sister talking on the phone in a distinctly romantic voice from the other side of the wall between their rooms.157 “I’d imagine it’s a boyfriend,” Xiaoyan speculated, “but that’s our secret!”

Xiaoyan’s rental arrangements with the Chens were quite common among other younger women from the PRC that I met in Scarborough during fieldwork, who typically rented one room in a Chinese family’s house.158 Most of them were in their mid to late twenties, although

157 What I translated into “good moral characters” was originally renpin hao (人品好). This is really a euphemism for being chaste and unlikely to have boyfriend troubles and overnight guests. 158 The ethnographic stories I include in this chapter are primarily drawn from my interactions and deep hanging out with Xiaoyan, but my analyses of these stories are informed by seven other women who were also in their early to mid-20s. Like Xiaoyan, they have moved to Toronto from different parts of Mainland China, and each was threading the waters trying to make a life. Each of them had moved to Toronto alone and all of them have came at first on a student permit and had been working toward permanent residency when I met them—mostly through language and music classes tat different immigrant centers or through volunteering at ethnic festivals. With some of them I conducted multiple lengthy interviews, and with others I supplemented transcripts of their narratives with field notes from grocery shopping trips or restaurant samplings we had undertaken together. I maintained contact with most of them throughout the fieldwork

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“younger” here is perhaps more of a reference to the women’s (at least alleged) single, unmarried status than their biological age. Many of them embodied or at least were adept in performing the kind of “good moral character” listed as the key tenant requirement on the innumerable posters plastered on bulletin boards at every bus stop advertising rooms for rent. These ads looked for renters who had no “bad habits” (drinking, smoking, gambling), no pets, no boyfriends— heteronormatively presuming the ideal renters’ gender and sexual orientation—and no “disreputable occupations.” Cleanliness, quietude in movements and behaviour (no loud talking, no stomping), and punctuality with rent money were also on the list of requirements, but more than anything else the young women needed, basically, to play the role of an obedient, controllable daughter legible within a Confucianistic familial structure in which the landlord- renter relationship was also inflected with a fictive parent-child pattern.159.Just like a real Chinese daughter, the young women renters that I have known did not always live up to these stated ideals, but they came up with ways to avoid direct confrontations over their “moral characters.” Xiaoyan, for example, lied about her receptionist job at the massage parlour because she worried that the Chens would consider the job to be “shady.”

Practical logic undergirded such tactical maintenance of good landlord-renter relationships: for many of these young women, this kind of rental arrangement—typically hinging only on verbal agreements and involving no paper trail—is the better of their very few housing options. They often worked for hourly wages that were barely enough to cover rent, didn’t have a long credit history in Canada, and didn’t know anyone who could be a guarantor

year, mostly through WeChat, the Chinese social media application, and sometimes through the North American parallel, WhatsApp. Unlike my interlocutors from the queer diaspora chapter, these women are not part of the same social circle. These women’s stories helped me observe patterns and contexts, but rather than flattening their diverse experiences into an overview of this particular demographic category, I write with an emphasis on Xiaoyan only. 159 From January to May of 2015 I had also rented a room in a family house in Scarborough. I was interviewed by three different landlords, each of them asked in great details about my family history, my parents’ occupations (and curiously didn’t seem to care as much about my own occupation), my marital and relationship status, whether I drank and smoked, and whether I have “bad friends.” One of the rooms offered to me used to be occupied by the landlord’s now- married daughter, and if I had taken the room, I’d been offered the daughter’s old shelves in the bathroom and in the living room. I was also asked to take over all the chores the daughter used to do, including caring for the daughter’s cat.

180 for signing a rental lease, even with roommates.160 Renting a room in a family’s house also provided the renter with community and a support network. Xiaoyan had articulated this point when she told me that “we [young immigrant women] might be able to speak English and there might be Chinese supermarkets everywhere these days, but everything still relies on connections and is still set up for people to live in a family.” She then cited cellphone plans and buying groceries in bulk to demonstrate that it was economically more sustainable to live with a family. In renting the room, she had effectively also entered a fictive family arrangement.

20 Sounds like the Pacific Mall

The Pacific Mall is a Chinese-themed indoor retail centre located on the Northeast intersection of Steeles Avenue East and Kennedy Road, right on the border that separates the city of Toronto and the neighbouring municipality, Markham. Named after Hong Kong’s luxury shopping plaza, Pacific Palace, the Pacific Mall was developed in the early 1990s by Toronto- based private corporation, the Torgan Group, and first opened its door for business in 1997. The mall’s website describes it as the largest Chinese-themed shopping mall in North America.

160 The young women renters participated in the informal economy that exist in so many immigrant communities, but their experiences can be quite different from earlier accounts of Chinese immigrant labourers. Though all of them lived and worked in Toronto, many partially relied on financial support from family in China, which sometimes result in consumption patterns that seem jarringly incongruent to me. Take Xiaoyan as an example: in 2015, she was paid 30 dollars for every 8-hour day she worked. This wage was significantly lower than minimum wage in Ontario. When I asked, Xiaoyan uncomfortably and vaguely mumbled, “Yeah, well, it’s not like I didn’t notice that my boss never actually got around to having me sign a contract…” and trailed off. She made between 500 and 600 dollars a month, which barely covered rent and the cost of transportation to her work, and her family helped with the rest of her expenses. She often expressed her anxiety about the cost of living to me, and frequently uttered that she had to cut cost and be frugal. But she also bought Groupons for lobster meals, the second newest iPhones, and luxury handbags when they went on sale because, she said, “A good bargain is a good bargain.” In other words, while Xiaoyan’s employment situation and income corroborated the widely circulated ideas about downward socioeconomic mobility as a result of migration, she maintained a capitalistic middle class consumption.

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The Pacific Mall wasn’t the first Chinese retail centre on the block. Its next-door neighbour, Market Village, had been home to two major Chinese supermarkets along with many restaurants and primarily Chinese-owned businesses since 1990. But it really wasn’t until the Pacific Mall’s opening that the block became the well-known Chinese shopping mecca of Toronto. Once opened, the Pacific Mall was so welcomed by denizens of the surrounding Chinese ethnoburb (Li 2009) that a slew of other Chinese-themed shopping centres opened along Steeles Avenue through the 2000’s, forming an expansive ethnic retail block along with smaller restaurants and strip malls.161

Perhaps the most visited of them all, the Pacific Mall is a two-storied, fully enclosed building with 25,000 square meters of retail space. Instead of two rows of self-contained smaller stores linking multiple anchor stores like a typical North American shopping mall, the ground floor of Pacific Mall features one enormous open space, containing roughly two hundred retail booths. The booths are separated by corridors (Figure 2).162 North-south corridors are named after famous streets in Hong Kong: Nathan, Queen’s, Pacific, Hollywood, and Hennessy Avenues. The significance of sound-based puns in Chinese daily life is evident in the names of east-west corridors. From the main entrance on the south side of the building, corridors are named in ascending numbered streets ending in eight for good luck (e.g. 8th street, 18th street, 28th street), as Cantonese pronunciation of the number eight, baat, sounds similar to the word “prosperity,” faat. Streets forty-eight (homonymous of “prosperity died”) and fifty-eight (“no prosperity”) are omitted for the same reasons that streets eighty-eight (“double prosperity”) and one sixty-eight (“prosperity all the way”) are coveted prime locations for good luck.163

Near the centre of the ground floor there is a large stage that faces east. On the backside of the stage is the elevator shaft that connects the two floors and an underground parking lot.

161 For example, another ethnic mall called Splendid China opened just one block to the east. The development of ethnic malls has slowed down since then. For detail, see Dakshana Bascaramurty’s “The rise and fall of the ethnic mall” in The Globe and Mail, June 15, 2012. 162 From Pacific Mall’s official website. Https://www.pacificmalltoronto.ca/ [last accessed March 27, 2017]. 163 Spatial orientations based on puns of names isn’t limited to the Pacific Mall. Wealthy Hong Kong immigrants allegedly bought houses in both Toronto’s Richmond Hill and Vancouver’s Richmond (and subsequently drove up the real estate markets in both) solely because it’d be good luck to live in a place named “rich.”

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Two sets of escalators are located to the east and west of the stage. The two floors are visually and sonically connected through a railing-enclosed opening on the second floor in the area directly above the centre stage. This makes it possible to see and hear the performances on stage directly from the second floor. A PA system with stage monitors is permanently fixed along the centre stage and the opening on the ceiling/floor above. This system broadcasts from the heart of the mall to all of its corners, and it is not unusual to hear the performance on the centre stage immediately upon entering the mall, long before getting close enough to the stage to see what is going on.

The second floor features an open food court and the “mall in a mall” known as Pacific Heritage Town. It also features and about a dozen larger and structurally separate store spaces. Several of them are used as private medical, dental, and optometry clinics. There is one hair salon, a few restaurants, an arcade, and a variety store that sells everything from undergarments and elastic hair ties to motorized kitchen ventilators and Bluetooth karaoke microphones. There are no anchor stores on either floor.

The booths on the ground floor average four to five square meters in size, and are walled in plexiglass (Figure 3). Altogether, the booth-stores sell everything from high-end jewellery, car tires, professional photography equipment, rare and exorbitantly expensive Chinese medicine, to the most mundane everyday objects—plastic pens and basins, children’s toys, clothing, cell phone cases, and electronic odds and ends. There used to be many CD/DVD booths scattered across the mall as well, but after repeated police raids for pirated discs in recent years, only two remain as of this writing. Each booth operates as an independent store with a fairly clear marketing scheme and target demographic—often articulated through the presence or absence of background music in a manner evocative of Jonathan Sterne’s description of the Mall of America (1997).

Unlike most North American malls where storefronts are rented out and managed by a central business office that makes decisions to subscribe to the programmed background music services described by Sterne, the Pacific Mall operates on a condominium model. The developer sold the booths (or “units”) to individual buyers, who then either run their own business or, more frequently, arrange private rental agreements with business owners. The distributed control of Pacific Mall’s condo model means that the upkeep, attention to detail, and aesthetics of the retail

183 booths can be quite uneven across the mall. Some corners of the mall sported an out-dated aesthetic and were minimally maintained, with piles of plastic-wrapped merchandise strewn across cracking linoleum in harsh florescent light. Others featured expensive interior design with mood lighting, background music, and aerated perfume.

The top of each booth is open, although some retailers choose to construct a mock ceiling or to install additional lights. This means the air space above each booth is connected, and one can easily hear sounds coming from neighbouring booths. Many—but not all—vendors construct their own unique soundscapes to demarcate their retail booth, by attaching speakers along the top edge of the booth’s walls (Figure 4). Depending on the orientation of these speakers— pointing downward toward the place where the storeowners imagined the customers would stand, or upward toward the open space above the booth—the background music soundscape curated for any particular store might inadvertently spill into stores several corridors over.

If there had ever been any efforts to create a unified, cohesive soundscape in the Pacific Mall, by the time I was regularly visiting in 2014 to 2015 (and then intermittently in 2016 and 2017) such endeavours had already been abandoned. In every corridor and across both floors I saw speakers hanging from the ceiling (Figure 5), supposedly connected to a centralized broadcast system that is separated from the PA system at the centre stage. I never heard anything coming through these speakers. My observation was corroborated by casual interviews with many of the storekeepers, some of whom had been working at the Mall for as many as five years. The only time that they could recall maybe hearing something coming through the speakers was during events that took place on the centre stage of the ground floor. Even then, because of the ways so many different sounds from so many sources melded in the Pacific Mall’s particular spatial layout, it was often difficult to discern whether anything is really coming through the speakers, or if one is simply hearing from afar. In other words, the infrastructure exists for the soundscape of the Pacific Mall to be centrally controlled and engineered. But given the existing social and spatial organizations , the Pacific Mall is resonant with a robustly heterogeneous, grounds-up soundscape.

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Fig. 2 Pacific Mall’s floor plan

Fig. 3 Corridors and retail booths in the Pacific Mall, on Queens Avenue and 68th street. Photo by Yun Emily Wang.

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Fig. 4. Retailers’ independently mounted sound system, near the top of a booth. Photo by Yun Emily Wang.

Fig. 5. Mute speakers installed on the ceiling throughout the ground floor of the Pacific Mall. Photo by Yun Emily Wang.

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The Mall is well known within Toronto’s Chinese ethnoburbs, resembling an indoor, suburban iteration of the Chinatowns typically nestled in urban streets.164 Deployed as part of its self-conscious marketing scheme, the developers’ iteration of Chinese ethnicity and “culture” are on display at the Pacific Mall, ready to be consumed by the Canadian mainstream, Chinese diasporic communities, and tourists from the PRC.165 During my many visits to the Pacific Mall with various interlocutors, it was commonplace to see non-Chinese visitors strolling the corridors. Lucia Lo and Shuguang Wang’s studies (1997, 2004) on ethnic retail spaces also make similar observations.

This self-conscious display of ethnicity—and the kitsch such displays often become— crystallized in the Pacific Heritage Town, a “mall in the mall” on the second floor of the Pacific Mall. The Pacific Heritage Town was initially developed to serve as a cultural theme park that delivers food, music, and art construed to be iconically Chinese.166 This plan floundered, and the retail booths adorned in plastic roof vectors, red lanterns, and imitation terracotta warriors eventually became shops for low-quality qipao (Mandarin collar silk dresses), car accessories, and street food. Inside the Heritage Town is a second performance stage framed in antique carved wood panels meant to complement live, staged opera performances, but since few if any performances ever took place, the stage is now a glorified TV stand on which children roam (or cry) while their parents dine in the Heritage Town food court.

Celebration events modeled after the televised New Year’s Eve Gala (chun wan, “Eve of the Spring Festival”) take place on the ground floor centre stage without fail every February for the lunar New Year and every fall for the Mid-Autumn Festival. These events are quite similar to the ones organized in the geriatric centres (chapter 2) or at various Chinese cultural centres. The

164 Indeed, the Kennedy and Steeles intersection has become such an important landmark, the Toronto City Archive includes a series of old photos of the intersection to illustrate the growth of the Chinese community in Toronto— even though the intersection is technically outside of Toronto. 165 The Mall’s immense draw of tourists became part of the large scale competition between several Chinese supermarket chains in Toronto— in essence stores in the Mall were accused of artificially inflating their customer’s petition to apply for exemptions from municipal regulation by getting tourists to sign (Bascaramurty 2013). 166 I take these signifiers of Chineseness with a critical distance here, but bracket the interrogation of these constructions for now. My main purpose here is to show how immersive and abundant these problematic signifiers are.

187 events typically include music and dance performances punctuated by short addresses and well wishes, and stores often roll out deals and promotions on the event days, attracting many visitors from across the GTA. In the Mall, performances often expand from the stage into the street-like corridors. For instance, for the Chinese New Year’s celebration 2015, a lion dance troupe began on the centre stage, and then leapt off the stage to dance up and down the Avenue corridors.167 The dancing lions were accompanied by a small troupe of percussionists and Chinese barrel drums on wheels. They stopped by each booth to sprinkle fresh lettuce leaves—sheng (raw, or generating) cai (leafy vegetables, or money); a homophonic pun for “generating wealth”— in much the same way lion dance troupes visit every store for good luck and well wishes in Chinatown. During these events, drumming, crowd cheering, and loud music permeate the entire Mall, audible from all corners of the Mall.

Beyond the bounds of Chinese communities, the Pacific Mall maintains a robust presence in Torontonian mainstream media. Known for its Chinese theme, the Mall is frequently featured in travel guides and travel TV shows, in the newspaper, and in many “best of” articles on popular websites such as BlogTO. In recent years the Mall has also attracted tourists from China, which led to the Mall’s exemption from the Ontario Retail Business Act and made it legal for it to stay open through statutory holidays.

The Mall is not only a place to buy things that can’t be found in mainstream retail— clothes of certain styles or sizes, specialty household items, appliances with Chinese keys and instructions. It also serves as a space of leisure and sometimes dovetails in function with other community organizations or cultural centres. In interviews I have conducted for this and other chapters, many second-generation Chinese Canadians who had grown up in Scarborough in the 2000s reminisced about afternoons spent aimlessly browsing in the Pacific Mall with a bubble tea in hand. This practice continues today among Chinese-Canadian high school students, many of whom I came to know as weekend volunteers at the geriatric centre (chapter 2).

167 In his dissertation, ethnomusicologist Colin McGuire discussed the significance of lion dancing (including the boisterous percussion) as guardian of the diaspora’s border and as symbolic protection against racially motivated harassment in Toronto’s downtown Chinatown on Spadina Avenue (2015). Lion dance troupes, some times the exact same ones performing in Chinatown, in the indoor mall articulates the continuity between Chinatown and the “streets” inside the Pacific Mall.

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In its earlier days, the Mall was a popular hangout among retirees who lived nearby. Many of them now prefer the Splendid China Mall across Steeles Avenue for its better benches, brighter lighting, and newer coin-operated massage chairs. But it is still quite easy to observe elders walking around the outer corridors in laps for exercise. They stand out in their strides: slow and determined, with minimal movements at the hips resulting in feet sliding across the floor, which generates a steady stream of shuffling sound.168 The elders bring their own snacks and thermoses and sit in contemplation in the quieter corners of the Mall, occasionally stopping to chat with owners of some of the original stores that sell herbal medicine, Canadian ginseng, and so forth. Elderly and teenagers’ affinities for the mall are, of course, neither uniquely Chinese nor uniquely diasporic. But serving simultaneously as a face and a social hub for Toronto’s Chinese diasporic communities, the Pacific Mall’s social significance is evident, reaching far beyond its commercial purposes.

20.1 Three sonic “niches” in the Pacific Mall

Within the overall soundscape that emerged from the ground, there are many “sonic niches” (Augoyard 1979; Tausig 2013)— pockets of location-specific sonic textures that emplace their listeners. Each corner of the Mall is its own sonic niche, and to walk through the Mall is also to listen and move across a series of constantly evolving micro soundscapes.169

168 In Kinesthetic City: Dance & Movement in Chinese Urban Space (2013), San San Kwan mentions in passing a similar observation about shuffling feet when walking in Chinatowns. In Being Alive (2011), anthropologist Tim Ingold discusses Junzo Kawada’s comparison between how the French and the Japanese walked (40) around the 12th and 13th centuries— most notably, that the Japanese walked from the knees rather than the hips. This resulted in small [Japanese] steps dragged through the ground— i.e. a shuffle— for ease of carrying loads while walking uphill. Ingold then draws the parallel between the Japanese style of walking to dance . This is uncomfortably close to Alan Lomax’s cantometrics and choreometrics, and I go to great lengths to avoid suggesting anything close to a Chinese way of walking. I am by no means suggesting that everyone walks the same way in the Mall, or that different subjects’ walking experience can be flattened into a generic description. 169 I follow ethnomusicologist Ben Tausig’s use of the term “sonic niche” to describe pockets of a particular sonic phenomenon that mark the space (2013). Tausig used this term in the context of protests on the street. Specifics differ, but the bustling, crowded, and heterogeneous soundscapes

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In this section I briefly describe three sonic “niches” on the ground floor to give a general sense of how experiences of sound and space are co-constitutive in the Pacific Mall, how sound and space both orient the Mall’s visitors, and how the sounds in each of the sonic “niches” reveal a great deal about both the physical layout and the people of that part of the mall— that is, how the sounds produce the space. These descriptions are not meant to be comprehensive. Rather, I demonstrate the range and diversity of sounds a person might hear at from different corner of the mall. These three snapshots are organized roughly along a route I have walked with many fieldwork interlocutors, but most frequently with Xiaoyan. The first captures the mall’s south side entrance, the second centers around a particularly lively intersection at Pacific Avenue and 18th street, and the third is zooms in on the centre stage area on a regular day when there wasn’t a performance.

There are several entrances on the west and north sides of the rectangular Pacific Mall, but the entrance on the south side, facing the vast parking lot and Steeles avenue, is the most frequently used one. On busier days or when it is raining outside, the small foyer area can be quite lively with chatters. Most of the time, though, the foyer and the steps leading into the mall proper feel fairly quiet, with only a faint buzz coming from the florescent light above, and a soft, rhythmic clicking sound emanating from the ceiling fan and the short escalator. Walking up the stairs, a vaguely pitched throbbing bass that could be anywhere between 90 to 120 beats per minute gradually comes into earshot, and you might feel like you are entering a space demarcated by one musical soundtrack—most likely some sort of popular music—until you reached the top of the stairs, where multiple sound sources from nearby stores disrupt that illusion.

Tausig described seem to have something in common with the Pacific Mall. Tausig borrowed the term from Jean-Francis Augoyard’s Sonic Experience: A Guide to Everyday Sounds (2005), which incidentally grew out of Augoyard’s first book, Step-by-Step, about walking. Augoyard describes a “niche” as an effect that “uses the specific acoustic properties of a given environment.” There are, of course, conflicts over sound between owners of different booths, and the reasons range widely from conflicting soundscapes catering to specific clientele, to shift workers’ aural preferences. This is something that I will pursue further in a separate article on the sonic contestations in the Mall.

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The much smaller second floor is located right on top of the centre corridor, Pacific Avenue, rendering that corridor dim. To the left is a Bank of China overseas branch and several stores. Quite often the interlocutors with whom I visit the mall turn right, and begin their strolling from the Queen’s avenue corridor.

Along the southern-most wall of the Mall is a row of benches, where some elders might be see socializing or enjoying a snack. In front of the benches is the booth-store named Qooo Snacks (booth B2 on Pacific Mall’s floor plan in Fig. 2). Qooo Snacks carries imported Asian candies and snacks ranging from old time favourites like pickled plums to high-end chocolates from Hong Kong and the PRC. It has two large speakers on top of its many tall shelves near the top of the booth, and each speaker is placed facing the store’s two doors on corridors 8th street and Queens Avenue, respectively. The speakers effectively broadcast into the corridors, perhaps consciously expanding the store’s presence with sound (Figure 6).

Figure 6. The audibility of Qooo Snacks’ background music. Qooo Snacks is represented in red. Orange marks the space where Qooo Snacks’ music is readily audible to both Xiaoyan and myself; and the yellow line marks places where either or both Xiaoyan and I strained to hear.

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In informal interviews with the store’s employees, I was told that the owner usually selects “hip-sounding, Billboard top 40 playlists” from streaming services such as Google Play and its predecessor, Songza, or the Chinese counterparts Duomi, QQ Music, and WeChat Music. Or he uploads a playlist to an old phone to use as a sound source.170 The employees explained their belief that the point of this background music is in part to create a trendy image for the store. One employee demonstrated that the connection between background music and marketing is now well-known, as she told me, “It’s very obvious, right? The music creates the right atmosphere for the right customers.” The music also catered to the ideal customers’ expectations to shop with accompanying background music.171

To the left of Qooo Snacks and across the corridor of Queen’s Avenue is one of many Presotea bubble tea shops. Tucked away in a cabinet facing inward, rather than toward the corridors, is a stereo system that sometimes plays music chosen by and for the employees. This music—often contemporary Mandopop, although I have also heard Cantopop ballads from the 80s—is almost always very quiet and barely audible from the corridor. Instead of music, the

170 Interviews conducted in December 2014, February through May 2015, and February 2017, each time with a different employee. When I visited the Mall and Qooo Snacks in February of 2017, the store was playing Swedish singer Tove Lo’s single “Talking Body” on repeat on an old iPhone 4 with no SIM card. Interestingly, the employees who operated the old iPhone as sound source were often seen listening to their own music with ear buds on a different music-playing iPhone, “tuning out” of the prescribed background music for the store as a listener who is an “integrated yet distracted part of the aural ecology” (Beer 2007, 848). 171 Here, and perhaps throughout this chapter, I am thinking toward Anahid Kassabian’s Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity (2013). Kassabian draws on Joseph Lanza’s assertion in Elevator Music (1994) that it is a “quintessentially twentieth-century” phenomenon to have musics that “fill our days, are listened to without the kind of primary attention assumed by most scholarship” (xi- xii). Kassabian suggests a mode of listening “developed from the omnipresence of music in our daily lives” (9), where we listen alongside other quotidian activities. A listener engaged in ubiquitous listening relinquishes concerns about authorship, sound source, and genre-specific listening norms— i.e. all the very performative choices about how and what we listen to— but is also not just a passive receptor of music. For Kassabian, the ubiquitous listening endemic to life in the 20th and 21st centuries is a condition of possibility for what she calls “distributed subjectivity,” a way to think about individual subjectivity as nodes in a network of distributed subjectivity best encapsulated by mass culture (and namely music). In the context of this chapter, my point is that a person living in Toronto in the 2010’s, regardless of ethnicity and immigration patterns, most likely have gotten very used to background music in the grocery store, in TTC stations, and so forth.

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Presotea booth sonically marks its presence near the entrance with the raucousness of a row of industrial grade blenders, whose motors buzz and ice cubes clash against the blenders’ blades, and the sound of employees scooping ice cubes or pouring ice into steel sinks. These sounds are quite loud and audibly layer on top of the music coming from Qooo Snacks.

The partially intelligible hubbub from Presotea’s customers (often in a queue or in small groups waiting for their orders) blends disembodied speech sounds, out-of-context short phrases, and chuckles and giggles coming from nearby booths and neighbouring corridors, and become part of the sonic ecology (Atkinson 2007) of this corner of the mall. Sibilants, the consonants formed by high-intensity air streams, traverse from all directions and form an overall impression of chatter sounds.172 If listening closely, you can sometimes discern different voices from this soundscape. Another type of sound that is audibly present in much of the mall is people’s footsteps. Some of them shuffle slowly and steadily, while others stride in a rush and in heels. Sometimes rubber soles screeches sharply on the linoleum when people step on water dripped from their ice cold bubble teas. These sonic by products of human activities (Beer 2007) can be heard in many parts of the mall, but they are especially noticeable when framed in the relative quietude of the entrance area.173

Around the corner from the Qooo Snacks and Presotea booths, at the intersections between the corridors Pacific Avenue and 18th street, is one of the two or three remaining media stores in Pacific Mall (booth C8). There is barely any room inside the booth for a browsing customer—four tall shelves, each jam-packed with CDs and DVDs in plastic envelopes barricade the bespectacled shop owner in at his crowded desk. The shelves and the innumerable discs are all haphazardly labeled with a Sharpie. One wall is devoted to Mandopop and Cantopop: one tall pile for audio-only CDs, one for karaoke DVDs, and a third for videos of full concerts. The other wall is for “Western,” with subtitled TV series and movies filed in no particular order on

172 For example, sounds like s, ds, ts, and in Mandarin the retroflex sibilants zh, ch, sh. Sibilants are further categorized (and in different ways depending on the system of phonetics used), but the point here is that they are supposed to be louder because they are all produced by pushing a lot of air out very quickly. 173 This descriptive section is pieced together from my field notes from walking in the Mall with people. These walks took place mostly on weekdays in the late afternoon. The Mall is busier on weekends and holidays and sound differently.

193 top, and mainstream popular music selections on the bottom third of the shelves. Duplicates of Celine Dion discs take up nearly a whole row. In the centre of the booth is a display case for Cantonese dramas— specifically, the ones produced by Hong Kong’s TVB Company. The Plexiglas “wall” facing the Pacific Avenue corridor is completely removed, and in its place is a table that holds four wire bins labeled “New, hot Korean drama,” “Hong Kong and Taiwanese drama,” “Japanese drama,” and “Clearance.” Each bin holds bundle after bundle of DVDs in envelopes. Each envelope typically contains two or three discs and a whole season of a show. The envelopes are organized by shows. All around the table, the bins, and other bins on the floor are homemade signs that read: “Blu-Ray $3 per disc,” “No refunds,” and “Hot right now.” Instead of speakers and background music, the media store places one TV with built-in speakers facing the 18th street corridor, and one on the inside of the booth with large speakers facing Pacific Avenue. These TVs are usually playing different shows simultaneously at a high volume, and all of the two shows’ sound effects, music, and dialogue are audible from afar, drawing attention and foot traffic.

Across Pacific Avenue is a cellphone accessories and repair shop (booth D7) by the name of Mr. Repair. Also having removed part of its Plexiglas wall, this booth exclusively streams contemporary Mandopop and Cantopop, broadcasting from a row of inexpensive Logitech computer speakers fixed to the top of the booth into the intersection of 18th and Pacific. The music from Mr. Repair and rotating television shows from the media store dominate this entire intersection. The mixture of sounds permeates the neighbouring clothing store (booth D5), nail salon (next to the media store, in C10), and luxury barrette store (D9) and becomes their background music as well. Also located in the robust sonic niche of this intersection, the other cellphone accessories store in booth C6 (diagonally across from Mr. Repair) goes a different direction to create its own sonic space: the booth is sealed off the top, has all of its walls, and has the door closed all the time.

Continuing down the Pacific Avenue corridor leads to the centre stage area, which is richly sonorous from human activity even on days when there are no special events taking place. The individual booths’ background music tracks are distant and barely audible. There are usually four or five information stands (with pamphlets and product samples strewn across fold- out plastic tables), with talkative employees trying to engage each passer-by. Except for the benches near the entrances on the south and west sides of the Pacific Mall, the only other place

194 to sit and take respite from shopping is the steps around the centre stage. Fatigued shoppers and exercising elders often sit along these steps, so the sounds of chitchat, phone calls, and snacking abound. In this area there are also several nautically themed kiddie rides that intermittently play pre-recorded jingles, and a row of coin-operated massage chairs that beep and rattle.

Majority of the time during my fieldwork, there was a vendor of small aquariums and fish tanks who improvised a shop with fold-out tables and chairs behind the elevator shaft. Tens of lit- up aquariums, all plugged into the main power panel near the elevator, formed a tall, bright, buzzing stack. The elderly fish vendor from Hong Kong often sat next to the fish tanks and passed time by listening to a portable radio receptor. He later upgraded the small unit to a smart phone, and streamed political talk shows from Taiwan. These programs were broadcasted from a Bluetooth speaker facing the open corridors. The acoustics of the hollow space behind the elevator shaft amplified the fish vendor’s program of choice, ostensible meant for his private listening, and Mall visitors passing him could tune-in ever so briefly to the shows. The fish vendor often fell asleep. When that happens, his phone automatically streamed the next related talk show episode that then diffused into the Mall, contributing an unintended layer to the overall sonic composition of the centre stage area.

20.2 The critical intimacies of soundwalking in the Pacific Mall

In Mandarin, the verb guang refers to a particular mode of walking that combines strolling with relaxed perusal of one’s surroundings. Guang is the verb used for any situation where a person walks around to look around: you can guang the park, the zoo, or the garden. The verb is mostly used in the context of leisure shopping, the pleasure of which comes at least as much from browsing as it does from strolling. A person can guang the mall, the streets, or the supermarket.

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Strolling in this guang manner is an integral part of everyday social life in the Chinese diaspora.174 During fieldwork, I have accompanied and adapted to the different paces of numerous interlocutors as they guang in Pacific Mall and in Chinese supermarkets (Xiaoyan and the Chens in this chapter), in Eaton centre and in T&T, a Chinese themed supermarket chain now owned by Loblaws (with the queer diaspora group in chapter 3), and in the courtyard gardens and around suburban strip malls with fellow volunteers from the geriatric centre (chapter 2).

I start with guang, the perambulatory sensing of a space, as a possible inroad to think about the relationship between walking and listening— two distinctly different activities that sometimes inform each other. I do not intend to suggest in any way that walking and listening can or should be conflated, or that they are on the same continuum.175 But given what ethnomusicologists have said about the inter-relatedness between sounding, listening, and bodily movements (e.g. Ahlgren 2016; Hahn 2007; Le Guin 2006; and Rahaim 2012), it is worthwhile to at least explore how they are related. Here, I zoom in on moments where listening guides walking as much as walking conditions listening. I draw on theoretical reflections on walking as the “pedestrian unfolding” of the stories accumulated in a space (de Certeau 1984, 110), a way “to make one’s way through a world-in-formation” (Ingold and Vergunst 2008, 2; original emphasis), and an embodied form of storytelling (ibid, 8), so as to consider what happens to the listening ears as we walk. I postulate that walking through while listening to the sounds of a space has a generative dimension, and that it can be thought of as real-time composition of a sonic narrative. This narrative unfolds, as embodied listening, through the hesitation or eagerness of feet shuffling or in strides, toward or away. It is expressive and creative insofar as verbal or musical narratives are, and as such it plays a role in forging meaningful social relationships.

In Western thought walking has gone from a cheap mode of transportation signalling poverty to an emblem of the Romantic wanderer on a hero’s journey (Ingold 2011; similar observations in the introduction to Ingold and Vergunst 2008; Lorimer 2011). Ways to think about walking have certainly proliferated since Thoreau’s pensive strolls by Walden Pond: in a

174 And else where, too, I am sure— I don’t mean only Chinese people do this. It’s just a readily available way to talk about a particular mode of walking. 175 Scholars theorizing a nonrepresentational response to sounds “beyond cochlear listening and human consciousness” (Gallagher et al, 2016, 1, and Toby Butler 2007) certainly edge toward that direction.

196 review of studies on pedestrianism in social sciences and the humanities, Hayden Lorimer suggests several major themes in what he calls an emerging “walking studies”: walking, as “time- in-motion-across-space” (19-20) is an embodied way to get to know and to (co)produce a space. Walking is also an ordinary if not fundamental feature of everyday life, especially considering that street-level negotiations in crowded two-way pavement have been considered formative of the social realm.176 Finally, perhaps with a lingering tinge of Romanticism, walking is a means to “find a better sort of fit between self and world” that “offers an embodied space where searching questions are considered, and sometimes answered” (Lorimer 2011, 23)— which is to say, a way of narrating on foot toward one’s selfhood.177

Across the themes Lorimer identified, the one that is particularly relevant for my purpose here is a pattern of theorizing procedural, processional walking against the structural space in which walking happens. The epitome of this constructed dichotomy is, of course, de Certeau. In his essay “Walking in the City” (1984), de Certeau suggests that walking, like narrativizing or storytelling, is a spontaneous, tactical, improvisatory “makeshift thing” (107) that can be read as a kind of “making do” within the structured city. Walking allows a person to appreciate the on-the- ground details, to “follow the thick and thin of an urban ‘text’,” and “make uses of space in ways that cannot be seen” (93). The walker practices the city, which stands in opposition to the top- down view that is “a ‘theoretical’ (that is, visual) simulacrum, in short a picture, whose condition of possibility is an oblivion and a misunderstand of practices” (93).

In Ways of Walking (2008) and Being Alive (2011), anthropologist Tim Ingold similarly draws analogies for basically the same distinction between the processual practice and the structure that is the city. Ingold suggests that walking is like drawing a line across a surface rather than stamping upon it. The difference between drawing and stamping (and between walking and imposing a structure), he notes, is that the former is a way to inhibit—to dwell— and the latter to occupy (2008, 7), suggesting a de Certeau-esque understanding of the stamping structure as a

176 What Lorimer observes in walking studies is, of course, contingent upon social class, urban planning, abilities, and other intersecting social categories. 177 At the risk of drowning the baby for not throwing out the bathwater, I recognize that walking studies has a historical lineage in classist and Eurocentric romanticism emblematized by Walter Benjamin’s figure of the flâneur. This warrants interrogation, although it is not within the scope of my project.

197 form of domination. Much of the writing about walking as self-realization, as ways to act out everyday social interactions, or walking as the practice that “enunciates” (de Certeau, 98) a space, relies on this logic as well. Walking a city, rather than looking at it from above, is ultimately a decision to prioritize linear processes over multidimensional structures.

The key here is that a process must have a duration as it requires unfolding (see also Ingold 2008, 8). The duration introduces a great deal of uncertainty—a lot can change or go wrong during the walk, and this duration threatens the stability of the structure. The unfolding— or walking, if we were to continue de Certeau’s metaphor— requires real time “continual perceptual monitoring” (de Certeau 1984, 13) and changes in response to the observations made.178 This unfolding and the myriad of quick decisions involved lead both de Certeau and Ingold to suggest that a walk is akin to a narrative, and similar comparisons between walking and storytelling pepper other works. The narrative one walks is replete with the expressivity and creativity of speaking (de Certeau 98-101),179 and it “affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses, respects…the trajectories it ‘speaks’” (100).180 Bolstering the continuity between walking and verbal expressions, both de Certeau and Ingold have separately noted the ways in which walking, like talking, is often conditioned by the bodily dispositions that have sedimented over a life time. This is what Bourdieu calls habitus (1977). Indeed, Bourdieu himself used gendered styles of walking to explain hexis, a sub-category of habitus that encompasses ways of holding and moving one’s body— men strides in confidence; women slouch and shuffle (93-4).

Elsewhere, the embodied narrativity of walking has been adapted to think about people’s experiences of public spaces. In a study on visitors of the Abasto shopping mall in Argentina

178 See also Vergunst (2008) for the constant monitoring of the texture of the ground we walk on, and how we adjust— even without thinking— to those cues. 179 de Certeau goes as far as suggesting that there is a pedestrian speech act (as in J. L. Austin’s Speech Act Theory, where a performative is the creation of social facts through utterance), and that walking and speaking are homologous as both involve a system of symbols. 180 In theorizing a rhetoric of walking, de Certeau draws a parallel between verbal styles and walking styles, and following Augoyard, describes walked poetic devices such as synecdoche and asyndeton. There are other approaches to the expressivity and narrativity of walking. For some (e.g. Ray Lucas 2008) the expressivity lies in the dance-like moves on the street, for others (e.g. Kawada) it has to do with bodily dispositions. For writers like Augoyard, movements of walking has its own symbolic order. I engage mostly with de Certeau and Ingold here because they address mostly with directions and trajectories, which suits the ethnographic material better.

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(2015), geographer Jacob Miller argues that “even though places such as shopping malls are driven by the imperatives of commodity capital, our theoretical-methodological approaches cannot be solely focused on how the malls help reproduce consumers who shop” (882). Through interviews that he conducted while walking with interviewees in the mall, Miller depicts the ways in which his interlocutors mediated their social and affective lives through their experiences in the mall by weaving things they saw on the walk into stories of their idealized life. This is what Miller calls “critical intimacies,” or, an image of life through/at the mall. Miller notes that the social reproduction that happens at the mall is just one side of the coin— the other side involves how individuals imagine themselves vis-a-vis the mall as they walk through and around it. As a whole, then, what de Certeau, Ingold, and Miller emphasize is that walking is a form of expression that allows the walker some control of how they experience and engage with a space. I adopt this framework in thinking about my interlocutor Xiaoyan’s walks through the mall, but there is one caveat: de Certeau, Ingold, and Miller have all discussed walking in an overwhelmingly ocularcentric way; nearly all of the discussions about the walker’s sensory experiences focus on what can be and cannot seen, and the few exceptions emphasize the tactile.181 Given the proliferation of works that demonstrate the intimate relationships between sound, listening, and space in ethnomusicology (Abe 2018; Born 2013; Tausig 2013) and beyond (Duffy and Waitt 2013; Gallagher et al 2016; Revill 2014), though, it seems reasonable to expand the purview of the walker’s sensorial experience to sound as well.

Studies of ‘soundwalks” are obviously useful here. Soundwalks emerged in the in the 1970s among members of the World Soundscape Project to explore the sonic lives of cities and neighbourhood in Canada and in Europe. Among its proponents are R. Murray Schafer and Hildegard Westerkamp, who understood soundwalks as interventions to precisely the ocularcentricity of spatial experiences (Paquette and McCartney 2012). Todays, soundwalks are organized in many places around the world as “public exercises of awareness [of the sonic environment]” (2012, 138). They are typically guided walking tours, where a person or a pre- recorded audio track leads tour participants on a route and points their attention to certain sonic

181 There might be good reasons for this: in “Listening geographies: landscape, affect, and geotechnologies,” Gallagher et al. suggests that sounds follow a different set of laws of physics than sights: spaces can often sound much bigger or smaller than they actually are depending on the acoustics, and what can be heard is not always what can be seen.

199 phenomenon. Soundwalks have become increasingly popular as a niche form of alternative tourism, often discursively construed as a sensorial reframing that allows a city or neighbourhood’s residents to unearth an overlooked (or, perhaps more accurately, under-heard) dimension of an environment they thought they had known. Sound artists have also utilized soundwalks to highlight the relationship between sound and space.182

One problem with soundwalks, though, is that they ultimately reduce the duration of sound into vista points. Take the clichéd soundwalk feature a railway underpass, for example. Unless you stand near the underpass for the entire walk— in which case it’s not a walk—you can only ever observe a segment of the sounds of the underpass, and will necessarily have to forego the cycles and large scale rhythms of reverberating rumbles from the train. Similarly, on a soundwalk in the Pacific Mall, it would be impossible to attend to the interplay between two booths with competing background music playlists and the ebb and flow of customers’ chatter and footsteps— unless, of course, all you do is pace back and forth in one corner of the mall. The sequence of different sonic niches a walker experiences on a walk through a place like the Pacific Mall, then, is not just something that happens and waits to be heard, but is instead the result of the walker’s various decisions between what de Certeau calls “choices among the signifiers of the spatial language.”183 To borrow the words of Jean-Paul Augoyard (1979), the philosopher of walking and sound, in walking through and listening to environments, the walker can actively and creatively shape their own auditory experiences through the route they take.

The agency and creativity this framework attributes to the walker-listener-mall visitor would disrupt the predominant approach in works on constructed soundscapes in commercial spaces—or sonic architectonic in Jonathan Sterne’s words (1997). In this literature, the visitor- listener is often considered to have been disciplined and structured by intentionally designed sonic experiences. Such an approach implies a fairly stable sounding-listening relationship, in which to sound is to assert power and control, and to listen is to passively receive. I suspect this

182 For surveys of such sound art pieces, see Paquette and McCartney (2012). See also Toby Butler’s account of how he designed a soundwalk and his overview of sound artists in similar endeavours (2006 and 2007). 183 This observation would not apply to all soundwalks, though— most of them are guided and the participants do not always get a say in how and what they hear. Paquette and McCartney has noted the prescriptive nature of soundwalks as a major critique.

200 approach is an intellectual vestige left over from thinking about the act of listening as passive and receptive, although recent ethnomusicology has demonstrated otherwise: as “a deliberate channeling of attention toward a sound,” (Rice 2015, 99) listening has been theorized as the historically conditioned flip side of the development of sound production (Sterne 2003), a voluntary way to cultivate ethics (Hirschkind 2006), identities, and affect (Kapchan 2009), a generative site of knowledge production (Ochoa 2014), and a highly engaged way of sensing (not sensorial response) to ensure survival (Daughtry 2015). Indeed, in the introduction to Theorizing Sound Writing (2017), Deborah Kapchan has suggested that perhaps “J.L. Austin’s ‘illocutionary speech acts’ [can] find equivalency in ‘listening acts’ insofar as both are performative”(5). Kapchan goes on to elaborate that “a listening body interacts with sound, conducting but also transforming it in the process”(6, emphasis mine), pointing to the listener as a co-participant in acts of listening. If listening is such an active, expressive, and generative way of engaging with a particular environment, then, it would makes sense that even in a mall with carefully curated programmed music in the background, the mall visitors are agentive as listeners.

This brings me back to the verb guang, the simultaneous strolling and perusing. Walking in the way of guang involves not only “taking in,” but also a kind of “making up” of a sensory narrative. In the following section I trace Xiaoyan’s footsteps across the Pacific Mall, paying particular attention to her experience of the mall’s cacophonous soundscape as she walks. I take her walking and listening as forms of expression akin to speaking, and focus on two stories from one of the many trips we have shared. In the first, Xiaoyan effectively chased after the mechanical noise of blenders that came from different bubble tea stands from across the Mall, through which she performed a kind of transnational cosmopolitanism. In the second, Xiaoyan listens to the heterogeneous soundscape as a kind of “cover” that provided her with a feeling of anonymity, which allowed her to initiate a conversation that required a great deal of privacy.

20.3 Walking with Xiaoyan in the Pacific Mall

The Pacific Mall was Xiaoyan’s very first “home base” in Toronto. When she moved to Toronto in 2013, Xiaoyan had neither a job nor any friends whose locations could sway her decisions for exactly where to live. She consulted the online forums, and was told that as long as she had money, the Pacific Mall would meet all of the needs of a young Chinese woman.

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Xiaoyan held on to the comforting promise of the Mall, and rented a room in a house only five minutes away specifically so that she would at least know where to get the things she needed. In the months that followed, Xiaoyan visited the Mall nearly daily. She bought groceries from the supermarket in the adjacent Market Village, pots and pans and kitchen appliances from the kitchen equipment stores in Pacific Mall, and bedding from low-priced variety stores. She strolled the Mall after unsuccessful job interviews, when the furniture store she worked for went under, and during stints of unemployment. Xiaoyan’s comfort zone eventually expanded out from the Mall, and she became familiar with the landscape of Scarborough. Although she had moved three times and worked two other jobs since those early days, Xiaoyan continued to visit the Pacific Mall on her days off, often arranging to meet friends and stroll together at the Mall.

On a Monday evening in February of 2015, Xiaoyan texted me and invited me to lunch, saying that she wanted to chat. The next day we grabbed lunch at one of the restaurants in the large plaza right outside of the Pacific Mall. As it was a Tuesday afternoon, the restaurant was desolate, and we were the only two people dining.

It was Xiaoyan’s day off from her job at the massage parlour. She clearly had something on her mind, but it was also clear that she found it difficult to broach the subject. So we had lunch, then Xiaoyan suggested that we take a stroll— to guang — in the Pacific Mall. Xiaoyan considered herself to have outgrown the retail aspect of the Mall, noting that, “Everything is of low quality, gaudy design, and high price, and only people who don’t know better fall for the whole Chinese retail thing!” There was nothing she wanted to buy, she said, but the indoor setting of the Mall would give us a chance to walk around, and there was no harm in that anyway.

We went into the Pacific Mall through the south entrance, and were greeted by the Presotea stand. Xiaoyan begin telling me about her earlier days in Toronto, pointing to Qooo Snacks, which supplied her pickled plums until she realized how overpriced they were, and the booth that used to be a DVD store that closed after the police raid in 2013. We slowly walked through a number of shops, exchanging opinions on various clothing, accessories, or skin care products from outside of the stores. When we got to the intersection between Pacific Avenue and 88th street, Xiaoyan’s pace noticeably slowed. In front of us and to the left was another Presotea stand, and to the left was a “Tea Shop 168,” one of Presotea’s competing beverage store chains.

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#bookdart Though this had not always been the case, in the last couple of years Pacific Mall had become known for its comically high density of bubble tea shops. A “bubble tea” is a cold, sweetened tea typically mixed with milk, and always served with large tapioca balls, or “bubbles.”184 Bubble tea originated in Taiwan, but has gained popularity in Mainland China and in the diaspora. Bubble tea franchises typically market and prepare the tea in explicitly different ways from Hong Kong style milk tea, which are hot, strong, creamy, and unsweetened. In contrast, Taiwan style bubble teas are icy cold and intensely sweet. These days one can get a wide array of dessert-like beverages from any bubble teashop, ranging from an Oreo smoothie to an iced unsweetened Oolong. Although neither tea nor the tapioca “bubbles” is requisite, the tea stands are still referred to as bubble tea shops.

Just on the first floor of Pacific Mall, there are three major bubble tea chains competing against each other: Presotea, Tea Shop 168, and Real Fruit. Each chain has four to five shops spread evenly across the first floor. Including the independent bubble teashops or lesser-known chains, vendors of bubble tea constitute nearly one tenth of all the shops on the first floor. Each of these shops prepare the beverages in more or less the same way— pre-brewed, chilled tea is blended with lots of ice cubes, milk, and syrup, and then poured over freshly cooked tapioca in a disposable cup. The cups are then sealed with a plastic film in a machine, and an important part of drinking bubble tea is the satisfying popping sound of the specialty bubble tea straw poking through the seal.

Xiaoyan stopped walking when we came up to an intersection with two competing bubble teashops. Unlike the Presotea shop near the entrance, both shops were busy at that time. Multiple blenders were simultaneously running against the two shops’ different background music, and each blender was preparing a different drink. The uniformed employees adroitly and snonorously scooped then poured out ice cubes into stainless steel sinks. In front of both shops were two groups of young people— one of them speaking English, the other Mandarin— waiting for their orders. Xiaoyan walked up to a large cardboard sign advertising mango smoothies, and

184 Bubble tea is also known as “boba tea.”

203 she turned to me and said, “Hey, look! Bubble tea of your [Taiwanese] people!”, foregrounding the Taiwan-Mainland geopolitical tension that mediated our friendship.185

Xiaoyan reached for her wallet, and said that perhaps she would get a bubble tea like the old days. But on her way walking to the Presotea counter she hesitated and stopped, and explained to me that a bubble tea has as many calories as the lunch we’ve just had, and that she was trying to watch her figure, performing a gendered ethics of bodily cultivation. We continued walking, passing the intersection, when Xiaoyan changed her mind and began to turn around. She thought our stroll in the mall might just feel more leisurely and pleasant if we had bubble teas in our hands. Her change of mind only lasted a moment, however, and she turned away from the bubble tea intersection once again, noting that the bubble tea’s high sugar content was unhealthy.

We walked further around the corner toward the centre stage on the first floor of the mall. Xiaoyan continued to talk about how bubble teas articulated her understanding of Taiwan back in Wuhan and later in Toronto. She noted,

“You know, we had bubble tea back in Wuhan as well, and I drank those in high school. The Wuhan version of bubble tea was overly sweet, though, and the tapioca was never chewy. They were too soft. Everything was coloured in really caricatured and artificial ways— the taro flavoured tea would always be in bright purple, for example. Then I came to Toronto, and finally had the authentic Taiwanese bubble tea here. I mean— at least I think it’s more authentic. Like, I can imagine why Taiwanese people go crazy for these.”

She went on to narrate that in her first months in Toronto, while strolling in the Pacific Mall she had consciously learned to buy a bubble tea and hold the tea in her hand as she strolled like all the Asian-Canadian youths she saw in the Mall. The conspicuous consumption of the bubble tea transformed her presence from that of a timid, unemployed, new immigrant clutching tightly onto the Mall as a surrogate homeland, to the air of ease and leisure of the second- generation youths who, to Xiaoyan, seem to be at home. She aspired to this ease.186

185 Her original words were “Nimen (yours, plural) taiwande (of or belonging to Taiwan) zhenzhu naicha (bubble tea).” My translation was not quite exact, but this is a difficult phrase to translate. 186 The social theory of consumption, mostly following Bourdieu (1984), has shifted from understanding purchases as purely practical and informed by the buyers’ current social class (i.e.

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As Xiaoyan narrated, we began hearing the operations and swarm of mechanical sound of another blender, which seemed to have been coming from the north. There were no other bubble teashops in sight, but at least one was within earshot. Picking out the blender sound from the many different background musics from different stores, the coin-operated kiddie rides, the radio, and the chatter, Xiaoyan asked if I heard the sound as well. She then suggested that we explore the sound source, and began walking toward the sound. In part because of the way the booths were laid out on the floor and the open space above the ceiling, in part because of all the other sounds that were within our auditory fields, and in part perhaps because of Xiaoyan’s particular way of identifying the direction of a sound source—her echolocation—

Xiaoyan heard the blender sound as coming from above but had some trouble hearing the spatial relationships between her corporeal body and the sounding blender. As we walked in search of the blender, her footsteps slow down in hesitation when she wasn’t sure which direction to turn next, and one time she walked resolutely southward only to turn sharply to the opposite direction moments later.

Here, then, Xiaoyan’s movements across space and her subtle bodily gestures of hesitation or eagerness correspond to and reflect her listening as she parsed out a sound object (the blender) from the overall, ambient soundscape. By listening in this way, Xiaoyan simultaneously engaged in an interpretative practice where she listened for meaning (Rice 2015; Chion 1994) and a spatial practice; an improvised acoustemology (Feld 2015, 1996).

Eventually we found another lesser known bubble tea shop, and Xiaoyan was once again faced with indecision. The same thing repeated several more times that day, each time Xiaoyan performs ambivalence about the various significances that the bubble tea had accrued for her. On one hand, buying, drinking, and walking with a bubble tea would allow her to partake in a kind of multi-layered transnational cosmopolitanism— as an immigrant who has now “made it” enough to stroll in the mall with such relaxation, and as someone who has seen the world enough to know clumsy imitations from the real thing. On the other hand, her explicit disavowal of the

rich people buy expensive things) to a performative gesture of class aspiration (i.e. middle class people buy expensive things).

205 bubble tea also gestured toward a kind of bodily discipline imperative for a gendered, modern subject. For Xiaoyan, and in this particular setting, walking back and forth in response to her listening is a kind of a performative that allows her to fully express her productive and meaningful ambivalence.187

In between various searches for the bubble tea blender sounds, I asked Xiaoyan what she wanted to talk about, as she had wanted to take a stroll in the mall so that we could talk. Xiaoyan nodded, and said, “Yes, okay, let’s find a good place for talking.” I initially took that to mean a quieter corner of the Mall, and imagined that we would head toward one of the benches along the outer ring of corridors. These corridors held many of the “quiet” stores that attracted little foot traffic and did not play background music. I gestured to one of the corridors that lead to the quiet benches, and turned to start heading that way. To my surprise, Xiaoyan vetoed that suggestion, and began leading the way around the Mall in search of a “good place.” We briefly stopped by the centre stage area, which was robustly noisy at the time, but after five minutes or so Xiaoyan decided that perhaps we should look again and further. Eventually we went up the escalator to the Pacific Heritage town on the second floor, and Xiaoyan suggested that we head to the food court. We squeezed through the narrow, crowded corridors. Chatter, clamour, and music poured into our ears from all directions: food vendors’ chopping and dropping of stacks of steel bowls into a sink, metal spatula scraping and scooping in woks, and grills sizzling, along with people talking, slurping, laughing, adn blenders buzzing from two other bubble tea shops.

Xiaoyan and I sat at one of the empty tables, and she let out a long sigh, explaining that even if we were overheard, the noise in the food court would render her words unintelligible, and it suddenly became clear to me why she was hesitant to talk in the restaurant earlier that afternoon. Feeling a sense of anonymity and a paradoxical privacy afforded by the seeming publicness of

187 The idea of a performative, usually attributed to Austin, is foundational to linguistic anthropology and is central to Judith Butler’s formulation of gender performativity in Bodies that Matter. But here I am actually thinking toward de Certeau’s notion of the “pedestrian speech acts” in his essay “Walking in the city.” De Certeau argues that “the act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered” (98). De Certeau further noted that walking “enunciates” the topography as a “spatial acting-out of the place” just like how speaking is “an acoustic acting-out of language.” For de Certeau, practices, like walking, are the processes of materializing very real but very invisible structuring forces, as well as various forms of resistance or re-appropriations of those forces.

206 this soundscape, Xiaoyan confided a conundrum she felt impossible to speak about either with her family in China, or with Auntie and Uncle Chen.

I left many of the details of what Xiaoyan told me that day out of this dissertation, but the crux of her story was that she had realized that she had been tricked, lied to, and deeply exploited by her employer. Struggling with anger and resentment toward a fellow diasporic Chinese woman who talked a good talk about having each other’s backs— and wrestling with profound shame and embarrassment, Xiaoyan told me about the employers’ many potentially illegal dealings.

She also told me at length about her feeling of being trapped by the job. When she was first hired, having been too trusting and too noticeably eager to put her education to use, Xiaoyan had agreed to the employer’s demand of a ten-thousand dollar “deposit” to ensure that she would keep working for at least one year. The receipt for this deposit, like Xiaoyan’s employment contract and paperwork for health benefits, was promised but never delivered. Her working conditions deteriorated quickly within the first month—her shifts became longer but the daily pay never increased (and, by the time of our conversation, she was paid $30 dollars for a 8-hour day with no overtime); her off days became unpaid; and even though she was hired as a receptionist, she was coerced into performing massages on paying clients, feeling overwhelmed as she had no training beyond a few instructional video clips on YouTube, and feeling indignant to have been trained so well and yet exploited so badly. Xiaoyan wanted to leave the job but she also desperately needed to get back the ten thousand-dollar deposit, which was a hefty loan from her parents. She felt deeply resentful and regretful, but more than anything else she felt humiliated. This embarrassment prevented her from seeking consolation from any of her friends here or in China, with family, or with the Chens, the two elders she trusted the most in Toronto. She had only shared these troubles with me because I had met her at the workplace that was causing her so much distress in the first place.

Xiaoyan’s confiding had been shaped by her sense of what is and is not, and what should and should not be, audible. By choosing to talk in the noisiest part of the Mall and under the cover of the food court’s thickly layered soundscape, Xiaoyan tactically turned the crowd noise typically associated with collective sociality and festivity into an anticipatory shield against auditory surveillance. The extent to which her anticipation was warranted is beyond the point here: what really mattered was that by listening in this particular way, Xiaoyan highlighted a

207 secrecy of what she was to say, which engendered an intimacy between she and I. In walking through the Mall to find a noisy enough “good spot,” and in surveying and choosing between different sonic niches within the Mall, Xiaoyan also practiced and demonstrated a kind of curatorial listening that didn’t quite fit sound studies’ predominant taxonomy for different modes of listening. She listened to the sounds as sounds without attempting to impose or finding discernible traces of a symbolic order —what Michel Chion calls “reduced listening.” But her reduced listening was not simply for sensory experience’s sake. It was a way to recruit the noisy soundscape to frame what she wanted to say out loud; and a way to transform a social relationship. In such listening, She positioned herself as an active consumer of the soundscape— one who got to choose, pick, and use the public soundscape for her own.

Neither the blender sounds nor Xiaoyan’s tactic of hiding in plain earshot are uniquely Chinese or earth-shatteringly creative, of course. But by outlining these two examples, I hope to draw attention to moments where Xiaoyan excavated resources for her everyday communications from a place and a soundscape as publicly recognized and ethnicized as the Pacific Mall.

21 Walking and listening in a supermarket

In the next two sections I continue to follow Xiaoyan’s footsteps, but in different contexts. In the first, I examine how she walks away from or toward the high pitched shrill sounds of bone cutting machines in a Chinese supermarket, and in the second I investigate the role of sound and listening when Auntie Chen taught Xiaoyan how to properly chop the pork they bought. I argue that through these sonically-informed bodily movements of the everyday (walking, chopping), the women give meaning to sound and practice a kind of expressivity. In moving with or against each other, they listen across the discordances between them, and forge what Svetlana Boym has termed “diasporic intimacy” (1998), the ephemeral connection rooted in the suspicion of stable homes and belongings.

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21.1 The politics and poetics of food in Chinese contexts

Since both ethnographic scenarios below centre around food, and food also figures somewhat prominently in the stories above, it is necessary to first briefly outline the historical significance of food in the contexts of the PRC and the Chinese diaspora. I organize what anthropologists and cultural theorists have said about food in these contexts—as “a system of communication” inscribed with messages about social relations (Oxfeld 2017)—around Xiaoyan’s own discourse and her conversations with the Chens about food. This is not only to demonstrate that the stories Xiaoyan’s and the Chens tell about food are historically situated, but more importantly to frame the next couple of sections in their at-times clashing “food universes” (Oxfeld 2017, 22).

Food and culinary culture are often construed as identity markers for the Chinese ethnicity, and sites of food preparation such as the kitchen and the stove are traditionally symbolic of family unity.188 In a study on food in post-reform rural China, for example, anthropologist Ellen Oxfeld explains the social poetics of the stove. In traditional Chinese multi- generational housing, cooking and eating separately mean having separate assets, that is to say, being separate families. Starting a new stove is a symbolic gesture of splitting from the old family. Sharing a stove symbolically demarcates the boundaries of a family more so than sharing a roof does (2017, 32 and then again 54-56).189 Talking about food is often a proxy for talking about sociality in the Chinese context. Memories and experiences of food chronicle the PRC’s economic and political vicissitudes in the latter half of 20th century, and people from different

188 Farquhar points out that “‘China’ is not, however, a totality that can be seen as having a special relationship to food, orientalist images and some recent ethnicity literature in the United States notwithstanding,” and went on to clarify that she meant such racial stereotypes Chinese people eating “exotic delicacies.” Farquhar then cautioned her readers against essentializing the Chinese as particularly guttural (or prone to starvation because of communism), reasserting multiple times throughout the book that she examines eating as a historically conditioned phenomenon (2002, 44), and that habits, attitudes, and practices of food she describes are “extremely contingent on the events and conditions of Maoist and reform China” (8). In general I follow Farquhar’s approach and I share her trepidation in potentially reproducing the stereotype. That being said, I do think the relationship between eating and Chineseness, especially in North American diasporic contexts, is more complicated than orientalism and essentialism (more in the next two footnotes). 189 Oxfeld notes that in early Mao era the key move to collectivize was to abolish family stoves in favour of each communes’ collective refectory (8).

209 generations often have drastically different experiences with food.190 What Xiaoyan and the Chens do or say about food should be taken as an enactment of the history they’ve witnessed and embodied, rather than simply personal preferences.191

Both Farquhar and Oxfeld have observed that everyday practices and discourses surrounding food “reflected the stunning rapidity of social and cultural change in China” (Oxfeld 2017, 4), and that Chinese history in the middle of 20th century was basically a history of hunger. In 1958, a decade after the founding of People’s Republic of China on the mainland under Mao’s rule, the Great Leap Forward (1958-1961) movement lead to what was perhaps the greatest famine in world history, where thirty to forty-five million people died from causes directly attributable to starvation.192

190 Anthropologist Judith Farquhar notes in Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-Socialist China (2002) that in the PRC, because of such events as the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) and the reformation, everyday life experiences are often quite unified within a generational cohort, and markedly different between generations. Farquhar observed that she was often able to get a sense of what people went through and what they are probably like with just their birth year, and that the younger generation often don’t understand the Mao era ascetism (16-7). Oxfeld (2017, 3) and anthropologist Xin Liu (2000, In One’s Own Shadow) have both made similar observations. 191 Bourdieu’s discussion of food in his formulations of habitus seems like low-hanging theoretical fruit here: food preferences, structured by varying access to different types of symbolic capital, shape the bodies that in turn signal class distinctions (1984, 183-193). But since he’s mostly talking about the bourgeois and I am mostly talking about the PRC context I figured it’s probably better to stick with anthropologists of China and of food. Relatedly, the association between food and Chineseness in Canada is an inadvertent consequence of the Chinese Head Tax (1885-1923) and the Chinese Exclusion Act (1923 to basically 1967) in early 20th century. The prohibitively expensive Head Tax and associated immigration restrictions meant that early Chinese immigrants were mostly young men who couldn’t bring their family, and so laundry services and restaurants proliferated to meet the demands of these migrant labourers. Later, the Chinese Exclusion Act meant that Chinese immigrants could only work in a small number of industries— namely domestic labour like laundry and cooking, which were of low social status and were increasingly outsourced— and that Chinese businesses could only employee Chinese people. In Eating Chinese (2010) Lily Cho aruges that the Chinese restaurants that exist in every small town across Canada mediate between white Canada and the Chinese diaspora. This association is reflected in literature as well: Gang Yue notes in The Mouth that Begs (1999) that Asian American literature tend to connect Chineseness with eating. 192 Historian Frank Dikötter notes in Mao’s Great Famine that it was the biggest famine in human history without a natural disaster.

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Auntie Chen was around fourteen years old when China experienced this famine. For Auntie Chen, a former factory laborer with no political ties, the Cultural Revolution years after the famine (1966–1976) were also characterized by material and nutritional deprivations.193 In the time that I have known and hung out with her, Auntie Chen never talked about hunger. But the experience of starvation had left traces on her body. She has a myriad of lingering health issues that are common among famine survivors, such as anemia and digestive troubles. She was very thin and very small, and often worried about not being able to absorb enough nutrients from her daily diet. For her biological daughter and granddaughter, she was constantly worried about malnutrition-related infertility.

Auntie Chen’s historically conditioned relationship to food, or what can perhaps be called her habitus of consumption (Bourdieu 1977), sharply contrasted to that of Xiaoyan’s. Xiaoyan proclaimed herself a foodie, a connoisseur in the pleasures of food. She grew up in China’s prospering economy, as well as her parents’ and grandparents’ reactions to famine that took the form of constant overfeeding. For Xiaoyan, food had never been a promise for survival; rather it signalled belonging to a social class that could afford leisure eating. The generational gap between Auntie Chen and Xiaoyan, so palpably demonstrated in their appetites inscribed with history, exemplifies anthropologist Judith Farquhar’s contention that food and eating are ways to deeply live and feel political and historical forces in the everyday life in post-socialist China (2002).

Xiaoyan was a self-proclaimed chihuo—an expert eater, a foodie, a connoisseur in the pleasures of tastes and in food products available in China’s post-reform supermarkets. She explained her interests in food through the fairly widespread idea that the Chinese are obsessed

193 Even though the famine ended after the Great Leap Forward, hunger and deprivation characterized the Cultural Revolution years (1966-1976) and Chinese material life continued to be ascetic at best until the reformation that had begun in 1978 (Oxfeld 10-15). The 1980s saw “a gradual but still contested movement toward individual control over wealth ” (Farquhar 2002, 15) and the attendant appetite disorders, culminating to the abundance of the 1990s. Nowadays, having industrialized food production, China provides rather than receives food aid. The contemporary food fear is no longer famine, but rather excess and perversion. Oxfeld observes that many old people’s experiences in relation to food “have incorporated everything from misery and extreme want” (3), and such experiences shape the everyday life.

211 with food,194 even though many other things not necessarily related to her performances of ethnicity are also expressed about through food. Being a foodie was an important part of how Xiaoyan saw herself, and many stories of her pre-migration life and her continuous effort to find footing in Toronto’s Chinese diaspora were told through descriptions of what she had eaten or what she had wanted to eat. She illustrated the material abundance and intense pressure to succeed typical of “Post-90s” in the reformation era, through accounts of the food her parents and grandparents prepared for her— an endless supply of fresh fruits, expensive snacks, and piping hot meals. In depicting how much “growing up” she had to do after moving to Canada, she talked about how her knowledge of cooking and grocery shopping had expanded rapidly only in Canada. Homesickness and anxiety about the future were often expressed through discussions of how snacks change her body and her appetite— cookies, pies, and ice cream sold in mainstream grocery stores (e.g. Metro, No Frills, Loblaws) were unsatisfying and made her gain weight, unlike the steamed rice cakes or stuffed and candied lotus root she enjoyed at back in Wuhan.195 Stories about how she made her way into the diasporic networks were also conveyed through tales of how she established a small exchange group, where friends from all over China would swap homeland goodies brought in suitcases to Toronto.

Xiaoyan also told me about the time when the Chens’ daughter and grandchildren visited. She had joined them in wrapping dumplings and conversation, which briefly eased her feeling of alienation. When it was time to eat, however, she realized there weren’t enough dumplings to include her at the table—she didn’t actually belong. Walking away, Xiaoyan said, she realized how lonely the laughter and chitchat of a real family could sound. Food and eating were an everyday practice through which she wrestled with her personhood and her place in the diaspora and in the Chen’s household.

194 Anthropologist Ellen Oxfeld notes in Bitter and Sweet: Food, Meaning, and Modernity and Rural China (2017) that “while food is important in all societies, it is a highly charged focus of interest [in China]” (2), and went on to reference archaeologist K. C. Chang’s observation that “few other cultures are as food oriented as the Chinese.” 195 This is probably tangential, but a big part of Farquhar’s argument for eating and appetite for food as “a kind of connoisseurship of embodiment” (27) rests on how foods are considered to have different curative, medical properties in Chinese medicine. Eating, then, “curates one’s “vicissitudes of carnal experience with an array of herbal, mineral, and animal substances” (29). Xiaoyan deployed many of these Chinese medicine terms when describing Canadian junk food— causing “heat,” “fire,” and “expansion.”

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21.2 Grocery shopping with Xiaoyan and Auntie Chen

As the massage parlour for which she worked was the busiest on weekends, Xiaoyan usually has Tuesdays and Thursdays off. Most of her friends worked during the week, so with few social events occupying her time, Xiaoyan typically took a leisurely approach to her off-day errands. The major event of every Tuesday was to shop for groceries with the Chens.

On a Tuesday morning around 11 o’clock, Xiaoyan, Auntie Chen and I drove together to one of these supermarkets. In the car, Xiaoyan put on a Mandopop compilation CD that she had bought from the store. The store uses these CDs for background music. Mandopop singer Leo Ku’s (Gu Juji 古巨基) 12-miute Love Songs Medley (情歌王[Qingge Wang], released in 2008)196 [see slide 5] filtered through the car’s speakers like it did the week before in the store, creating sonic and spatial continuity for the shopping experience.

The car pulled into the parking lot at Hua Sheng Supermarket, and Xiaoyan followed behind Auntie Chen as we entered the store. The Chens and Xiaoyan decided to share a grocery cart since they were going to stroll through (guang) the supermarket together. As soon as we pushed the cart through the clear vinyl curtain that marked the supermarket’s entrance, a wave of smooth Mandopop, barcode scanners’ beeps, and cashiers shouting in Mandarin enveloped us. Xiaoyan pushed the cart and hurried everyone to move out of this sonically marked threshold/entryway, so we quickly walked to the produce section where the background music and the cashier’s area are much less audible (see Figure 7). Hua Sheng supermarket shares many of the sonic characteristics of the other Chinese groceries stories across the GTA: strategically placed overhead speakers broadcast Mandopop or Cantopop— often through streaming services, although sometimes stores also play compilation CDs. In addition to chatter, footsteps, and the cashier’s barcode scanner beeps, the defining auditory characteristic of a Chinese supermarket is the various clamour that come from the meat and seafood sections (more below).

The two women paced steadily through the produce section, chatting about the various foods they see and exchanging stories, until we reached the aisle for candy, cookies, and

196 A full version can be heard at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abtsOJE8PcE

213 packaged snacks, when their conversation suddenly stopped. The Mandopop background music, playing from the ceiling speakers in the aisle, filled the silence between them.

Figure 7. Floor plan and notable sound sources in the supermarket.

During other grocery shopping trips with just Xiaoyan and myself, she had exuberantly pointed to every recognizable brand and every packaged snack and spoke with an excitement she couldn’t contain. Often Xiaoyan was eager to share with me her extensive knowledge of what tastes good and what doesn’t—her way of showing care— but sometimes these stories are also infused with deep longing for a past that highlights her anxiety about the present. “Taiping” brand saltines brought out a story about how in middle school, her friends passed around these lightweight yet delicious and filling crackers under the desks, so that they could silently eat during

214 class. These friends taught her how to keep the cracker under her tongue to soften it, so as not to attract the teacher’s attention with chewing noise. The inexpensive White Rabbit milky chews and hawthorn fruit leathers were practically synonymous with childhood happiness. The Japanese Pocky sticks, Oreos and their better-tasting knock-offs, and Hsu Fu Chi brand of fruit- filled shortbread cookies, on the other hand, evoke memories of adolescent years, where increased allowance from her parents also mean pressure to keep up with her classmates’ conspicuous consumptions in the newly reformed China. Xiaoyan didn’t just reminisce through the food items in the aisle; she tried to establish common ground by asking if I’ve had this or that in Taiwan when I was a kid, and asked me to explain basically anything that claims to be an authentic Taiwanese snack.

I’ve learned a great deal about Xiaoyan’s pre-migration life and her friends and family, by walking with her through the cookies and candies aisles at different grocery stores. The life and world she portrayed through food anecdotes is one filled with friends who are always around and parents who translated love into an unending supply of edibles. Although she rarely ever buys anything from the aisle, Xiaoyan always insisted that we walk through once “just to see what they’ve got.” She lingered in front of every packaged snack that jogged a memory; a palpable reluctance accompanied every step she took. Sometimes she’d proclaim that there’s no point in dwelling in these childish things that she wouldn’t buy and shouldn’t eat anyway, and begin rushing through the aisle. But more often than not she lingers.

In her interviews with Chinese immigrants about their choice of Chinese supermarkets in Toronto, one of sociologist Lucia Lo’s interlocutors had noted that she often takes a look at her favorite food products even if she didn’t need them. She just wanted to see if the products are still on the shelf—“like visiting old friends.” Lo therefore theorized that goods stocked in ethnic supermarkets are affectively charged and can ameliorate diasporic homesickness. I have observed many other grocery store walkthroughs and in general agree with Lo’s interpretation, but for Xiaoyan, these ritualistic walkthroughs of the snacks aisle are not just about feeling tethered to the hometown through the products, they are more importantly a necessary but temporary respite from her anxiety about making a life on her own. This anxiety is to some extent endemic to her Post-90s generation in 2015, many members of whom had missed or delayed traditional markers of adulthood (namely marriage), but is also tied to her lack of legal employment, her being scammed and exploited, and the uncertainty of her future. Walking through and lingering

215 in the romance of childhood represented by the snacks aisle is Xiaoyan’s guilty pleasure in an activity otherwise signalling (at least to her) adult-like responsibility, care for herself and others, prudence by cooking her own food, and so forth.

On the day that Xiaoyan had visited the supermarket with the Chens, I was surprised to note that Xiaoyan walked through the aisle without her usual storytelling and high spirit. But she nonetheless slowed down her pace, and gradually slowed further to a near stop as she quietly looking over each tier of the shelves. Xianyan later explained to me that on earlier visits she had discovered that Auntie Chen had little interest in these snacks, instead preferring more substantial “real food” such as rice, dried noodles, and meat. She then postulated that perhaps the elders want solid meals, which is different from what she wanted, demonstrating an awareness of how the historically and economically conditioned generational differences between auntie Chen and her could register in her reticence while walking through the snacks aisle.

As Xiaoyan made her way through the ritual snacks-gazing, auntie Chen became noticeably impatient. From the aisles, although we couldn’t see the meat and seafood sections, we were able to hear the high pitched tinny shrieks of frozen bones passing through the saw cutter machine when the butchers at the meat section prepare the cuts, and a faint growl from the meat grinder. These sonic indexes of the meat section were picking up in frequency, along with the bangs from worker at the seafood section dropping heavy plastic trays onto the work table, and the thumps from when they use a hammer and a chisel to break apart blocks of frozen fish. To me, in that moment, it sounded like there was suddenly a flurry of activities at the meat and sea food sections— perhaps a new shipment just came in, or perhaps business was picking up nearing lunch hour. All of these sounds became suddenly that much more audible partly because we had physically moved closer toward the meat and sea food sections, but perhaps also because Xiaoyan and auntie Chen had stopped conversing in this particular aisle, freeing up auntie Chen’s auditory attention to heed the noise of the meat and seafood sections. Auntie Chen seemed to have interpreted the frequent shrieks of bone saw cutter in the same way that I did, as she began rushing Xiaoyan to leave the aisle. She reminded Xiaoyan that the important thing to buy that day was ground pork for the filling of steamed buns she had promised to teach Xiaoyan how to make.

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As she began walking, one hand waving along her hips with her palm turned toward the direction of the meat sections, Auntie Chen impatiently said, “Zouba! zouba! (Come on, let’s walk along) we need to get the ground pork before they run out! People are pouring in! There’s a dough waiting for us, we can’t go home empty-handed!” Xiaoyan agreed to go, pushing the cart further toward auntie Chen who lead the way. We walked along the aisle, the bone cutter shrieks and ice chisel smacking grew louder (to us) as thickly layered butcher-customer conversations gradually emerge within the realm of audibility and became comprehensible. Auntie Chen continued walking eagerly toward the central corridor between the non-perishable shelves toward the meat section, and Xiaoyan kept being distracted by another packaged snack on the shelf, which meant that Auntie Chen would have to turn back to get her. The two of them continued back and forth this way, until we finally made it out of the corridor.

In her book, Farquhar argues that appetites are “far from natural— in the sense of being ineluctable, everywhere the same, or determined outside of human history” (2004, 28). She notes that there is often a historical specificity that can be read from a person’s enjoyment and desire for a food, and that differences between historical epochs are often “figured in food and realized in acts of eating” (44). Continuing from earlier section of this chapter where walking in response to sound is understood as a form of expressivity, I postulate that in this kind of back and forth bargaining played out on foot can be thought of as Xiaoyan and Auntie Chen working out their generational differences. Each of them enact a different, historically-informed, generation- specific habitus of consumption in demonstrating their being pulled toward different directions. The negotiations that occurred in the aisle between Xiaoyan and Auntie might be minute, but it is perhaps in the accumulation of such minor everyday interactions that notions about generation differences are hardened.

22 Chopping toward diasporic intimacy

After each shopping trip, Xiaoyan helps the Chens bring all the groceries into the house. Then, while uncle Chen sits down with receipts and a calculator to figure out how much everyone owes (as they often split family-sized packages or the cost of ingredients for large batches of things like dumplings), Xiaoyan and auntie Chen head toward the kitchen to cook together. Neither of the women had been much of a home cook before moving to Canada, and while their reasons differ, for both of them cooking is intricately tied with their transnational

217 move and diasporic experience. Unlike many of the Chinese (Taiwanese and Hong Kongnese included) women of her age who attribute their cooking skills to decades of (not always completely voluntary) caregiving labour as mothers and wives, Auntie Chen is always explicit that she didn’t cook back in China (guonei, in-country).197 She had came of age eating in the communal refectory for her Production Team (shengchan dui) in Maoist China— which, she explained to me once, freed up women’s time so that they could to participate in “outside” (i.e. non-domestic) production labour. Later, as uncle Chen’s wife, she and him had both eaten in the canteens of the state-run factory that employed them. After their retirement, but before moving to Toronto, she filled her days with social visits and mahjong games, subsisting primarily on takeouts from nearby eateries and university cafeterias that were “fresher, hotter, cheaper, and tasted better [than if I had cooked myself].” Auntie Chen reminisced that, “back in Shanghai, vendors of cooked meals were everywhere, all I had to do was to go downstairs. All of the variety, everything you can think of— baozi (steamed filled buns), jiaozi (dumplings), boiled, steamed, pan fried, deep fried, everything.” To switch things up, the Chens also frequented the cafeteria at nearby schools where they felt comfortable. There were, of course, the occasional pot of instant noodles that she whipped up for the family, and she knew some of the kitchen basics without really knowing why or from whom (“I probably have watched enough to kind of know”), but in general, when she spoke of cooking, auntie Chen denounced it as too time- and labour-intensive of an activity, such that it is really only worthwhile when there is nothing else to do.

And “there is nothing else to do” is how she typically describes her post-migration life in Toronto. When I asked her how and where she learned to cook — she seemed so comfortable and in control in the kitchen, giving instructions and demonstrating techniques with confidence— Auntie Chen laughed, and said that she learned everything after moving to Toronto from cooking shows on TV, cooking tips sent to her by friends in China via WeChat, and through trial and error. Cooking takes up a lot of time, which was perfect because she wanted to kill the time. She explained to me that "there's no one [friends] here, and there's nothing to do, and it's way too strenuous to walk if we had to buy every meal out like we did in our complex in Shanghai.”

197 I understand her attitude toward cooking as a kind of nostalgia for the Mao era and all the de- gendering where women were supposed to have been emancipated from cooking duties.

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The Chens spend most of their days at home. Uncle Chen doesn’t want to drive, because he cannot tell apart the road signs in English and worrieds that he will get lost without being able to ask for directions. Buses pass by the nearest stop infrequently, and after a humiliating experience with a TTC employee when he had mistaken a day-old transfer pass for a ticket in their first year, they mostly avoid public transportations. Cooking thus became not only what needs to be done now that they live in an environment without food infrastructure like cafeterias and street side vendor stands, but also a way to kill/fill long stretches of time spent at home.

Furthermore, through cooking, a new endeavour born out boredom in Toronto, auntie Chen has also found her role as a mother and a wife taking on a new dimension. Auntie Chen told me with pride that through watching video instructions (on TV and WeChat) and through practice, she is now able to make such complex savoury pastries as jiucai hezi (a panfried large dumpling with layered crust filled to the brim with chopped leek, mung bean noodles, among other things). Her most recent batch of jiucai hezi won heartfelt compliments from her daughter and grandchildren. Auntie Chen giggled and reported that her 44-year-old daughter said over her cooking the previous night, “I now know why people talk about their Mom’s cooking all the time,” which she took as a high praise. For her, the kitchen and cooking is not free of traditional gender roles and the labour of care expected of women, but these are not the only things. Cooking is also wrapped up in her transnational experience and her relationships with various real and fictive kins in Toronto— which filled the void of her active social life back in Shanghai.

Similarly, Xiaoyan had also only learned to cook after she had left China, where she had been quite pampered and practically forbidden to partake in any kitchen labour so that she would have more time to study. Xiaoyan illustrated the extent of her inexperience with food preparation by telling me that growing up, she didn’t know the difference between chicken and pork. She said, “I knew meat as the thing that is cooked, that is part of a dish my mother had prepared, that I could eat and enjoy eating. And I knew if this meat is tastier than that meat, but I couldn’t tell you what animal that meat was from, let alone what part of an animal, or what cut, or how my Mom cooked it.” She then explained that it was the same with fruit, which she knew most intimately in the form of washed, cut, and refrigerated in plastic containers. And so even though Xiaoyan describes her everyday life and her place among friends mostly through the pleasures of tasting and digesting, her food connoisseurship was somehow removed from food preparation.

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After moving to Canada, Xiaoyan ate at the university cafeteria, and was pushed to learn a few dishes when she couldn’t stand the cafeteria hamburgers and cold pizza slices any longer. At first she learned simple regional staples from other Chinese classmates— Sichuan style chili boiled fish, Hunan style braised pork knuckle, and white rice on induction heater stoves. After three years, she got a part-time job working at Mandarin, the Chinese-Canadian buffet franchise popular across southern Ontario, hoping to learn a little more about cooking. Unfortunately, though, she was assigned to the pastry department and the only skills she picked up were to pipe icing and to pour large bags of cake mixes into an industrial sized batter mixer.

Xiaoyan also learned to shop for groceries entirely in the Chinese supermarkets in Canada through a process of trial-and-error, with occasional help from her friends. She recounts stories of how she got ripped off, not knowing the going prices for grapes, or how she bought ten kilograms of rotten oranges, not knowing how to tell the fruit’s freshness. Xiaoyan once remarked in jest that, “You think you came to Canada, and you are going to the New Oriental International College,198 so you’ll learn skills like English. But no, no. You are really going to the New Oriental Culinary School (she made this up on the spot), and you came all this way to learn things that you could’ve learn at home with your Mom!.”

On many of the afternoons spent together in the kitchen, auntie Chen guides Xiaoyan through the processes of a particular dish, demonstrating and explaining tips and techniques, although sometimes their roles are reversed. On the one particular instance that I am writing about in this section, Auntie Chen was fulfilling a long standing promise to teach Xiaoyan Shanghai style baozi, the steamed yeast dough buns filled with meat and vegetable, which she had mastered only in Toronto.

Earlier that morning, before the grocery trip, Xiaoyan and auntie Chen had already prepared a dough that they had left to rise while we were out. Xiaoyan lifted the damp cloth covering the dough, and while auntie Chen poked the dough to check its consistency, Xiaoyan demonstrated to me that auntie Chen had taught her how to knead with the fleshy part of her palm. In Chinese cuisine, Xiaoyan said, the final method of cooking (whether to steam or fry, for

198 A private educational institution that offers English courses to mainland Chinese students, with branches across Scarborough and downtown Toronto.

220 instance) determines the ratio and temperature of water added to the flour. These things impacts the consistency and stickiness of a dough, which demands different kneading techniques. Sometimes you have to lao (repeatedly scoop with cupped palm), and sometimes you have to rou (knead), which were all hand gestures new to Xiaoyan.

Auntie Chen announced that the dough is almost ready, and that we should hurry to prepare the fillings at once. She brought out the ground pork bought at the store and Xiaoyan should chop the ground pork. Auntie Chen explained that chopping, rather than machine grinding, encourages protein coagulation, which gives the steam buns the correct texture. Standing next to Xiaoyan, she demonstrated how to pound with a Chinese cleaver, heavily, decisively, and repeatedly. A string of fast, crisp, loud thuds confidently poured from her expert hands, setting both gestural and sonic models for Xiaoyan to follow.

Auntie Chen handed the cleaver to Xiaoyan, and molded Xiaoyan’s right hand around the handle so as to teach her the proper hold. The Chinese cleaver sports a heavy blade that naturally droops, and the best way to carry out repetitive motions is to find a good balance point: nestle cleaver handle against one’s palm, and then utilize the natural weight of the blade through light flicks of the wrist—similar to holding a violin bow or a pair of drumsticks.

Xiaoyan began chopping. She first attempted the exact same tempo of chopping as in Auntie Chen’s demonstration, but the cleaver immediately slipped out of her hand. She picked up the cleaver and wrapped her hand around the wooden handle with deliberation, as if rehearsing Auntie Chen’s hand-holding pedagogy moments earlier. Then, through a series of tentative, irregular strokes, she gradually found an equilibrium between her own movements and the knife’s rebound. Xiaoyan’s confidence grew, and as she gained control she settled into a steady tempo of chopping strokes. Then she began scooping and flipping the chopped pork slab. Each time, she scraped the cleaver on the wooden board, which created a different sound with a duller attack, less resonance, and a longer duration characterized by fast decay. Following each “flip,” Xiaoyan rebalanced the cleaver in her hand by way of an empty stroke on the chopping board, creating a crisp and higher-pitched stroke. As she mastered the techniques and found comfort, a repeating pattern of the three differently sounds of chopping meat, scrape-flip, and empty strike emerged, and a rhythmicity of Xiaoyan’s chopping became discernible (audio example 1).

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In our conversation later, Xiaoyan told me that she had wanted to model her chopping after Auntie Chen, whose authority in the work was audible in the regularity and organization of the strokes. As Xiaoyan mastered her own three sounds and three strokes—that is, as she listened and sensed her own emergent gestural command in sonic terms—Xiaoyan’s thoughts drifted toward Leo Ku’s “Love Song Medley,” the Mandopop song that we had listened to in the store and in the car. The song played “in her head,” so to speak, but Xiaoyan insisted that she couldn’t tell me whether she had coordinated her movements to the varying tempos of the medley. Perhaps sometimes she did, and other times the music in her head conformed to her motions. Perhaps sometimes she listened for traces of musicality in the rhythm of chopping sounds, and other times she chopped with echoes of Auntie Chen’s demonstration. And perhaps, in yet other moments, she heeded the quiet, raspy voice of Auntie Chen’s, gently nagging her to eat nutritious food and stay healthy.

In the gendered space of the kitchen, Xiaoyan tuned in to a cycle of listening, moving, and sounding. This cycle was mediated by the transnational circulation of popular culture and the public soundscape of an ethnicized supermarket. And in this mediated transmission that ethnomusicologist Tomie Hahn calls “sensational knowledge” (2007), Xiaoyan and Auntie Chen listened for the tender, complicated diasporic intimacy that temporarily bridged their differences.

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Chapter 5 Recapitulation

In this dissertation I provide three snapshots of the vibrant, variegated, on-going sonic lives of Sinophone Toronto. In the first case study, I argued that practices of sound and music in everyday life culminated in Ga-Liang’s sociohistorically situated processes of self-fashioning. Ga- Liang grew into her aging, diasporic, Chinese self in a Canadian context vis-à-vis mediations of homeland imaginaries that took form in the nursing home administration’s sonic routines. This sonic routine was ideologically conditioned by Canadian multiculturalism, and it prescribed a diasporic nostalgia for an elsewhere located in the past. But this sonic routine also provided a way through which Ga-Liang asserted expressive agency in her everyday singing and listening practices. She sometimes contested and sometimes conformed, and at the core of this polyphony of sonically evoked pasts and presents was her project of personhood.

In the second, on queer diasporic subjects who could not dwell easily and comfortably in Sinophone Toronto as a home, I demonstrated how Frank and his friends conjured and sustained a belonging of their own. This feeling of belonging rested on a sociohistorically contingent queer sensibility that manifested in their sonic praxis that encompassed ways of speaking, singing, and listening. The puns, sing-alongs, and the self-conscious managements of metaphorical and literal noise, silence, and (in)audibilities were the practices through which their queer diasporic subjectivities emerged in the context of Sinophone Toronto.

The third case study focused on how Xiaoyan forged connections with other diasporic Chinese women across palpable differences in their subject positions and experiences. Tracing the aurality she demonstrated through everyday movements such as walking and chopping, I showed how Xiaoyan sounded and listened for her place in a particular historical moment in Sinophone Toronto as a young woman.

Together, these three case studies show something of the range and variety of experiences and subject positions that make up Sinophone Toronto. They also point to how state-sanctioned ideologies of ethnicity, a history of essentialism, and normative “homes” trafficked in globally circulating musical cultures made their ways into the micro-practices of everyday life. The details of such processes and the senses of self culled together from the minutiae of daily life are context-

223 specific to each case study. But ultimately, I argue, it is through the sound and music practices of the everyday—both in their seeming ordinariness, and in their daily repetitions— that people like Ga-Liang, Frank, Xiaoyan, and many others in my research pointillistically accumulate senses of self that harden into subjectivities in relation to each other, to the diaspora, to Canada, and to the world.

The chapters of this dissertation were written out of order. The research for all three case studies was conducted simultaneously, and fieldwork logistics did not impose a chronological linearity in my writing. I started by writing the analytics that were the clearest and tidiest to me: chapter 3. I followed this with an interest in critically interrogating the constructions of Chineseness, which took shape in chapter 2. In the process of drafting these two chapters, I began wishing for a mode of ethnographic writing that could show—and not just tell—what it feels like to wring meaning out of the nebulous, inconsistent, and incoherent mess that is everyday life, because cleanly distilled theories of the chaotic quotidian always seem somewhat disingenuous. I experimented with this idea while writing chapter 4. Only after having written all the ethnographic chapters did I tease out, in chapter 1, the key ideas threading together all three case studies. I have titled this chapter “introduction,” but it is just as much a conclusion. I wrote these final pages at the very end, although they could be read as an introduction to chapter 1.

The chapters of this dissertation were written out of order in a different sense of the phrase as well: I had not planned on writing about any of the people I ended up writing about. Many of the ideas in this dissertation emerged from spontaneous outings when I thought I was off the ethnographer’s clock, field notes jotted down on cocktail napkins, recordings haphazardly made on my phone, and crumbled up trashed first drafts that had amassed during and after fieldwork. They were out of the structural and rhetorical orders imparted by a typical research design, where a theoretically driven postulation guided the observations of concrete practices. I tried to reflect this disorder in the way I have written the ethnographic chapters. Whenever possible, I strived to depict the fine-grained textures of experience rather than produce a concise summary.

I made this experimental stylistic decision for two reasons. First is in order to make a basically pedantic demonstration that I have taken the theories of everyday life to heart, and I wanted the form of the writing to reflect the work’s content. The second and significantly more

224 important reason is that my interlocutors have not always been completely clear and ordered about what they wanted, where they were going, who they thought they were, and how things became meaningful—to me, in conversations and interviews, and to themselves as well. They were deeply, spectacularly, and relatably human in their at-times inconsistent meanderings and earnest efforts to make something out of the disarray—like myself and like the few people who might read this dissertation. To reduce all of the cumulative minutiae into a contention supported with only the most relevant specifics seems to me a kind of epistemic violence, where my interpretations and the theorists I cite are somehow elevated above my interlocutors’ work of living this everyday life. I am unwilling to commit such violence.

In this spirit, I have intentionally foregone the formal conclusion chapter that conventionally draws all the theoretical threads and points together, and that makes a final statement rendering the ethnographic details supportive—and subservient—of the main argument. My hope is that through the case studies, the readers will have accrued enough impressions, glimpses, and tastes of everyday life in Sinophone Toronto and of my analytical ideas that the key theoretical points will be close to self-evident. Some of these points include how Canadian multiculturalism produces a historically contingent version of Chineseness that is lived, felt, and contested in everyday life; how this Chineseness is co-constitutive of the ontological status of the diaspora in Canada; how vastly different identities and subjectivities can be heard within the metaphorical tone cluster that is Sinophone Toronto; and how people are able and willing to listen across differences internal to an ethnic community cohered by the vague allusion that there might be a stable ethnic belonging.

For readers who would still like the closure provided by a theoretical summary, I encourage reading this dissertation as an ouroboros, by continuing on to the introduction-cum- conclusion. My hope is that with the ethnographic chapters now in your mind, a return to chapter 1 will be resonant in ways that exceed an echo.

Just like how each re-iteration of Cai-Hua’s “dream home” brings something new. I know this because I have heard Cai-Hua talk about her “dream home” many times.

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